What led to all of these revolutions? The map that I showed you before, that colonial map of the Americas, these colonies had been in place for several hundred years before these revolutions. Why did all of these revolutions happen roughly at the same time? Well, one overarching idea is that as we enter into the 1700s, you have the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment. There were many authors and many publications involved in the Enlightenment, but perhaps most famous is the Encyclopédie, in French, or Encyclopedia, which had the intent of collecting much of the scientific and political science knowledge of the time. And it's considered one of the central texts of the Enlightenment, and it was a series of articles published from the 1750s all the way until the 1770s. And to get a sense of it, here is an excerpt of an article by one of the authors, Denis Diderot, considered one of the primary actors in the Enlightenment.