IB History: The Age of Revolutions — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: The World of 1775

Paying for an empire. Britain’s victory in 1763 left it with the world’s biggest empire and biggest debt, as well as a new American frontier to garrison. Ministers could reasonably ask those protected by its troops to contribute to their cost. Colonial assemblies, however, had voted taxes for 150 years. The attempt to raise revenue therefore put the question of representation before the colonies: who had the authority to require payment? War debt and fiscal reform will bring France to another crisis in Chapter 3.

Readers and the language of rights. Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau gave political arguments an influential body of theory. Print helped carry those arguments to readers: colonial literacy was among the highest in the world, and printers such as Franklin made political writing widely available. The “rights of Englishmen” and, later, the “rights of man” supplied terms in which people could make claims on their governments.

An empire sustained by slavery. About one in five people in British America was enslaved; in the sugar islands the proportion was about nine in ten. Plantation wealth supported an imperial world that maintained navies and circulated pamphlets. A declaration about “all men” would have to meet the fact that these societies depended on enslaved labor. In Chapter 5, enslaved people force that question upon the Atlantic world.

The people beyond the line. The Proclamation Line of 1763 sought to keep settlers off Native land and preserve peace at less cost. Colonial speculators, including Washington, resented the restriction. For the Six Nations, the Cherokee and many other nations, the same line offered some restraint on settlers. A movement to free the colonies from British authority could remove that restraint, with very different consequences for the people whose land settlers wanted.

Chapter 2: The American Revolution

The Atlantic and the cost of reconquest. An army fighting 3,000 miles from Britain depended on men and supplies sent by sail; an order and its answer could take three months. Distance raised costs and slowed decisions, but it became a serious burden because resistance continued. The rebels needed to keep their army and movement alive until the expense of reconquest weakened London’s will and credit.

The French decision. Vergennes arranged covert arms for the rebels from 1776, and most of the gunpowder at Saratoga was French. France wanted revenge for its defeat in 1763, yet open war exposed its own resources and possessions. The alliance of February 1778 brought a French fleet and army into the struggle and stretched British resources across a global war. France’s estimated expenditure of 1.3 billion livres would add to the debt behind its own crisis.

Resistance beyond the garrison. Colonial armed communities and self-governing institutions had a century of experience. Britain captured New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, but its garrisons could not exercise the same power everywhere beyond them. Assemblies, committees and militias could sustain or rebuild local resistance. A captured city gave Britain a foothold; it did not by itself restore rule over the surrounding population.

Changes that endured. Restored rulers recovered authority without reversing everything that had happened. The abolition of serfdom affected more than forty million people across much of Central Europe. Piedmont and Prussia kept constitutions, while Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland retained constitutional changes; Switzerland’s 1848 federal constitution continued in amended form. France retained universal male suffrage, and several states kept parliaments. Rulers could recover powers they had conceded while preserving reforms that weakened feudal obligations or changed administration.

Unification by other means. Frankfurt’s delegates had tried to unite Germany through constitutional deliberation. Their failure left the national ambition alive, but others would pursue it differently. Within 23 years Cavour and Bismarck helped build Italy and Germany through monarchy, diplomacy and war. Bismarck had opposed the revolution as a young Prussian conservative in 1848. National unification answered one revolutionary demand; whether it was a delayed victory or a defeat also depends on the importance given to the liberals’ hopes for how it should be achieved.

Exiles carry the arguments abroad. Revolutionaries carried their arguments into exile. Kossuth toured the United States, Mazzini continued to plot, and Carl Schurz became a Union general. An estimated quarter-million Forty-Eighters reached the United States, though the size of that migration is disputed. Marx, a German journalist, worked in London and the British Museum; his interpretation of bourgeois revolution would influence later movements. Defeat scattered these people, but did not end their political work.

The age in the balance. From Lexington to Világos, the conflicts in this atlas cost several million lives. They also helped leave republics as an established form of government, slavery abolished or challenged across much of the hemisphere, declarations of rights as a constitutional model, and national statehood as a goal for peoples without a state. These gains and the deaths belong in the same account. How should we weigh them against the violence through which they emerged?