H-Diplo: New posted content
H-Diplo: New posted content
Tieleman on Perl-Rosenthal, 'The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It' [Review]
Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. New York: Basic Books, 2024. vii + 560 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 9781541603196.
Reviewed by Matthijs Tieleman (Illinois State University)
Published on H-Diplo (January, 2025)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61022
In our esoteric times, few scholars dare to tackle long and complex periods in history, especially with bold and thought-provoking arguments. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal does so masterfully in his latest book, The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. Perl-Rosenthal has expertly crafted a historical overview of the crucial revolutionary era that rivals R. R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution (2014) and Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962) in its clarity, its sweeping argumentation, and its appeal to a larger audience than just his fellow experts. With an updated historiography and new scholarly perspectives on this period, this is a book we will be reading and discussing for a long time to come.
The main argument in Perl-Rosenthal’s book is that revolutions take several generations to complete. Scholars have long viewed revolutions as instantaneous moments of change. Perl-Rosenthal argues convincingly that they unfolded much more gradually than previously argued and that their full effects were truly felt only decades later. He points out that anti-revolutionary forces adopted revolutionary changes, even as they rolled back other elements of the revolutionary period. Perl-Rosenthal deploys biographical sketches of several revolutionary characters from a wide variety of backgrounds to demonstrate how they changed the way they viewed society and revolution through time. Perl-Rosenthal’s transatlantic cast of characters include the American revolutionary John Adams, the French revolutionary Louis-Augustin Bosc, the Haitian revolutionary Marie Brunel, and the Peruvian revolutionary Maria Rivadeneyra.
Through these characters, Perl-Rosenthal judges the success of revolutions based on their ability to cross social class divides and create mass political movements. Revolutions happen, he argues, as a result of political mobilization, which is “essential for major and lasting changes to occur” (p. 3). In this light, Perl-Rosenthal views the revolutionary period before the year 1800 as less successful because the revolutions failed to employ mass politics in the way that others did in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Implicitly, this argument critiques Palmer, who ends his classic work in the year 1800. In line with this argument, Perl-Rosenthal sees the assault on the hierarchies of the eighteenth century and the fight for equality as the defining feature of the age of revolutions.
The implications of these arguments are numerous, but Perl-Rosenthal wants the reader to walk away with three main insights. First, he presents the argument that radical political changes happen gradually rather than suddenly, similar to Steven Pincus’s argument in 1688: The First Modern Revolution (2009). This is largely the implication of the generational argument Perl-Rosenthal makes. People are born and raised in particular historical circumstances and therefore can only envision so much change from the historical world in which they grew up.
Second, Perl-Rosenthal wants us to “rethink the special place that we accord to the American and French Revolutions” (p. 14). This is, again, a subtle critique of Palmer and scholars who followed closely in his footsteps. One of the main strengths of the book is Perl-Rosenthal’s ability to transcend space and bring in the Atlantic dynamics of the age of revolutions. This is the only monograph of which I am aware that seamlessly connects Peru to the Netherlands and to Hasidic Judaism. In this way, Perl-Rosenthal builds brilliantly on the innovative scholarship of the last several decades and provides a new, less Eurocentric perspective of the period than Palmer and Hobsbawm had.
Third, Perl-Rosenthal argues strenuously against the idea of exceptionalism of especially the American and French Revolutions, both in its positive and negative forms. Traditionally, scholars of both the American and French Revolutions viewed their respective revolutions as an exceptional moment in history that ushered in modern democratic government. New critiques of this view, Perl-Rosenthal argues, have also been too exceptionalist. Recent progressive critiques include the notion that, for instance, the American Revolution was exceptional in its racism and unique in its inability to get rid of slavery. Instead, Perl-Rosenthal states that all Atlantic revolutions were “shadowed by its own old regime,” which in the American case included slavery (p. 16).
There are many impressive aspects about Perl-Rosenthal’s Age of Revolutions but among the most is the book’s focus on the transatlantic nature of the revolutions. The aforementioned cast of characters does not limit the revolutions that Perl-Rosenthal tackles in this work. His book also tells the underappreciated revolutionary histories of such places as the Netherlands and Genoa, while weaving these moments in the larger, more familiar narratives of the French, Haitian, and American Revolutions.
Another strength is Perl-Rosenthal’s skill in using visual and material culture to tell the diverse histories of the age of revolutions. At various points in the book, Perl-Rosenthal creates almost like a narrative intermission, in which he describes paintings or material objects to highlight a particular point he is raising on the revolutions he describes. This storytelling device feels like a breath of fresh air when the myriads of details and dates of the various revolutions may otherwise numb or overwhelm a reader, especially one who is not a subject expert.
The very few criticisms I have to offer are mostly questions related to the historiographical framing of the book. My biggest question is why Perl-Rosenthal decided to end his narrative in the mid-1820s. He does not explicitly tell the reader, but it seems he views the mid-1820s as the logical endpoint of various revolutionary characters of the old generation—the death of Adams in 1826, for instance—and the completion of the goals of the newer generation, particularly in the Spanish-American case. Ending the age of revolutions in the 1820s, in other words, best serves his generational argument, or at least that is what I surmised from the book.
Yet reading the book made me wonder why he did not choose 1848 as an endpoint for his generational argument. The year 1848 could have logically bookended his generational argument even better than the 1820s. Karl Marx was born in 1818 and many other participants from the 1848 revolutions were similarly born in the early nineteenth century. Another generation that unleashed revolutions in the mid-nineteenth century would have greatly strengthened his argument that revolutions take time to unfold and that they require mass political movements, characteristics more present in 1848 than in 1776.
Irrespective of the choice—all have their merits and demerits—the choice for the 1820s as an endpoint deserved an explanation. Palmer and Hobsbawm decided on wildly different endings for the age of revolutions, both from each other and from Perl-Rosenthal (the former in 1800, the latter in 1848). Understandably, Perl-Rosenthal had to make choices and cut things, as any author is forced to. Yet it would have been great to know why Perl-Rosenthal chose his different, perhaps better, periodization.
Regardless, when a book review turns to “I would have liked to see more” it is further proof of how highly the reviewer rates the book, and that is certainly the case here. With The Age of Revolutions, Perl-Rosenthal has written a masterpiece that will shape the debates on this period for years to come. Most impressively, he has written an argumentatively novel monograph in an accessible way, a feat that only a few academics have achieved. I will be rereading this book and will unquestionably assign it in my undergraduate and graduate classes. And so should you.
Matthijs Tieleman is an assistant professor of early American history at Illinois State University.
Citation: Matthijs Tieleman. Review of Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. January, 2025.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61022
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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