Debating the Age of
What’s is important here: Four
Bourgeois and/or National
Revolutions of this period
• Against the ancien regime (old order)
– (Reformation – earlier but a big challenge)
– American Revolution
– French Revolution
– Haitian Revolution
– Mexican Revolution
– South American Revolutions
– Industrial Revolution
Challenging the “master narrative”
• Formerly historians adopted a very
Eurocentric stance – looked for causes
only within Europe and assumed rest of
world was left to wither imitate Europe or
be left behind.
The BIG question for Part Two
• What were the origins of the revolutions
and reforms of the sixteenth to the
nineteenth centuries in the Americas,
France, the Ottoman and British Empires
• Was global trade central to these transformations?
• To what degree did global trade cause variance?
• How important were local factors, such as the
development of national identity?
Rise of the Bourgeois
• Wealthy European merchant
– entrepreneurs and
innovators – profits.
• Essential ingredient to Age of
• Leaders and participants in
many of the revolutionary
movements – not just
political but Enlightenment,
capitalism and Industrial
The “European Miracle”?
• Eric Jones (Reading 29, p. 81) – believes in the
“miracle” of responsive capitalism.
• Culmination of very long term trends – market
responds to customer demands.
• Add New World bounty – merchants already in
place to profit.
• In comparison with Zheng He’s voyages –
individual merchants di not profit.
• “Peace and easy taxes” a necessary prelude.
Adam Smith, 1776
• Argues that Europe economic
systems not so free and
efficient as Jones believes they
• Mercantilism – belief that there
is a fixed amount of wealth –
thus look always for a favorable
balance of trade.
• European countries because of
mercantilism insist their
colonies only trade with Mother
Country – limits profitablity in
• When western Europeans turn to
exploiting and importing goods from
elsewhere it creates a dependency cycle:
• Americas export raw materials to Europe –
Africa exports slaves to Americas – Asia
exports finished goods to Europe, which
Europeans pay for with American silver.
• At each stage European shippers profit –
profits go into innovations in Europe.
Just how important was global
• Kenneth Pomeranz (reading 31) argues
for the extreme importance of global trade
to European development, But Patrick
O’Brien, argues that local and inter-
regional trade was more important.
• Only 4% of Europe’s Gross national output
going to export, but profits made from
imports and from moving goods around.
(e.g. slave trade does not involve Euro
A European Agent in India 1580
• Reading 33, p. 91, an
agent for the powerful
banking family, the
Fuggers, send back a
disappointing report –
the only thing he
seems to be able to
trade for Indian
spices, is American
• Sixteenth Century Church of St Francis in
Cochin – no doubt our agent would have
attended services there.
Did Local Nationalism cause
• The Atlantic World – North and South
America, Europe and Africa.
• Created by movement in goods, people,
ideas and species.
• Enlightenment Ideas about the most just
and natural society spread and caused
waves of revolution in the Atlantic world?
• Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth century
• 1775 – American Revolution
• 1789 – French Revolution
• 1792 – Haitian Revolution
• 1810 – Hidalgo’s Mexican Revolution
• 1819-1821 – most Latin American
countries achieve independence
What is the Third Estate
• Since the medieval period, France’s parliament had
been the Estates General – three estates – clergy,
nobility and “everyone else”.
• Not called for over a hundred years – French king
wanted to rule as absolutists.
• But Louis XVI had lent money to American
revolutionaries (because they were fighting the British) –
• Needs to call the Estates General – but the Third Estate
now includes wealthy but disenfranchised bourgeois –
sick of not really being represented because first two
estates in cahoots.
• Reading 34, Abbe Seyes argues it is only the third estate
that work, so they really are the nation, they are
A generalized sense of national or
• Liah Greenfield argues that that there was no
generalized spread of nationalism behind these
revolutions, but local factors in each
revolutionary area were more important.
• In terms of France, she argue that the absolutist
government created a situation in which the
desires of the nobility and the bourgeois
temporarily aligned – the nobility wanting to
protect their status from further erosion and the
bourgeois wanting to attain a status which
matched their new found wealth
Nationalism in America – “Just say
• T. H. Breen argues that nationalism in the
thirteenth colonies was expressed by the wide-
scale boycotting of popular goods – especially
• Increased taxation to pay for the Seven Years
War against France (fought in both America and
India) – was not matched by an increasing say in
• The Declaration and Resolves of the First
Continental Document - expresses this colonial
Is Nationalism about “Imagined
• Benedict Anderson’s argument, reading
38, on page 105 – argues that nationalism
is often and internal creation rather than a
really historical unity.
• In Spanish America – the Creoles were
discriminated against in favor of the
peninsulares – this gave them a common
sense of cause – an imagined community.
• Think about the American revolution in terms of
the wave of revolutions in the Atlantic world.
• Was revolutions caused by the increase in
bourgeois power and wealth as a result of global
• How did nationalism develop – was this the root
cause of revolutions?
• Next time (just chapter 9) – look more closely at
the connections between Atlantic Revolutions.