The Age of Revolutions - Study Notes

Lesson summary

By the end of the eighteenth century two revolutions, the American Revolution of 1775-83 and the French Revolution of 1789-95, dealt a severe blow to monarchy. The Industrial Revolution that began in eighteenth-century England shifted the economy from agriculture to industry.

11.1 The American War of Independence

The thirteen colonies

• Walter Raleigh's colony at Roanoke Island (1587) became a lost colony.
• Jamestown, Virginia was founded in 1607; the pilgrims of the Mayflower settled at Plymouth, Massachusetts.
• The Dutch founded New Amsterdam (1624) near the Hudson; the English renamed it New York.
• By 1770 over 2 million people lived in Britain's 13 North American colonies. The south grew cotton, wheat and tobacco with African slaves; the north had mills, shipbuilding and trade.
• Colonies were ruled by Governors appointed by the British monarch; only tax-paying landowning men could vote.

Causes

• Navigation Acts: colonial produce to be exported only in British ships.
• Seven Years War (1756-63): conquest of Canada removed the French danger, so the colonies were less willing to submit.
• Taxes: sugar and molasses (1764) - slogan "no taxation without representation"; Stamp Act (1765, repealed 1766); Townshend Act on goods imported from Britain.
• Boston Massacre (1770): Lord North kept only the tea tax; British troops fired on critics.
• Boston Tea Party (1773): about 100 activists threw 342 boxes of tea into the sea.
• Intolerable Acts (1774): Boston Port Bill, Massachusetts Government Act, Administration of Justice Act and a quartering act. The Quebec Act gave the Ohio-Mississippi lands to Quebec.

Course and result

• First Continental Congress at Philadelphia (all colonies except Georgia) demanded repeal and sent the Olive Branch Petition to George III.
• Fighting at Lexington (1775); independence declared on 4 July 1776, mainly the work of Thomas Jefferson; Richard Lee proposed it.
• Howe led the British, Washington the Americans. Burgoyne surrendered at Saratoga (1777); the British surrendered at Yorktown (1781).
• France, Spain and the Dutch helped the colonists; Prussia, Sweden and Denmark formed the Armed Neutrality.
• Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) sold over 150,000 copies. Loyalists (Tories) opposed the Patriots.
• Treaty of Paris (1783): USA recognised; land to the Mississippi and the 31st parallel went to the USA; Spain got Florida; France gained some British territories.
• George Washington (1732-1799) became the first president of the USA.

11.2 The French Revolution

• The ancien regime (old order) had three estates: clergy, nobility and commoners. Only the third estate paid taxes: tithe, taille, gabelle (salt) and tobacco tax.
• Peasants were serfs who paid about 80% of their earnings in taxes. The bourgeoisie wanted political power to match their economic status.
• Wars, including aid to the Americans, bankrupted France under Louis XVI.
• Philosophes: Montesquieu (The Spirit of Laws), Voltaire (The Age of Louis XIV), Rousseau (Social Contract), John Locke (Two Treatises of Government), Diderot and the Encyclopaedists.

Course of the French Revolution

• Estates-General met at Versailles in May 1789: 300 delegates each from clergy and nobility, 600 from the third estate, which demanded one vote per member.
• National Assembly formed on 17 June 1789; Tennis Court Oath on 20 June led by Mirabeau and Abbe Sieyes.
• Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, now Bastille Day. Feudalism and the tithe were abolished.
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen adopted on 26 August 1789: a preamble and 17 articles; preamble to the Constitution of 1791.
• Women marched on Versailles; Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen.
• La Marseillaise (1792) by Roget de Lisle became the national anthem by a decree of 14 July 1795.
• Jacobin Club led by Robespierre (sans-culottes); Danton dominated the Cordelier Club; the Girondins declared war on Austria and Prussia in April 1792.
• Jacobins stormed the Tuileries; September Massacres from 2 September 1792 killed about 1,200 prisoners.
• Victory at Valmy (20 September 1792); monarchy abolished next day; Louis XVI guillotined on 21 January 1793.
• Jacobin rule: slavery abolished on 4 February 1794, wage ceiling, rationing; Robespierre executed in 1794.
• Directory of five men; Napoleon's coup in 1799; crowned Emperor in 1804.

11.3 Revolution in Latin America

11.4 Industrial Revolution

• Causes in England: commercial revolution capital, colonies with 25% of world population, growing home market, drain of wealth from India, liberal politics, coal and iron (10 million tons of coal by 1800, 90% of world output), enclosures, ports, island location, temperate climate.
• Cotton: flying shuttle (John Kay, 1733), spinning jenny (Hargreaves, 1764, eight threads), water frame (Arkwright, 1769, 128 threads), Crompton's Mule. Manchester became Cottonopolis.
• Iron and steam: Abraham Darby used coke (about 1709); Newcomen's pump (1712) improved by James Watt (1769), who built over 500 engines with Matthew Boulton.
• Transport: first locomotive 1804; Liverpool-Manchester passenger railway 1830; Stephenson's Rocket; Fulton's steamboat 1807; Brunel's SS Great Britain 1843; McAdam's roads; telegraph 1835.
• Second phase (1870-1914): Prussia's Zollverein, unification of Germany (1871), Diesel engine, Siemens, Bayer and Hoechst. In the USA, Slater's mill (1793), transcontinental railroad (1869), Bell's telephone (1876), Edison's bulb (1879).
• Impact: wealth went to a small group of owners; artisans ruined; industrial bourgeoisie and proletariat formed. Peterloo Massacre (1819), Tolpuddle Prosecution (1834), Great Railroad Strike (1877) and Haymarket Massacre (1886), remembered on May Day.