Ingredients for Revolution

Revolutionary patterns

When a bunch of revolutions happen around the same time, it begins to look like there’s a pattern. Historians can identify some patterns that led to the American War of Independence and revolutions in France, Haiti, and Spanish Latin America during the long nineteenth century—the impacts of empire, economic crises, and new ideas coming out of the debates of the Enlightenment. But why and how did these revolutions happen when and where they did?

There are lots of explanations for why these revolutions happened. Now, if only there were a way to put those explanations together so a reader might understand how they worked together to create those revolutions. Wait! There is! It’s a recipe!

In cooking, a recipe has a list of ingredients and directions for how to put them together. For our purposes, we’ll create a list of ingredients that includes all the principal explanations for why the Atlantic Revolutions happened, and then we’ll add some preparation instructions to show how these ingredients came together.

Ingredients of the Atlantic Revolutions

Demographic: a way to describe a group of people based on things like their age, gender, income, education, or where they live
Fiscal: Relating to government money (especially taxes), spending, and budgeting.
"Why did political revolutions happen?"
• The demographic-structural theory: More people need more things.
• The Little Ice Age: Extreme weather means people go hungry.
• The fiscal-military state: Big wars mean big taxes.
• The crisis of rising expectations: People with money want power.
• Social inequality: Poor people want better conditions.
• The Enlightenment: People share ideas about challenging authority and individual freedoms.

There are more ingredients that help explain why these revolutions happened, but the ones listed above are the main ones. To make our analysis easier to understand, we can categorize these ingredients based on geological and biological conditions, economic conditions, and new ideas.

Environmental and demographic conditions

Let’s start with the background conditions for the Age of Revolutions. First, the population of the world was rising. Of course, this wasn’t true in the Americas, where disease brought from Afro-Eurasia and colonial settlement had taken a dramatic toll on the local population, but it was especially true in Europe and Asia, and in particular in Europe. Between 1400 and 1790, the population of Europe almost tripled from approximately 60 million people to almost 180 million. This was partly due to scientific advances, and partly to Europe’s ability to get food and resources from its colonies in the Americas. But the important point is, there were a lot more people in Europe, and this put a strain on the food resources of countries like France, whose population had grown particularly fast.

One reason this growth in population mattered was that the world’s climate was also changing pretty dramatically during this period, which has been called “the Little Ice Age.” Falling temperatures caused a series of crop failures that impacted North America and Europe in the years just before the French Revolution. It probably also contributed to a drought in Latin America. These extreme weather events led to famine for some, and higher food prices for others, and certainly contributed to social instability.

Historians tend to refer to this combination of extreme weather and demographic growth as “the demographic-structural theory,” and there’s lots of evidence that these factors contributed to revolutions in Europe. But it’s probably less significant for the colonies of British North America and for the Caribbean and Latin America, so let’s keep looking for explanations.

Economic conditions

Environmental and demographic conditions were closely related to what we know was a huge factor in all of these revolutions—shifting economic conditions. But we must be very careful here, because the economic causes of revolution were different in different regions, and even for different groups within each region. Still, we can say that unhappiness with the economy brought together people from various walks of life who were all willing to give revolution a chance.

Governments in this period were getting bigger. This was especially true in the big European empires like Spain, England (Britain), France, and the Netherlands. But it turns out it was also true in places like the states of modern West Africa—such as Asante and Dahomey—and elsewhere. Simply put, competition on an imperial level meant that bigger armies, complicated guns, and super-expensive ships were needed, along with the government agencies to equip and run them. We call this “the fiscal-military state.” Imperial expansion meant more money was needed for militaries, but this money could only come from a couple of places, the main one being taxes. An increasing tax load on an empire’s subjects certainly did contribute to the French Revolution and the American War of Independence.

But empires could also levy taxes on trade, and all of the big states tried to do that by restricting trade in goods made in their colonies. In British North America, this meant the Navigation Acts, which forced settlers to trade only with Britain, often for less money than could be made elsewhere. The Spanish had similar acts that restricted their own colonies to only trading with Spain, meaning more money for the Spanish government but less for merchants based in Spanish Latin America!

The settlers and merchants in British North America and Spanish Latin America weren’t starving, of course. But they felt the control and taxation of their trade was unfair. And even more important, they were unhappy that they paid these taxes without being able to serve in government to change them. The American Revolutionary slogan “No taxation without representation” is famous for a reason!

But actually, these complaints, although specific to the colonies, were part of a wider general issue: the crisis of rising expectations. Basically, expanding trade meant that there were more people in Europe and the colonies who had some money—in other words, a growing middle class. Yet those people weren’t rulers. Rather, governments were still mostly led by a king or queen and their nobles. And that didn’t seem fair to the newly wealthy people who were paying most of the taxes. Why shouldn’t they have a voice in government? Why shouldn’t they get some power?

This crisis is most evident in revolutionary France, but something similar was happening in French Saint-Domingue (Haiti). There, a system was in place that gave precedence to big French companies, often led by nobles (grands blancs), over other white merchants and small companies (petits blancs) on the island. Of course, the petits blancs ultimately wanted a revolution—although not the revolution that ultimately happened!

That makes the Haitian Revolution an expression of another economic cause of revolution—social inequality. During the long nineteenth century, the lower economic classes were, in many cases, suffering greatly. In France, French peasants in their failed fields and Parisian workers unable to afford their daily bread saw revolution as a chance to rise from poverty. In Latin America, many of the troops most eager for revolution were Indigenous people or mestizos who were maltreated as laborers on haciendas and in mines. In Haiti, the revolution was carried forward by the enslaved, who suffered from a militarized system of abuse and regimented labor every day as they created wealth for both the petits blancs and grands blancs.

Enlightenment

As you can see, there were many groups of people who had many reasons to revolt or rebel against their government. Most of those reasons were economic and are easy to understand. Yet having a motive often isn’t enough. Revolutions also need a unifying language and a philosophy. For most revolutionaries, the ideas of the Enlightenment provided that philosophy.

Now, the Enlightenment wasn’t one set of ideas that everyone agreed upon. But it had a general thrust that won the support of many different groups of people. Enlightenment philosophers taught that people in authority weren’t always right. This was a huge reversal from the philosophy of “divine right,” which said that rulers were infallible—incapable of making mistakes—because rulers were God’s earthly representatives. These new ideas meant that it was probably OK to replace a ruler if they weren’t doing a good job. That’s certainly a concept that a revolutionary could embrace!

The Enlightenment also centered on ideas of sovereignty—the right to rule. Enlightenment thinkers raised the thought that maybe sovereignty rested with the people, rather than just a ruler, and that a ruler should have the support of (or even be elected by) the people.

Many Enlightenment philosophers suggested that people had certain rights. Not everyone agreed on what those rights were, or who should get them—and it should be noted that gender, race, and class issues often meant that these rights were kept from many. But overall, these philosophers thought that there were certain freedoms and liberties that people should get, and that if they didn’t get them, they had the right to fight for them.

These rights are central to the key documents of the Age of Revolutions, of course—the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the French Declarations of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and of Women and of the Female Citizen, the Constitutions of Haiti, and others. There is enough shared between them that we can see a general pattern of the Enlightenment’s impact on the Age of Revolutions.

Conclusion

The political revolutions of the long nineteenth century weren’t all the same—each had its own recipe, and its own ingredients. But overall, we can see some wide trends in how revolutions were made. World history helps us make the comparisons and connections to reveal these sorts of global trends. Recognizing the nuances and unique experiences of each person and each country while also identifying the broader patterns that drove and connected large-scale political revolutions helps us better understand the forces shaping our world and our shared human experience across centuries.