下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
The“Age of Revolutions”indicates the profound and comprehensive transformations of the Anglo-American world from about the 1770s to the 1830s. In past historiography of the Western culture in general and the Anglo-American culture in particular, historical periodization has been called as such, for instance: in his epic four-volume history of the modern world, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789—1848 , Eric Hobsbawm defines it as a period of the death of the ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies; in their The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760—1800 , R. R. Palmer and et al. wrote that the period from 1760 to 1800 was the great revolutionary era, marking the advent of the modern democratic state, showing that the American, French, and Polish revolutions…were manifestations of similar political ideas, needs, and conflicts, and clearly illustrating that the clash between an older form of society characterized by legalized social rank and hereditary or self-perpetuating elites is transformed into a new form of society placing a greater value on social mobility and legal equality; in his The Age of Revolution: A History of the English-Speaking Peoples , Winston Churchill regards“the Age of Revolution”as characteristic of the American and French Revolutions, which have transformed the political structure of much of the world, altered traditional political and social thought, and dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority, and most importantly, the global conception of power.
In addition to varieties of political revolutions, the more profound and comprehensive is the“Industrial Revolution” [1] , which, taking place across the Atlantic world, began in Britain in the late 18 th century and from there spread to other parts of the world and had gradually forced an agrarian and handicraft economy to one dominated by industry. The main features were technological, socioeconomic, and cultural.
The final solution to the Age of Revolutions is a new chart of the world power with the British Empire as the strongest, in spite of its surrender in America and acknowledgement of its independence in 1783. As it has subdued the Spanish earlier, Britain terminated the French dominance during The Napoleonic Wars (1803—1815), in which an array of European powers formed into various coalitions and financed and usually led by the United Kingdom fighting with France. As for changes of wars, the historian Frederic J. Baumgartner has summarised:both the American and the French Revolutions
drew heavily from the Enlightenment for inspiration in staging their revolutions and for the concepts of war and ideas for the new governments they created: Enlightened philosophers were sharply critical of war, regarding it as the greatest evil confronting mankind though they had little hope it could be eliminated;they combine proposals for permanent peace with a more realistic discussion of the means by which war might be limited or rendered more humane; the“civilizing of war”seemed to be a reasonable, worthwhile, and achievable undertaking.
[2]
In the revolutionary periods spanning from the end of the 1800s to the middle of the 19 th century, American revolutions resonated with French Revolutions and even revolutions across the whole of Europe, plunging the transatlantic world into an integrated community for“looking for better societies.”Although the British and the Americans were in confrontations,they were in fact, integrated as a whole culturally as the British romanticism echoed with the legacy of American independence. Thomas Paine announced that“Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil”and“in its worst state an intolerable one.”The“common sense”had generated a history of the“American distrust of government”: Not only is the natural legitimacy of the state negated, but also the power of the dominant is to be subverted. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had once met the rising sympathy for events in France with questions about the legitimacy and future of the state. The intellectual and political turmoil surrounding the French Revolution had set in motion intense and urgent discussion concerning the nature of society. Samuel Taylor Coleridge now conceived the design of circumventing the disastrous violence that had destroyed the idealism of the French Revolution by establishing a small society that should organise itself and educate its children according to better principles than those obtained in the society around them.
[1] Although used earlier by French writers, the term“ Industrial Revolution” was first popularized by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852—1883) to describe Britain's economic development from 1760 to 1840. Later, the term was spreading to all of the transatlantic world.
[2] F. J. Baumgartner, Declaring War in Early Modern Europe . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 147.