The Transformation of the World

Te Transformation of the World A Global History of the Nineteenth Century Jürgen Osterhammel Translated by Patrick Camiller PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Unauthenticated Download Date | 3/26/16 7:45 PM CHAPTER X Revolutions From Philadelphia via Nanjing to Saint Petersburg 1 Revolutions— From Below, from Above, from Unexpected Directions Philosophical and Structural Concepts of Revolution More than in any other era, politics in the nineteenth century was revolutionary politics. It did not defend “age- old rights” but, looking ahead to the future, elevated particular interests such as those of a class or class coalition into the interests of a nation or even of humanity as a whole. “Revolution” became a central idea of political thought in Europe, serving as a yardstick that for the first time divided Left and Right. The entire long nineteenth century was an age of revolutions, as a look at the political map will make apparent. Between 1783, when the world’s largest republic gained independence in North America, and the near worldwide crisis at the end of the First World War, some of the oldest and most powerful state organisms disappeared from the stage: the British and Spanish colonial states in the Americas (or at least south of Canada); the ancien régime of the Bourbon Dynasty in France; the monarchies in China, Iran, the Otto- man Empire, the Tsarist Empire, Austria- Hungary, and Germany. Upheavals of revolutionary dimensions occurred after 1865 in the Southern United States, after 1868 in Japan, and wherever a colonial power replaced indigenous groups with a form of direct rule. In each of these cases, what happened was more than a changeover of state personnel within an abiding institutional structure. New political orders came into being, with new bases of legitimacy. Any return to the world as it had been previously was barred; nowhere were prerevolutionary conditions restored. Te birth of the United States in 1783 was the frst founding of a state of the new type. Te revolutionary unrest that led to this event, and with it essentially the Age of Revolution, began in the middle of the 1760s. An Age of Revolu- tion or Revolutions? A good case can be made for either. A view grounded in a philosophy of history prefers the singular noun; a structural approach, the plural. Tose who initiated or lived through the revolutions in America and 514 Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:43 PM Revolutions 515 France saw mainly the singularity of the new; the events in Philadelphia in 1776, when the thirteen colonies declared their independence of the British Crown, and the spontaneous emergence of a National Assembly in France in June 1789 appeared to be without parallel in any age. Whereas previous violent overthrows had merely led to external modifcations of the status quo ante, the American and French revolutionaries expanded the whole horizon of the age, opening a path of linear progress, grounding social relations for the frst time on the prin- ciple of formal equality, lifing the weight of tradition and royal charisma, and instituting a system of rules that made those in political authority accountable to a community of citizens. Tese two revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment, however diferent from each other in their aims, signaled the onset of political modernity. From then on, defenders of the existing order bore the mark of the old and obsolete, of reactionaries and counterrevolutionaries, or else they had to reinvent their posture as “conservative.” Both revolutions— though the French more than the American— polarized along new dividing lines: no longer between elite factions or religious groups, but between rival worldviews. At the same time, in a contradiction that would never be overcome, they raised the demand for human reconciliation, the “hope for the emancipation of all mankind through revolution.”1 Tomas Paine already set this new tone in 1776, combining a favorite theme of the European Enlight- enment, the forward march of the human race, with the local protest of a British subject. “Te cause of America,” he wrote, “is in great measure the cause of all mankind.”2 Since then, what Hannah Arendt called the “pathos of an entirely new beginning”3 and a claim to represent more than the self- interest of the pro- testers have been part of every self- styled revolution. In this sense, a revolution is a local event with a claim to universal validity. And every revolution has in a sense been imitative: it feeds of the potential of the ideas that frst became a reality in 1776 and 1789. Such a philosophical concept of revolution is admittedly very narrow, and it becomes still narrower if one insists that every authentic revolution must have happened under the banner of liberty and served the cause of progress. Tis would also be to generalize a claim to universality that was invented in the West and whose like is found nowhere else. A larger range of cases come under a concept that is not pitched in terms of aims or philosophical justifcations, or the role of “great revolutions” in the philosophy of history, but bases itself on observable events and structural outcomes.4 A revolution then denotes a col- lective protest of certain proportions: a systemic political change involving the participation of people who did not belong to the circle of the previous holders of power. In the language of a social scientist careful to keep his conceptual tools razor- sharp, it thus becomes “the successful overthrow of the prevailing elites . by new elites who, having taken power (usually with considerable violence and mass mobilization), fundamentally change the social structure and therewith also the structure of authority.”5 Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:43 PM 516 Chapter X Here nothing is said about a moment in the philosophy of history; the pathos of modernity vanishes. In this defnition there have been revolutions almost every where and in almost every epoch. Te whole of recorded history displays any number of radical breaks, including ones in which many people thought every thing familiar was being turned upside down or torn up at the roots. If there were statistics for such things, they would probably show that really major watersheds have more ofen been a result of military conquest than of revolution. Conquerors do not only vanquish an army: they occupy a land, destroy or topple at least part of its elite, install their own men instead, and introduce foreign laws and sometimes also a foreign religion. Tis also happened in the nineteenth century, all around the world. In terms of its efects colonial conquest was ofen “revolutionary” in a quite literal sense. In most cases the invaded and vanquished must have experienced it as a trau- matic break with their previous way of life. Even where the old elite physically survived, it was degraded by the fact that a layer of new masters stood on top of it. Te coming to power of alien colonial rulers through a military invasion, or less ofen through negotiations, was thus tantamount to a revolution for large numbers of Africans, Asians, or South Sea islanders. Furthermore, the long- term revolutionary character of colonialism lay in the fact that, afer the original conquest, it created space for the rise of new groups in the indigenous society and thereby paved the way for a second wave of revolutions. In many countries, the true social and political revolution took place only during or afer decoloniza- tion. Revolutionary discontinuity marked both the beginning and the end of the colonial period. Te idea of foreign conquest as “revolution” was more present to nineteenth- century Europeans than it is to us today. Te Manchu takeover of China, for instance, which began with the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and continued for several more decades, struck plenty of early modern European commentators as a dramatic example of a revolution. Te older political language of Europe closely associated the term with the rise and fall of empires. Several factors came together here, in a way that Edward Gibbon synthesized between 1776 and 1788 (at the beginning of the Age of Revolution) in his great work on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire: namely, internal unrest and elite change, external military threat, secession on the imperial periphery, and spread of subversive ideas and values. Te ingredients were no diferent in what we have called the “bridge period” (Sattelzeit). Te old European conception of politics contained a com- plex picture of radical macrochange that led to an understanding of the novel events of the last third of the eighteenth century: they were simultaneously of unprecedented novelty and a repetition of familiar patterns. It would be too sim- ple here to counterpose a new “linear” and an old “cyclical” view of history. What was the Battle of Waterloo if not the terminus of a cycle of French hegemony? Anyone looking for “premodern” patterns in their pure form could continue to discover them. For example, exactly at the same time as the revolutionary events Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 1/24/16 7:43 PM Revolutions 517 in France, a drama unfolded in what is now Nigeria that could be copied straight out of Gibbon: the fall of the Oyo Empire as a result of elite infghting at the center and uprisings in the provinces.6 Te chronological nineteenth century, from 1800 to 1900, does not have pride of place in the usual narrative histories of revolution; it witnessed the con- sequences of revolutions in North America and France, but it did not produce a “great” revolution of its own.

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