The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It

Perl-Rosenthal (history, Univ. of Southern California; Citizen Sailors) demonstrates that the period between 1760 and 1825 could be called the Age of Revolutions, as numerous uprisings occurred in France, the United States, the Netherlands, Spain, Saint-Domingue, and the Spanish colonies of western and northern South America. Unfortunately, revolutions that occurred in West Africa are not discussed in this book. But Perl-Rosenthal does a good job of demonstrating that the revolutions he discusses actually effected only limited political and social transformations. Coalitions of elites and groups of ordinary people pushed for radical change, and it was the dawn of mass politics. The revolutions’ outcomes were double-edged, being both conservative and liberal, egalitarian and repressive, hierarchical and democratic. Perl-Rosenthal attributes the illiberalism of the Age of Revolutions to the long learning curve for organizing revolutionary political movements. This positions his book as a major counterpoint to the conclusions presented in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution and R.R. Palmer’s The Age of Democratic Revolution.