The Global Age of Revolutions: A History from 1650 to Today

Redrawing the map and resetting the clock of the Age of Revolutions

In 2015, Bryan Banks and Cindy Ermus launched Age of Revolutions, a website offering critical reconsideration of the foundational concept of revolution and centered on three key questions: What was the Age of Revolutions? Where was the Age of Revolutions? And are we still living in an Age of Revolutions? This collection represents the best of scholars’ answers to these expansive, urgent questions. Throughout, contributors place the revolutionary era within a larger and more fluid context of global interconnections, situating it within multiple overlapping narratives of resistance and transformation and encouraging a more nuanced and expansive conception of revolution across time and space. They challenge traditional understandings that placed the Age of Revolutions between the years 1775 and 1848 and that confined it to Europe and the Atlantic world. Instead, this volume demonstrates that the Age of Revolutions began much earlier in the eighteenth century and continues through the present day and across the globe--from Haiti to Hong Kong. Collectively, these field-defining essays explore the implications of this new understanding of the concept, offering snapshots of the diverse nature of revolutionary change across all continents.

Bryan A. Banks is Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University. Cindy Ermus is the Charles and Linda Wilson Associate Professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.