Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present

Despite the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Britain’s real emergence as a world power only occurred in the 19th century with the advent of the steam engine and industrialization. Even as poets and essayists bemoaned the loss of an agrarian world, coal mines employed thousands of workers and powered factories and railroads. Zakaria also notes that the lot of rural peasants prior to industrialization was hardly the paradise that was romanticized in fiction. The former peasant class gravitated to life in the big cities because it offered them a higher wage and fixed work hours. While factory conditions were hardly ideal, they were far less of a contrast to the subsistence farming that had previously enslaved people to the land. Furthermore, working for wages in a factory created disposable income that might be spent on leisure pursuits, thereby creating “the lifestyle we now associate with the global middle class” (114).

The status of women also improved. Working in textiles had always been considered a female pursuit, but working in a textile factory offered women an independent income and facilitated the women’s liberation movement, which was “set in motion by industrialization, [the] greatest economic revolution” (117). However, while economic growth continued unabated, political reform was slow to catch up. The landed gentry in the House of Lords wanted to maintain traditional privileges and resisted attempts to grant more rights to the working class. Protests and riots by the lower orders eventually won concessions, but the struggle would continue for decades. Ultimately, the protests of the working class failed to become a full-blown revolution because the standard of living was so high compared to that of other European countries.

One of the chief by-products of industrialization was the switch between the agendas of the conservative Tories and liberal Whigs. The Whigs would abandon laissez-faire capitalism, while the Tories adopted it. As Zakaria states, “The meaning of liberalism itself had changed. The left had kept its social progressivism but abandoned its enthusiasm for unfettered industrialization” (134). Even as progress was being made on the fronts of economic and social welfare, identity politics continued to plague the nation. The gulf dividing Catholics and Protestants grew wider over time. During this same period, the British empire reached its apex, with many questioning the cost of managing its far-flung holdings. While Britain was worrying about its colonies to the east, it failed to notice the industrial rise of its former colonies in America.

The American Revolution of 1776 did not constitute the kind of revolution discussed in this book; it did not represent an ideological shift. Instead, it was an attempt to limit government overreach on the part of the British crown. As Zakaria asserts, “America did not need a great social revolution to overcome feudalism; it simply never imported these relics of the Old World in the first place” (143). Industrialization in America was also stimulated by the Civil War, for the urban North gained an influx of immigrants to work in its factories, while the agricultural South failed to exploit the same resources and remained mired in an economy dependent on enslavement.

While American goods found their way overseas, industrialization in the United States grew exponentially at the turn of the 20th century, at which time “petroleum replace[d] coal as society’s main source fuel, and the automobile displaced the train” (160-61). American economic growth spurred the need for social reform, but socialism itself never caught on in America. The class conflict that characterized European society was never felt in the United States because feudalism had never become entrenched there.

During the period of rapid industrial growth, America followed Britain in the way that its two major political parties swapped their ideologies. Right after the Civil War, Democrats in the South were the champions of states’ rights, principally because they did not want the federal government to interfere in the enactment of the oppressive Jim Crow laws that were designed to suppress the Black population. Conversely, Republicans were concerned with building a national infrastructure, and they needed a strong central government to manage such tasks.

A populist movement briefly gained prominence because of the debate over gold versus silver as the standard for American currency. William Jennings Bryan gave voice to the concerns of rural populations whose values were not in line with America’s robber barons. As Zakaria notes, “Bryan’s own later career would show how America’s homegrown anti-elite populism, unlike European socialism, drew much of its strength from those who saw their traditional values as threatened by modernity” (155). As the economic interests of Democrats and Republicans shifted with the dawn of the new century, centrists in either party became rarer. Theodore Roosevelt was the last Republican who sought to curb the monopolistic tendencies of big corporations, for “[t]he coming century of American life would be largely defined by political warfare between the Right, championing laissez-faire dynamism, and the Left, championing social security and stability” (160).

By the time that Franklin Roosevelt became president during the Great Depression, party identities had switched and became entrenched, with the Democrats becoming both “the critics of laissez-faire economics” and “the champions of the welfare state” and giving rise to “ferocious pushback from the other side of the aisle” (164). Zakaria also observes that the current era is bringing another shift to these political polarities, for “[t]he recent rise of a new populism has led new issues and new divides to seep into politics everywhere” (165). The reasons for this most recent shift will be the subject of Part Two of Age of Revolutions.