The Age of Revolutions: 1750–1900

The Enlightenment (~18th century)

An intellectual movement extending Scientific Revolution confidence in reason to political, economic, and social questions. Key thinkers:

• John Locke — natural rights, government by consent (Two Treatises 1689).
• Voltaire — freedom of speech, religious toleration.
• Montesquieu — separation of powers (Spirit of the Laws, 1748).
• Rousseau — popular sovereignty (Social Contract, 1762).
• Adam Smith — market economics (Wealth of Nations, 1776).
• Kant — categorical imperative, cosmopolitan political theory.

The Atlantic revolutions

A cascading wave of revolutionary politics:

• American Revolution (1775–1783) — first successful colonial secession from a European power; Declaration of Independence 1776 explicitly grounded in Locke's rights tradition; US Constitution 1787 with Montesquieu-inspired separation of powers.
• French Revolution (1789–1799) — overthrew the ancien régime; passed through constitutional monarchy, National Convention, Reign of Terror (1793–1794), the Directory, and Napoleon's rise (November 1799).
• Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) — the only successful large-scale slave revolt in history; produced the second independent republic in the Americas.
• Latin American independences (~1810–1825) — most Spanish American colonies gained independence during the Napoleonic disruption of Spain, with Bolívar and San Martín as canonical leaders.

The Napoleonic era (1799–1815)

Napoleon spread French Revolutionary principles across Europe — the Napoleonic Code (1804), meritocracy, secular administration — while redrawing European borders (dissolving the Holy Roman Empire in 1806). Sustained resistance (Spanish guerrilla warfare, Russian scorched-earth strategy) eventually led to his defeat; the Congress of Vienna (1815) restored monarchical principles across Europe.

The Industrial Revolution

Beginning in late-18th-century Britain and spreading across the 19th century:

• Watt's steam engine improvements (from 1769) providing the era's foundational power source.
• Mechanized textile production (spinning jenny 1764, water frame 1769, spinning mule 1779).
• Iron and steel (Bessemer process 1856) enabling railroads, ships, and heavy manufacturing.
• Railroads from ~1830 transforming transportation.
• Later spread to Belgium, France, Germany's Rhineland, the US, and Japan (Meiji era from 1868).

Consequences: dramatic productivity gains, urbanization, new working-class experience, capital concentration, and eventually socialist and labor-movement responses to industrial inequality.

19th-century nationalism

Nationalism reshaped European politics. German unification (1871) was engineered by Bismarck through three wars (Denmark 1864, Austria 1866, France 1870–71). Italian unification (1861–70) proceeded under Piedmont-Sardinia's Cavour with Garibaldi's dramatic southern expedition. The Revolutions of 1848 across Europe mostly failed in immediate goals but established patterns later movements would pursue.

19th-century imperialism

Industrial-era European powers extended colonial control over most of Africa (with the 1884–85 Berlin Conference partitioning the continent among European powers) and much of Asia. Motivations combined economic (raw materials, markets), strategic, and ideological (mission civilisatrice, social Darwinism) factors. Consequences reshaped world political geography and underwrote much of 20th-century decolonization politics.

CBE skill focus

Look for causal chains that connect Enlightenment ideas → Atlantic revolutions → constitutional government; Industrial Revolution → urbanization → labor movements. The CBE loves to test both the specific event and the intellectual or economic engine behind it.