The Transformation of the World (113 page)

Second
. In order to be a revolution, must the serious shaking or successful elimination of the existing relations of authority always proceed “from below?” Must it stem from those in society whose interests are not regularly taken into account, and who resort to the collective use of force because the organized power of the state and elite groups has left them with no other course? Or should one also allow the possibility of a “revolution from above,” that is, a systemic change going beyond merely cosmetic reforms, carried out by parts of the existing elite? This “revolution from above” is an equivocal figure, unless one casually treats it as just a façon de parler.
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The revolution itself may lose its mass impetus as a result of inevitable “routinization,” giving rise to a bureaucratic regime that puts into effect many of the revolution's proper goals with the instruments of state power, often without, against, or at the expense of the original revolutionaries. Napoleon and Stalin were “top-down revolutionaries” of this kind. A different possibility is a headlong conservative rush: modernization and strengthening of the state as a prophylactic defense against revolution. Anti-Jacobin statesmen like Otto von Bismarck (especially in his period as Prussian prime minister) or Camillo di Cavour in Italy were such “white revolutionaries.” They saw that only those who kept abreast of the times could hope to maintain the initiative—an old insight of the British ruling class. However, “white” revolutions led not to a real change of elites but at best to the co-opting of new elite groups (e.g., bourgeois figures with a national-liberal coloration), and they saved the status quo more through its transposition into a different template than through reinvention. Bismarck preserved Prussia
within
Germany, and Cavour projected his Piedmont onto the larger canvas of Italy.

But there was one limiting case in which a subdominant elite reinvented a country's whole political and social system (and thereby also itself), in the most radical attempt at a revolution from above, but also one that eschewed the term “revolution” and sought legitimacy as the restoration of a previous state of affairs—the Meiji “Restoration” of 1868 and after. It lay outside the perceptual horizon of most European political commentators, and what knowledge there was of it had no influence on the European understanding of revolution and reform.

In Japan, a country whose elites felt threatened less by the specter of a “red” social revolution than by the incalculable consequences of a forced opening to the West, a radical system change disguised itself as a political “renewal” or “restoration” of legitimate imperial rule. For two and a half centuries, the powerless imperial court in Kyoto had led a shadowy existence, while the real authority in
the country had lain with the supreme military commander, the shogun in Edo (Tokyo). In 1868 the shogunate was eliminated in the name of a newly active imperial power.
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The driving forces were not members of the old dominant elite, the territorial princes, but small circles among their privileged vassals, the samurai. These constituted a lower, military nobility, which by the early nineteenth century performed little other than administrative duties.

This special kind of renewal for the sake of rapid increases in efficiency, neither motivated by counterrevolutionary aims nor propagating anything in the way of universal principles, was as momentous in Japan as the American or French revolution had been in its country of origin. But the historical context was not a revolt against injustice and participation deficits; the goal was to make an upcoming nation fit for global competition, using new international rules that it recognized from the start. The social content of the Meiji Renewal was thus incomparably more radical than Prussian-German nation-building was during the Bismarck period.

After a brief military conflict between the shogunate and imperial forces, a tiny oligarchy grasped hold of state power and introduced a reform policy which, though not sweeping away the existing social hierarchies, ran clearly counter to the interests of the samurai class from which the Meiji oligarchs themselves originated almost to a man. The European category of “revolution” is peculiarly unfocused in the Japanese case, and so too is the idea of revolution from above. The Meiji Renewal needs a different historical framing: as the most radical and successful self-empowerment operation of the nineteenth century, it belongs in the comparative context of similar state strategies of the time.
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To describe it as a Japanese equivalent of “bourgeois revolution” would be formally correct insofar as it brought to an end the feudal ancien régime. The like cannot be said of any of the European “revolutions from above.” It showed little respect for popular rights, and two decades would pass before middle and lower strata obtained some scope to articulate their interests within the Japanese political system. Implementation of the Meiji strategy did not even require a mobilization of the popular masses outside the increasingly disciplined world of labor. It was not the motives and methods of the Meiji Renewal but its consequences that were revolutionary: that is, an ideologically veiled radical break with the past, which suddenly opened up space for the future, and the return of a long-peripheral elite to the centers of power.

With regard to the mass experience of crisis, mention should finally be made of four other cases that do not fit unambiguously into the category of revolution. They are borderline or transitional phenomena, which bring out all the more graphically the peculiarities of real revolutions.

A revolution in the slipstream of history
was the Tay Son uprising in Vietnam. In spring 1773 three brothers from the central Vietnamese village of Tay Son launched a protest movement that would become the largest revolt in the country's history before the twentieth century. They preached the equality of rich
and poor, burned taxation registers, distributed the mobile property (but not the land) of affluent households to the poor, marched a 100,000-strong peasant army through the north of Vietnam (Tonkin), abolished the Lê Dynasty after more than three centuries in power, beat off Chinese and Siamese intervention in support of the Lê rulers, and attacked the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Khmer. French, Portuguese, and Chinese mercenaries and “pirates” fought on both sides. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the fighting or from starvation. Once the Tay Son leaders had become masters of the whole of Vietnam, they established a tyrannical regime that brutally repressed the Chinese minority. Their support among the masses collapsed. Another warlord group put an end to their rule and in 1802 established the Nguyen dynasty in the city of Huê.
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Minor civil wars
, often omitted in historical overviews, were also present in Europe and nearby, if by “civil war” we mean “armed combat within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities.”
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Following the death of Ferdinand VII, the last Spanish monarch with absolutist impulses, parts of Spain were turned into a battlefield during the First Carlist War (1833–40), which ranged parliamentary liberalism against a classical form of counterrevolution.
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The Carlists, with their main stronghold in the Basque country, wanted to unify Spain along Catholic lines, to eradicate all liberal and “modern” tendencies, and to replace Queen Isabella II with her uncle Charles V, an absolutist pretender mentally stuck in the sixteenth century. In 1837 and 1838, whole armies were locked in a savage war reminiscent of the Napoleonic occupation. After their defeat, the Carlists did not surrender but continued a guerrilla campaign and made plans for a coup d'état; it was 1876 before the constitutional monarchy was firmly in the saddle, having seen off another attack by the Carlist “state within a state” in the Basque country, Navarre, and parts of Catalonia.
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Comparable in brutality, though not in the scale of the fighting, were the civil war in Portugal (1832–34) and the chain of lesser revolts that followed it.
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In Ottoman Lebanon, a host of social conflicts, religious tensions, and capricious interventions by foreign powers after 1840 gave rise to “intercommunal” hostilities, which between 1858 and 1860 escalated into a civil war in which thousands were massacred and hundreds of thousands forced to become refugees. Here the outcome was not the fall of an ancien régime or the repulsing of a postrevolutionary counterrevolution but a kind of constitutional compromise reached through international negotiations; the history of an actual Lebanese state then began in 1861, albeit one that recognized French rights of protection and intervention.
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Peasant revolts
disappeared in Europe (with the exception of the Balkans), after one last upsurge in 1848–49 from the east of the Habsburg Monarchy down to Sicily and up to southern and central Germany. These final outbursts of rural protest were quite in tune with the times and realistic in their goals and forms of action—by no means further instances of the blind, backward-looking
outbreaks of violence that city dwellers, and even many historians, have tended to see in them. Outside the few European countries where its interests could find some representation in parliament, the peasantry resorted time and time again to violence or high-profile symbolic actions. Such protest movements were to be expected in every agrarian society, but they varied in size and scope. They took on larger dimensions in Mexico, for example, from 1820 to 1855, peaking in the years between 1842–46.
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In Japan, where political life was more stable, they increased in frequency during the economically and ecologically harsh period of the thirties and then again, under different conditions that included alliances with urban forces, in the eighties.
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Between 1858 and 1902, the Near and Middle East witnessed a number of peasant revolts, mostly in opposition to “modernizing” forces, a fiscally more demanding state, and absentee landowners seeking to boost their profits (and therefore the exploitation of labor) out of a structurally unreformed agriculture that was no more productive than before.
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Anticolonial resistance
may acquire revolutionary forms and produce revolutionary effects.
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The United States and the Latin American republics arose out of just such a situation. From the Greek revolt against Ottoman rule (1821–26), the great Java war of 1825–30, and the coeval resistance of the Kazakhs to Russian colonization to the Khoikhoi rebellion at the Cape of Good Hope (which did much to shape solidarity along the line of “black” and “white” racial stereotypes) to the Polish uprising of 1863, the Jamaican revolt of 1865, and the Cretan insurrection of 1866–69, a long chain of actions against foreign rule developed, up to the new great wave of anticolonial or anti-imperialist unrest in 1916–19 in Ireland, India, Egypt, China, Korea, and Central Asia. Anticolonial resistance is
revolutionary
, however, only when its aim is to establish a new and independent political order—such as a nation-state. This was relatively uncommon outside Europe before the First World War. One of the few instances is the Urabi movement in Egypt in 1881–82.
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Revolutions, as “accelerated processes” of a special kind,
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are not distributed evenly along the temporal continuum. Often they appear clustered at critical junctures of historical change—which is why historians, especially since the French Revolution, have liked to use them as period markers. Even before the mid-eighteenth century, systemic crises or even breakdowns were plainly visible in several parts of the world: between 1550 and 1700, for example, in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, England, China, and Siam (to name only the most important cases). They occurred without having had a direct influence on, or encounter with, one another. The (temporary) fall of the Stuart dynasty in England in 1649 and the (definitive) removal of the Ming dynasty in China in 1644 had nothing causatively in common. Yet it has been argued that factors not recognized by people at the time—of which a similar demographic trend might be especially important—lay behind such conspicuous simultaneity.
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For us today the connections are much more apparent. Between roughly 1765 and 1830, the clusters of revolutionary events were so striking that it is possible to
speak of a compact Age of Revolutions.
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The imperial offshoots reached all continents, but the centers of interactive unrest were in the Americas and continental Europe. For this reason the “revolutionary Atlantic” is the most appropriate image. A
second
cluster of upheavals and revolutions may be found between 1847 and 1865: the European revolutions of 1848–49, the Taiping Revolution in China (1850–64), the so-called Mutiny or Great Rebellion in India (1857–58), and the special case of the American Civil War (1861–65). These events had a much weaker and less direct effect on one another than the comparable ones had had in the revolutionary Atlantic. They added up not so much to another compact age of revolutions as to a set of separate megacrises with rather weak “transnational” links. A
third
wave of revolution washed over Eurasia after the turn of the century: Russia in 1905, Iran in 1905, Turkey in 1908, China in 1911. The second Russian Revolution, born in February 1917 under the special conditions of the World War, also belongs in many respects to this context, as does the revolution in Mexico that began in 1910 and lasted a full decade. This time the mutual influences were more intense than in the mid-nineteenth century; the revolutionary events were expressions of a common background in the times.

2 The Revolutionary Atlantic

National Revolutions and the Atlantic Connection