The Age of Revolution

Between 1750 and 1900, a cascade of revolutions, intellectual, political, and industrial, remade the world. The Enlightenment challenged the divine right of kings with the language of natural rights and popular sovereignty. Those ideas, spread by pamphlets and newspapers, ignited political explosions from Philadelphia to Paris to Port-au-Prince. Within decades, monarchies that had ruled for centuries were overthrown or constitutionally constrained.

The Industrial Revolution transformed production itself. Steam power, mechanized textile mills, and eventually railways concentrated workers in cities and generated unprecedented wealth, wealth that was profoundly unequally distributed. The factory system created new social classes: a wealthy industrial bourgeoisie and a vast, often impoverished, urban proletariat whose conditions inspired Marx to write that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Nationalism emerged as the era's most powerful political force, binding together people who shared language, culture, and history into demands for self-determination. Revolutionary ideals spread globally: inspiring Latin American independence movements, anticolonial resistance in Asia and Africa, and the abolitionist movements that would eventually end legalized slavery across the Atlantic world.