Atlantic Revolutions
Global context
[Safavid dynasty], Mughal decline
Wahhabi movement threatened The Ottoman Empire
Pugachev, Chinese rebellions
Expensive wars, weakening states, destabilizing processes of commercialization
Driven by popular sovereignty, social contract, liberty, equality, free trade, religious tolerance, republicanism
Against divine right, state-controlled trade, aristocratic privilege, established church
Common: Challenge to empire & privilege, expansion of political rights
Different: local causes, violence level, who benefits, long-term outcomes
Revolutions
North American Revolution 1775–1787
Seven Years’ War debt, higher taxes
1776 Declaration, 1787 federal Constitution
Major anticolonial break, constitutional model
French Revolution 1789–1815
Fiscal crisis, Estates General, Third Estate forms National Assembly
1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, end privileges & feudalism, church reshaped under state
Louis XVI & others executed
Women’s rights debate elevated slightly
Napoleon: takes power 1799, keeps legal equality, nationalism, 1815 defeat
Haitian Revolution 1791–1804
Haiti (Saint Domingue) sugar & coffee, enslaved majority, whites & free people of color
1791 slave revolt, war & foreign interventions
Toussaint Louverture
1804 independence, First successful slave revolution, citizens legally black
Plantation system collapses, land to smallholders & long-term instability
French independence debt
Promoted abolitionists
Latin American Revolutions 1808–1825
Creole elites, Bourbon reforms, racial & regional divisions
1808 Napoleon invades Iberia & Portuguese court to Brazil
No unified federation
Bolívar
Consequences
U.S. grows rich, Latin American states remain poor
Britain shifts focus to Asia
Constitutionalism spreads
Abolitionism, nationalism, feminism later