CH 16 Atlantic Revolutions, Global Echoes 1750–1914

Atlantic Revolutions in a Global Context

The Atlantic Revolutions (1775-1825) were a series of upheavals that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, influencing Latin American independence struggles and drawing inspiration from earlier revolutions.
These revolutions highlight the increasing interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America following Columbus's voyages.
Voltaire noted the late 18th century as an era of revolutions. This era saw political and social unrest worldwide, including the collapse of the Safavid dynasty, fragmentation of the Mughal Empire, the Wahhabi movement challenging the Ottoman Empire, peasant uprisings in Russia, rebellions in China, and Islamic revolutions in West Africa.
The Atlantic revolutions occurred in the context of expensive wars, weakening states, and commercial instability. The Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) was a global conflict between Britain and France that led to increased taxes and revenue seeking, contributing to the North American and French Revolutions.
Key ideas that animated the Atlantic revolutions came from the European Enlightenment such as:
- Human political and social arrangements could be engineered and improved.
- Challenging the divine right of kings, state control of trade, aristocratic privilege and the authority of a single church.
- Emphasizing liberty, equality, free trade, religious tolerance, republicanism and human rationality.
- Politically, the core notion was “popular sovereignty,” meaning that the authority to govern derived from the people rather than from God or tradition.
- John Locke (1632–1704) argued that the “social contract” should last only as long as it served the people well.
The Atlantic revolutions involved the elimination of monarchs; republican political systems were virtually inconceivable in Asia and the Middle East until much later.
The chief beneficiaries of the Atlantic revolutions were propertied white men of the “middling classes.”
The Atlantic revolutions had immense global impact, inspiring efforts to abolish slav ery, extend the right to vote, develop constitutions, and secure greater equality for women. Nationalism, a potent ideology, was nurtured in the Atlantic revolutions.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) echoed the principles of the Atlantic revolutions.

Comparing Atlantic Revolutions

The Atlantic revolutions were triggered by different circumstances, expressed different social and political tensions, and varied considerably in their outcomes.

The North American Revolution, 1775–1787

The American Revolution was a struggle for independence from British rule, launched with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and resulting in a federal constitution in 1787.
The American Revolution was a conservative movement that originated in an effort to preserve the existing liberties of the colonies rather than to create new ones.
The British colonies in North America enjoyed a considerable degree of local autonomy, as the British government was embroiled in its own internal conflicts and various European wars.
Local elected assemblies in North America, dominated by the wealthier property-owning settlers, achieved something close to self-government, which colonists regarded as a birthright.
Participation in the British Empire provided many advantages — protection in war, access to British markets, and confirmation of the settlers’ continuing identity as “Englishmen”.
English settlers in the colonies had developed societies described as “the most radical in the contemporary Western world”.
Social life was far more open than in Europe, with less poverty, more economic opportunity, fewer social differences, and easier relationships among the classes.
The American Revolution grew not from social tensions within the colonies, but from a rather sudden and unexpected effort by the British government to tighten its control over the colonies and to extract more revenue from them.
Britain imposed new taxes and tariffs on the colonies without their consent, challenging their economic interests, their established traditions of local autonomy, and their identity as true Englishmen.
Armed with the ideas of the Enlightenment — popular sovereignty, natural rights, the consent of the governed — they went to war.
Independence from Britain was not accompanied by any wholesale social transformation, but accelerated the established democratic tendencies of the colonial societies.
Political authority remained largely in the hands of existing elites who had led the revolution, although property requirements for voting were lowered and more white men of modest means were elected to state legislatures.
Land was not seized from its owners, except in the case of pro-British loyalists who had fled the country.
$All contracts and rights, respecting property, remained unchanged by the Revolution.$
The United States did become the world’s most democ ratic country, but this development was less the direct product of the revolution and more the gradual working out in a reformist fashion of earlier practices and the principles of equality.
The American Revolution initiated the political dismantling of Europe’s New World empires.
The “right to revolution” inspired revolutionaries and nationalists from Simón Bolívar to Ho Chi Minh.
The new U.S. Constitution — with its Bill of Rights, checks and balances, separation of church and state, and federalism — was one of the first sustained efforts to put the political ideas of the Enlightenment into practice.

The French Revolution, 1789–1815

The French Revolution was closely connected to the North American Revolution. French soldiers had provided assistance to the American colonists and now returned home full of republican enthusiasm.
The French government, which had generously aided the Americans, was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and had long sought reforms that would modernize the tax system and make it more equitable.
King Louis XVI called into session the Estates General, consisting of male representatives of the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners.
Representatives of the Third Estate organized themselves as the National Assembly, claiming the sole authority to make laws for the country, and drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which declared that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights”.
The French Revolution expressed the tensions of conflict within French society not a colonial relationship with a distant imperial power.
Members of the titled nobility resented and resisted the monarchy’s efforts to subject them to new taxes.
Educated middle-class men and merchants were offended by the remaining privileges of the aristocracy, from which they were excluded.
Ordinary urban men and women, whose incomes had declined, were hit particularly hard by the rapidly rising price of bread and widespread unemployment.
Peasants in the countryside were subject to dues imposed by their landlords, taxes from the state, obligations to the Church, and the requirement to work without pay on public roads.
Enlightenment ideas penetrated French society, and more people found a language with which to articulate these grievances.
The events of the French Revolution led to efforts to establish a constitutional monarchy and promote harmony among the classes gave way to more radical mea sures, as internal resistance and foreign opposition produced a fear that the revolution might be overturned.
Urban crowds orga nized insurrections, peasants attacked the residences of their lords to destroy records of their dues, the National Assembly decreed the end of all legal privileges and eliminated feudalism in France, and Church lands were sold to raise revenue.
King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, were executed, and the Terror of 1793–1794 followed under the leadership of Maximilien Robes pierre and his Committee of Public Safety.
Accompanying attacks on the old order were efforts to create a wholly new society, symbolized by a new calendar with the Year 1 in 1792, marking a fresh start for France.
The country became a republic and briefly passed universal male suffrage.
The old administrative system was rationalized into eighty-three territorial departments.
France created the world’s largest army, with some 800,000 men, and all adult males were required to serve. Led by officers from the middle and even lower classes, this was an army of citizens representing the nation.
French women were active in the major events of the revolution.
Women signed petitions detailing their complaints: lack of education, male competition in female trades, the prevalence of prostitution, the rapidly rising price of bread and soap.
“Women are ill-suited for elevated thoughts and serious meditation. A woman should not leave her family to meddle in affairs of government”.
The French Revolution opened up the question of women’s rights for consideration, laying the foundations for modern feminism.
Streets got new names; monuments to the royal family were destroyed; titles vanished; people referred to one another as “citizen so-and-so”.
Ordinary men and women, who had identified primarily with their local communities, now began to think of themselves as belonging to a nation.
The state replaced the Catholic Church as the place for registering births, marriages, and deaths, and revolutionary festivals substituted for church holidays.
The revolution spread through conquest under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1799–1814).
Napoleon preserved many of its more moderate elements, such as civil equality, a secular law code, religious freedom, and promotion by merit, while reconciling with the Catholic Church and suppressing the revolution’s more democ ratic elements in a military dictatorship.
Napoleon kept the revolution’s emphasis on social equality for men but dispensed with liberty.
Napoleon imposed such revolutionary practices as ending feudalism, proclaiming equality of rights, insisting on religious toleration, codifying the laws, and rationalizing government administration.
French domination was also resented and resisted, stimulating national consciousness throughout Europe.

The Haitian Revolution, 1791–1804

The French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (later renamed Haiti) was the richest colony in the world, producing some 40 percent of the world’s sugar and perhaps half of its coffee.
A slave labor force of about 500,000 people made up the vast majority of the colony’s population, with roughly 40,000 whites and 30,000 gens de couleur libres (free people of color).
The principles of the French Revolution meant different things to different people.
- To the grands blancs — the rich white landowners — it suggested greater autonomy for the colony and fewer economic restrictions on trade.
- To the petits blancs, it meant equality of citizenship for all whites.
- To free people of color, it meant equal treatment regardless of race.
- To the slaves, it was a personal freedom that challenged the entire slave labor system.
In 1791, slaves burned 1,000 plantations and killed hundreds of whites as well as mixed-race people, followed by warring factions of slaves, whites, and free people of color battling one another, complicated by Spanish and British forces seeking to enlarge their own empires.
Amid the confusion, brutality, and massacres of the 1790s, power gravitated toward the slaves, now led by Toussaint Louverture, himself a former slave.
Socially, “the lowest order of the society — slaves — became equal, free, and independent citizens”.
Politically, they had thrown off French colonial rule, creating the second independent republic in the Americas and the first non-European state to emerge from Western colonialism.
They renamed their country “Haiti”.
All Haitian citizens were defined as “black” and legally equal regardless of color or class, directly confronting elite preferences for lighter skin even as it disallowed citizenship for most whites.
The country’s plantation system had been largely destroyed, with private and state lands redistributed among former slaves and free blacks, and Haiti became a nation of small-scale farmers producing mostly for their own needs.
The destructiveness of the Haitian Revolution, its bitter internal divisions of race and class, and continuing external opposition contributed much to Haiti’s abiding poverty as well as to its authoritarian and un stable politics.
The enormous “independence debt” that the French forced on the fledgling republic in 1825 put the former colony in dire straits.
“Freedom” in Haiti came to mean primarily the end of slav ery rather than the establishment of political rights for all.
Haiti inspired other slave rebellions, gave a boost to the dawning abolitionist movement, and has been a source of pride for people of African descent ever since.
The saying “Remember Haiti” reflected a sense of horror at what had occurred there and a determination not to allow political change to reproduce that fearful outcome again.
The Haitian Revolution also led to a temporary expansion of slav ery elsewhere, and Napoleon’s defeat in Haiti persuaded him to sell to the United States the French territories known as the Louisiana Purchase, from which a number of “slave states” were carved out.

Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1825

The Spanish American revolutions were shaped by preceding events in North America, France, and Haiti as well as by their own distinctive societies and historical experiences.
Native-born elites (known as creoles) were offended and insulted by the Spanish monarchy’s efforts during the eighteenth century to exercise greater power over its colonies and to subject them to heavier taxes and tariffs.
Creole intellectuals also became familiar with ideas of popular sovereignty, republican government, and personal liberty derived from the European Enlightenment.
Spanish colonies had long been governed in a rather more authoritarian fashion than their British counterparts and were more sharply divided by class and race.
In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal, deposing the Spanish king Ferdinand VII and forcing the Portuguese royal family into exile in Brazil.
The outcome was independence for the various states of Latin America, established almost everywhere by 1826.
The process lasted more than twice as long as it did in North America, partly because Latin American societies were so divided by class, race, and region.
The move toward independence began in 1810 in a peasant insurrection in Mexico, driven by hunger for land and by high food prices and led successively by two priests, Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos.
Alarmed by the social radicalism of the Hidalgo-Morelos rebellion, creole landowners, with the support of the Church, raised an army and crushed the insurgency.
The entire independence movement in Latin America took place under the shadow of a great fear — the dread of social rebellion from below — that had little counterpart in North America.
Creole sponsors of independence movements required the support of “the people” with promises of freedom, the end of legal restrictions, and social advancement.
This was found in nativism, which cast all of those born in the Americas as Americanos, while the enemy was defined as those born in Spain or Portugal.
The imperial state was destroyed in Spanish America, but colonial society was preserved.
Latin American women continued to be wholly excluded from political life and remained under firm legal control of the men in their families.
No United States of Latin America emerged.
Distance among the colonies and geographic obstacles to effective communication were cer tainly greater than in the Eastern Seaboard colonies of North America, and their longer colonial experience had given rise to distinct and deeply rooted regional identities.
The United States grew increasingly wealthy, industrialized, democ ratic, internationally influential, and generally stable.
Latin America became relatively underdeveloped, impoverished, undemoc ratic, politically un stable, and dependent on foreign technology and investment.

Echoes of Revolution

Britain’s loss of its North American colonies fueled its growing interest and interventions in Asia, contributing to British colonial rule in India and the Opium Wars in China.
Napoleon’s brief conquest of Egypt opened the way for a modernizing regime to emerge in that ancient land and stimulated westernizing reforms in the Ottoman Empire.
During the nineteenth century, the idea of a “constitution” found advocates in Poland, Latin America, the Spanish-ruled Philippines, China, the Ottoman Empire, and British-governed India.
Smaller revolutionary eruptions occurred in Europe in 1830, more widely in 1848, and in Paris in 1870, reflecting ideas of republicanism, greater social equality, and national liberation from foreign rule.
The American and French revolutions led sympathetic elites in Central Europe and elsewhere to feel that they had fallen behind.
Three major movements arose to challenge continuing patterns of oppression or exclusion: abolitionists, nationalists, and feminists.

The Abolition of Slavery

Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century Europe had become increasingly critical of slav ery as a violation of the natural rights of every person.
The actions of slaves themselves likewise hastened the end of slav ery.
The Great Jamaica Revolt of 1831–1832 was particularly important in prompting Britain to abolish slav ery throughout its empire in 1833, as growing numbers of the British public came to believe that slav ery was “not only morally wrong and economically inefficient, but also politically unwise”.
These various strands of thinking — secular, religious, economic, and political — came together in abolitionist movements, most powerfully in Britain.
British naval vessels patrolled the Atlantic, intercepted illegal slave ships, and freed their human cargoes in a small West African settlement called Freetown, in present-day Sierra Leone.
Brazil, in 1888, was the last to do so, bringing more than four centuries of Atlantic slav ery to an end.
A roughly similar set of conditions — fear of rebellion, economic inefficiency, and moral concerns — persuaded the Rus sian tsar (zahr) to free the many serfs of that huge country in 1861, although there it occurred by fiat from above rather than from growing public pressure.
In most cases, the economic lives of the former slaves did not improve dramatically, and a redis trib-ution of land did not follow the end of slav ery.
The understandable reluctance of former slaves to continue working in plantation agriculture created labor shortages and set in motion a huge new wave of global migration.
Large numbers of indentured servants from India and China were imported into the Caribbean, Peru, South Africa, Hawaii, Malaya, and elsewhere to work in mines, on plantations, and in construction projects.
Newly freed people did not achieve anything close to political equality, except in Haiti.
Harsh segregation laws, denial of voting rights, a wave of lynching, and a virulent racism that lasted well into the twentieth century were widespread.
Unlike the situation in the Americas, the end of serfdom in Russia transferred to the peasants a considerable portion of the nobles’ land, but the need to pay for this land with “redemption dues” and the rapid growth of Russia’s rural population ensured that most peasants remained impoverished and politically volatile.
In both West and East Africa, the closing of the external slave trade decreased the price of slaves and increased their use within African societies to produce the export crops that the world economy now sought.
In the Islamic world, some nineteenth-century Muslim authorities opposed slav ery altogether on the grounds that it violated the Quran’s ideals of freedom and equal-ity, but slav ery was outlawed gradually only in the twentieth century under the pressure of international opinion.

Nations and Nationalism

Independence movements in both North and South America were made in the name of new nations.
The French Revolution declared that sovereignty lay with “the people,” and its leaders mobilized this people to defend the “French nation” against its external enemies.
Napoleon’s conquests likewise stimulated national resistance in many parts of Europe.
Printing and the publishing industry standardized a variety of dialects into a smaller number of European languages, a process that allowed a growing reading public to think of themselves as members of a common linguistic group or nation.
Nationalism inspired the political unification of both Germany and Italy, gathering their previously fragmented peoples into new states by 1871.
It encouraged Greeks and Serbs to assert their independence from the Ottoman Empire; Czechs and Hungarians to demand more autonomy within the Austrian Empire; Poles and Ukrainians to become more aware of their oppression within the Rus sian Empire; and the Irish to seek “home rule” and separation from Great Britain.
Popular nationalism made the normal rivalry among European states even more acute and fueled a highly competitive drive for colonies in Asia and Africa.
The immensity of the suffering and sacrifice that nationalism generated in Europe was vividly disclosed during the horrors of World War I.
Some supporters of liberal democracy and representative government saw nationalism as an aid to their aspirations toward wider involvement in political life (civic nationalism).
Other versions of nationalism, in Germany for example, sometimes defined the nation in racial terms, which excluded those who did not share a common ancestry, such as Jews.
Governments throughout the Western world now claimed to act on behalf of their nations and deliberately sought to instill national loyalties in their citizens through schools, public rituals, the mass media, and military ser vice.
As it became more prominent in the nineteenth century, nationalism took on a variety of political ideologies.
Civic nationalism identified the nation with a particular territory and maintained that people of various cultural backgrounds could assimilate into the dominant culture.
Conservative nationalism could be used to combat socialism and feminism, for those movements allegedly divided the nation along class or gender lines.
An “Egypt for the Egyp tians” movement arose in the 1870s as British and French intervention in Egyp tian affairs deepened.
The Indian National Congress, established in 1885, gave expression to the idea that India, with all its diversity, was a single nation.

Feminist Beginnings

In the century following the French Revolution, organized groups of women called into question the subordination of women to men.
The French Revolution then raised the possibility of re-creating human societies on new foundations, and many women participated in these events and insisted that the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality must include women.
In neighboring En gland, the French Revolution stimulated the writer Mary Wollstonecraft to pen her famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
The first orga nized expression of this new feminism took place at the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
From the beginning, feminism became a transatlantic movement in which European and American women attended the same conferences, corresponded regu-larly, and read one another’s work.
Access to schools, universities, and the professions were among their major concerns.
By the 1870s, feminist movements in the West were focusing primarily on the issue of suffrage and were gaining a growing constituency.
By 1914, some 100,000 women took part in French feminist organizations, while the National American Woman Suffrage Association claimed 2 million members.
One British activist, Emily Davison, threw herself in front of the king’s horse during a race in Britain in 1913 and was trampled to death.
By the beginning of the twentieth century in the most highly industrialized countries of the West, the women’s movement had become a mass movement.
By 1900, upper- and middle-class women had gained entrance to universities, though in small numbers, and women’s literacy rates were growing steadily.
Divorce laws were liberalized in some places and professions such as medicine opened to a few, and teaching beckoned to many more.
Socialists too found themselves divided about women’s issues.
Did the women’s movement distract from the class solidarity that Marxism proclaimed, or did it provide added energy to the workers’ cause?
Never before in any society had such a passionate and public debate about the position of women erupted. It was a novel feature of Western historical experience in the aftermath of the Atlantic revolutions.
The most radical feminist activists in Russia operated within socialist or anarchist circles, targeting the oppressive tsarist regime.
By the 1920s many feminists in colonized countries came to believe that education and a higher status for women strengthened the nation in its struggles for development and independence and therefore deserved support.