The Transformation of the World (117 page)

The independence revolutions throughout the Americas had—or at least tended to have—two fundamental consequences: subjects became citizens, and the structure of the old hierarchical societies started to totter.
⁷⁶
However, colonial plurality gave way to different political landscapes: in Hispanic America sovereign nation-states brought with them an even greater diversity; in North America a federal state had a basic dynamic of territorial expansion to the west and south, at the expense of Mexico and Spanish civilization in general (and culminating with the Spanish-American war of 1898). In both hemispheres, there continued to be a large nonrevolutionary state: here the Empire (from 1889, the Republic) of Brazil, there the Dominion of Canada within the British Empire. Also in both, political revolution did not immediately result in stability, although the conditions for it were more favorable in the northern continent because the War of Independence was not at the same time a civil war, and because there was no equivalent to the
pardos
, that large stratum of free colored people wooed at times by both republicans and monarchists.
⁷⁷
In North America the dividing line with Indians and blacks was clear cut: national politics remained white politics. In South America, where the colonial state had translated shades of skin color into legal status, the lines of conflict continued to be more complex. In the northern hemisphere a clearer balance persisted between town and country, whereas the period of wars in the southern hemisphere led to a “ruralization of power.”
⁷⁸
Over the following decades, the North American frontier promoted a certain democratization of landownership. In South America, by contrast, landowning oligarchies imprinted their stamp on the political system more powerfully than agrarian forces in the United States had been able to do at the height of their influence in the Southern states before the Civil War.

One of the great achievements of the early United States, not repeated farther south, was the avoidance of militarization and militarism. The nation in arms of the revolutionary period never became a military dictatorship; independent caudillos did not acquire any significance. Unlike South America and parts of Europe, North America did not evolve into a land of coups d'état.
⁷⁹
Many countries of Hispanic America did not know internal peace until the 1860s or even 1870s, in the wake of their greater integration into the world economy.
⁸⁰
If one were to define something like a peak period of political stability in Central and South America, then it would have to be the three decades between 1880 and the onset of the Mexican revolution in 1910.

As to the United States, its postrevolutionary stabilization really began with the election in 1800 of the third president, Thomas Jefferson, and was already well advanced by the time Latin America was embarking on its independence struggle.
⁸¹
Much of the consolidation was deceptive or provisional, however. Two questions in particular were unanswered: how slave society and the quite different Northern capitalism based on free wage labor could coexist within one and the same republic; and how new states could be integrated into the republic without upsetting the delicate constitutional balance. The outbreak of the Civil
War in 1861 did not come as a complete surprise, and in retrospect it seems much more “unavoidable” than the First World War, for example. A number of problems from the age of the revolution had been left unresolved. Only because the Founding Fathers had neglected to clarify the issue of slavery was it possible for anyone seriously to demand in the late 1850s that the African slave trade (banned since 1807) should be resumed, or for a level-headed politician like Abraham Lincoln to convince himself that the South was seeking to impose slavery in the free states of the North.
⁸²
The Civil War was thus in a sense the last spinoff from the Revolutionary War. If one is not too afraid of belaboring the term, one might toy with the idea of a hundred-year cycle of revolutionary unrest in North America: from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 to the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865.

The end of the Hispanic American independence revolutions was soon followed by the European revolutions of 1830–31, their Janus face turned to both past and future. They, too, should be classified as part of—and the closing of—the Age of Revolution. Triggered by unrest among Parisian artisans in late July 1830, revolutionary conditions prevailed in France, the southern Netherlands (which would emerge from these events as the autonomous state of Belgium), Italy, Poland, and some states of the German League (especially Kurhessen, Saxony, and Hanover). The results were rather modest. The restorationist tendency that had gained the upper hand in Europe after 1815 was weakened here and there, but politically defeated only in France—and even there the main social forces that increased their political room for maneuver, whether one calls them “notables” or “liberal bourgeoisie,” had formed the core of the French elite even before the July Revolution.
⁸³
What occurred in 1830 was more a political revolution than a social one. It did link up with 1789–91, inasmuch as it evoked the original revolutionary ideas of constitutionality and harked back strongly to the rhetoric and symbolism of the Great Revolution in its pre-Jacobin phase. But its heroic imagery of the urban barricade cannot hide the fact that some forms of rural protest—only loosely connected with events in the cities—were, to say the least, still distinctly “premodern.”
⁸⁴

Transatlantic Integration

The Atlantic revolutions shared a new basic experience that debarred any return to prerevolutionary conditions: the ongoing politicization of broad sections of the population. Everywhere politics ceased to be merely elite politics. Some of this revolutionary legacy nearly always endured, even if the cooling-down period evolved in very different directions.
⁸⁵
The most successful channeling into representative institutions took place in the United States, albeit with the exclusion of the nonwhite population. Where such an attempt at democratic reconstruction failed, as in France during the interlude of the Directorate (1795–99) and many countries of Latin America, new authoritarian systems could not dispense with a degree of popular legitimation, if only by acclamation. “Bonapartism” did not mean a return to the ancien régime. Even the Bourbon Restoration after 1814
accepted much from the post-1789 period, codifying some of its ideas in the Charte Constitutionnelle, for example, and taking on board the new aristocracy that Napoleon had created out of his generals and minions.
⁸⁶
Nowhere outside Spain, Italy, and the German principality Hesse-Kassel did the forces of reaction completely erase the traces of revolution. Napoleon himself, a great institution builder, saw clearly that pure charisma was incapable of sustaining a postrevolutionary order. Bolívar too understood this and, despite a few dictatorial temptations in his years of triumph, he fought indefatigably for the rule of law and constraints on personal power. Yet he could not prevent his Venezuelan homeland and others like it from sliding into caudillismo over the decades.
⁸⁷
Under such conditions, mass politics was reduced to keeping a narrow clientele happy.

The Atlantic revolutions arose out of a set of relations that had developed on both sides of the ocean since the time of Columbus. Five levels of integration overlapped:

1. 
administrative
integration within the great empires of Spain, England/Britain, and France, as well as the smaller ones of Portugal and the Netherlands

2. 
demographic
integration through emigration to the New World, but also through reverse migration, especially of colonial personnel

3. 
commercial
integration—from the fur trade in North America to the Angola-Brazil slave trade in South America—organized under the competitive rules of a national mercantilism that was ever harder to enforce and that was disturbed at first (up to around 1730) by endemic piracy; this gave rise to something like a pan-Atlantic consumer culture (the embryo of today's Western “consumerism”), whose interruption by politically motivated boycotts became a weapon in international relations
⁸⁸

4. 
cultural
integration in many different shapes, from the transfer of West African lifestyles to the spread of performative practices right across the entire region to the modified reproduction of European architectural styles
⁸⁹

5. 
normative
integration on the basis of common or similar normative foundations of “Atlantic civilization,” borne and disseminated by growing numbers of books, pamphlets, and magazines (in 1828 the English essayist and literary critic William Hazlitt already described the French Revolution as a late effect of the invention of the printing press)
⁹⁰

This fifth point is of special importance for an understanding of the Atlantic revolutions, although it is not sufficient to explain political action as motivated by ideas alone and without reference to underlying interests. From the point of view of the history of ideas, all Atlantic revolutions were children of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was of European origin, and its effects on the other side of the ocean must be described first and foremost as a vast process of receptionand adoption. From the 1760s some American voices, heard also
across the Atlantic, responded with indignation to European authors (such as the French naturalist Buffon or, at a later date, the German philosopher Hegel) who had spoken dismissively of nature and culture in the New World; among the most prominent were Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the authors of the
Federalist Papers
(1787–88), and the Mexican theologian Fray Servando Teresa de Mier.
⁹¹
Simón Bolívar too—Latin America's most important political thinker of the age, along with the versatile and for a long time London-based scholar Andrés Bello
⁹²
—repeatedly insisted that the program of the Enlightenment should not be transferred without modification to the Americas. On this he could invoke Montesquieu, for whom the laws of a country always had to be adapted to its particular circumstances.

Various cores and peripheries took shape within the Atlantic Enlightenment as a whole. In comparison with France or Scotland, even Spain in the anticlerical reform period of Carlos III was an intellectual sideshow. It was a sign of the times, however, that people looked beyond the cultural boundaries within and around Europe. Britons and North American colonists, though often at odds religiously and otherwise, shared the same legal tradition and the same beliefs in individuality and personal safeguards.
⁹³
Numerous pamphlets, and above all the Declaration of Independence, showed that John Locke's contractual theory of government, Algernon Sidney's doctrine of legitimate resistance, and the theories of Scottish moral philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Ferguson were well known in North America.
⁹⁴
Thomas Paine, a trained corset maker and self-taught philosopher, who first arrived in the New World in November 1774 and became one of the most influential journalists of all time, distilled British radical thought into his potent pamphlet of 1777,
Common Sense
; it was the product of an Atlantic radicalism that would find even more striking expression in his later work,
The Rights of Man
(1791–92).

Compared with the actual results of “enlightened absolutism” in Europe, the new United States embodied an advance of enlightenment in the real world. If there were any philosopher-kings at all in this age, then they were to be found—even more than in Frederick II's Prussia or Joseph II's Austria—in Napoleonic France or the America of George Washington's first three successors as president: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. English-speaking America was also attentive to French authors, particularly Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the sharp critic of colonialism Abbé Raynal (whose name Denis Diderot sometimes used for his writing). Latin Americans also made the acquaintance of these
philosophes
early on. Simón Bolívar, a young man from a wealthy family in Caracas, read their works as well as those of Hobbes and Hume, Helvétius, and Holbach, and he was probably not altogether untypical.
⁹⁵
In Mexico City in the 1790s, everyone from the viceroy on down studied what the critical minds of Europe had to say—without immediately putting it into practice.
⁹⁶
More generally the zeitgeist, with its faith in progress, gripped not only intellectuals but also parts of the business world on both sides of the Atlantic.
⁹⁷
For many Americans
a visit to London, politically conservative but the world center of economic modernity, was therefore at least as exciting as a firsthand impression of the mood in revolutionary Paris.

Revolution is not a dinner party, wrote Mao Zedong—and he knew about such things—in 1927. So much is true of the Atlantic revolutions; none was as peaceful as that which took place in 1989–91 from the Elbe to the Gobi desert. The victims of the Terror of 1793–94 plus the civil war of 1793–96 in the Vendée, estimated at a minimum of 260,000 for the whole of France,
⁹⁸
must be seen in the perspective of all those who died in the European wars between 1792 and 1815 (including the reign of terror on all sides in post-1808 Spain), the hundreds of thousands killed in Latin America from the Túpac Amaru rising of 1780 to the end of the liberation struggles and civil wars, sometimes waged as total wars of annihilation,
⁹⁹
and all those who lost their lives in the worst revolutionary cauldron of the age, in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, including tens of thousands of ordinary French and British soldiers, most of whom died of tropical diseases. With justice the revolution of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington is favorably compared to that of Maximilien Robespierre; there was no American equivalent of the massacre of alleged traitors in France. But it should not be forgotten that the American war of independence, from 1775 to 1781, involved a mobilization on Britain's side greater than in any of its previous conflicts, making it in a sense the first modern war, and that it claimed some 25,000 lives among the rebel troops alone.
¹⁰⁰
The war generated more refugees and emigrés than the whole of the French Revolution.
¹⁰¹
But it did not produce massacres of the civilian population—unlike the Russian-Ottoman war, for example, in which thousands of Turks were killed in one afternoon during the capture of the fortress of Ochakov (Özi) in 1789. By comparison, the second quarter of the nineteenth century was an innocuous period in world history, until the great Taiping bloodbath began in China in 1850–51.