A World in Crisis: The Eighteenth Century

At the end of the eighteenth century, the world was in crisis due to social changes. The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions transformed global relationships. Though most people think of these events as political transformations, here you’ll explore the argument that the revolutions had economic causes.

The rise of a capitalist global economy produced social disruption. Capitalism—an economic system in which property is privately owned and profits are used to increase production—became the dominant economic system in Western Europe and the Americas. Three important changes accompanied the system:

• European capitalists built plantations in their American colonies. Plantation workers, most of whom were enslaved, lived on plantations where they planted crops like sugar and cotton. These valuable crops were then returned to industrial centers in Europe.
• A new class of working poor emerged in European cities as early factories popped up.
• As global trade expanded, an urban upper-middle class—known as the bourgeoisie—grew wealthier from trade. Both the working poor and the bourgeoisie were increasingly unhappy with their governments.

All of this took place during global turmoil. Rising populations and shifting social relations from 1500 to 1800 sparked thousands of revolts among peasants and other workers. Famine was a constant threat and one bad harvest could place millions at risk of starvation. In response to rising food prices, the poor took to the streets in protest. In most cases, the government and land-owning aristocracy brutally repressed resistance. In America, France, and Haiti, however, these tactics failed to stop people from protesting their material conditions.¹

Material Causes of Revolt

The political revolutions of this time had both political and economic causes. The American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were full of ideas about liberty. However, these revolutions were about taxes and property as much as they were liberty and political representation.

Historians argue that the American and French Revolutions were a direct result of the Seven Years’ War between England and France from 1756 to 1763. The war began as a struggle for territory in North America and quickly spread to the rest of the world. The consequences of this expensive war ignited the American and French Revolutions.

Rich men fight the high cost of tea: The American Revolution

The American Revolution was really about taxes. Crops like cotton made Western European countries wealthy, but Seven Years’ War put the British empire in serious debt. To recover, the British crown planned to tax the American colonies.

American colonists resented the new taxes, which caused tea prices to rise and tobacco prices to fall. Colonists demanded representation in Parliament. Plantation owners then declared independence because they weren’t making enough money from crops grown by enslaved people.

Have you seen the price of bread? The French Revolution

In France, people at the middle and bottom of the social pyramid started questioning the social order. Aristocrats and church officials at the top of the hierarchy were widely resented. The upper-middle class resented the fact that even the wealthiest among them lacked political rights. Meanwhile, almost everyone else struggled to eat in years of bad harvest.

The harvest of 1788 was unusually bad. At the same time, King Louis XVI imposed new taxes to pay for wars with England. Taxes and the high price of bread caused revolts. In October 1789, thousands of women marched from the marketplace and took up weapons outside the Palace of Versailles. Though the working poor were often the ones rising up in the streets and charging the Bastille,2 the wealthier bourgeoise directed the early revolution. The bourgeoise rejected the aristocracy’s dominance and revolted to seize power for themselves. As in America, these French revolutionaries grew wealthy through global trade and cash crop plantations.

The bad harvest of 1788 had particularly bad timing. The king raised taxes just as the middle class started to demand political representation and the poor demanded fair food prices.

The right to property? The Haitian Revolution

The French colony of Saint Domingue or Haiti was the most profitable colony in the world. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people grew coffee and sugar, enriching the French Empire and aristocracy.

In Saint Domingue, class divisions were even more extreme than in France. Enslaved people were nearly 90 percent of the island’s population. At the top of the social hierarchy, wealthy white landowners (grands blancs) controlled most of the colony’s resources and labor. There were two other groups in the hierarchy: poor white laborers and artisans (petits blancs) and free people of color, who were often mixed-race children of landowners and enslaved people.

All four classes had complaints. Grands blancs resented being taxed by the distant French monarch. Free people of color knew they would never be considered equal. Petits blancs identified with the revolutionaries in France and resented wealthier grands blancs and free people of color. Yet it was the bottom of the social structure that made Saint Domingue so unstable. Most enslaved people had been born in Africa before being enslaved and forced to work under horrific conditions. In 1791, these social tensions erupted into open conflict, resulting in the world’s first successful revolt of enslaved people.

The Haitian constitution, which outlawed slavery, was inspired by Enlightenment ideas about equality. The Haitian Constitution of 1806 guaranteed a right to property. However, this right also included “the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s work.” This strongly contrasted to the ways in which American and French revolutionaries (among others) used the right to property to protect slavery.

The United States and other nations excluded Haiti from the world economy. Fearing that enslaved people in the United States would also revolt, President Thomas Jefferson refused to acknowledge the new nation.

An age of revolutions

These three Atlantic Revolutions were part of a larger world crisis at the end of the eighteenth century. The world saw other major revolts in India, Russia, and China.

These eighteenth-century revolutions were about political liberties and representation. Yet on a deeper level, they were about restructuring social hierarchies, the production of goods, and the distribution of wealth.

1 Material conditions means physical things that are wanted or needed. The material conditions concerning revolutionaries included access to food and shelter, taxation, and control of one labor.

2 The Bastille was a prison in Paris that people saw as a symbol of oppression. “Storming the Bastille” has become an expression frequently used to describe protests.