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Three Decades of Global Revolution at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Search for Democracy, Social Justice and National Liberation

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Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

This volume focuses on the thirty years of revolutions roughly stretching from the first Russian revolution of 1905 to the Asturian revolution in Spain in 1934. We discuss why there is this proliferation of global revolutions over such a short time span. We outline three overlapping phases of research on revolutions, and also mark blind spots in the existing research on revolutions and elaborate common themes and threads during the three revolutionary decades. It is pointed out that,what is characteristic of the revolutions and revolutionary movements discussed in this volume is, that they were united by common aims and situational narratives grouped around the contested ideas of democracy and freedom, social justice and national liberation. All these three factors had their roots in the nineteenth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Julian Jackson, ‘Historians and the Nation in Contemporary France’, in Stefan Berger, Mark Donovan and Kevin Passmore (eds.), Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 252–264. On the foundational role of the French revolution for nineteenth-century and twentieth-century historical master narratives in France, see also: Hugo Frey and Stefan Jordan, ‘National Historians and the Discourse of the Other: France and Germany’, in Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (eds.), The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 200–230.

  2. 2.

    Arup Banerji, Writing History in the Soviet Union. Making the Past Work (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2008), pp. 181–224.

  3. 3.

    For an English translation, see Marc Bloch, ‘Toward a Comparative History of European Societies’, in Frederick C. Lane and Jelle M. Riemersma (eds.), Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History (Homewood, IL: R. D. Irwin, 1953), pp. 494–521.

  4. 4.

    Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1962); idem., Age of Capital, 1848–1975 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); idem., Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); idem., ‘Revolution’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds.), Revolution in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 5–46. See with a different approach Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europäischen Revolutionen.Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (Jena: Diederichs, 1931), Translation: Out of Revolution (New York: Four Wells, 1964).

  5. 5.

    See Walter Markov, Zwiesprache mit dem Jahrhundert. Dokumentiert von Thomas Grimm (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1989); Manfred Kossock, Vergleichende Geschichte der neuzeitlichen Revolutionen: methodologische und empirische Forschungsprobleme (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1981); idem., Vergleichende Revolutionsgeschichte: Probleme der Theorie und Methode (Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1988); Oscar Zanetti, ‘History of Comparison: Manfred Kossock and a Comparative Study of Bourgeois Revolutions’, Review (Fernand Braudel Centre) 38/1–2 (2015), pp. 83–97. See Manfred Kossock, Vergleichende Geschichte der neuzeitlichen Revolutionen: methodologische und empirische Forschungsprobleme (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1981); idem., Vergleichende Revolutionsgeschichte: Probleme der Theorie und Methode (Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1988).

  6. 6.

    Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, Original: 1791), p. 167.

  7. 7.

    See as recent international overviews and also on periodization of the research on revolution George Lawson, Anatomies of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions. A very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Georg P. Meyer, ‘Revolutionstheorien heute. Ein kritischer Überblick in historischer Absicht’, in Hans-Ulrich Wehler (ed.), 200 Jahre amerikanische Revolution und moderne Revolutionsforschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1976), pp. 122–176.

  8. 8.

    See Lyford P. Edwards, The Natural History of Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press 1927); Crane Brinton, Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Norton, 1938) on England, US, France and Russia; George Swayer Pettee, The Process of Revolution (New York: Harper 1938). See for a differing perspective Theodor Geiger, Die Masse und ihre Aktion (Stuttgart: Enke, 1926).

  9. 9.

    Julius Braunthal, History of the International 1864–1914 (London: Nelson, 1966); James Joll, The Anarchists (London: Eyre & Spottiswode, 1964); Max Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, 5 vols. (Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1981/1984). The first three volumes appeared already between 1925 and 1931.

  10. 10.

    See Hobsbawm, Revolution, p. 5.

  11. 11.

    Ted R. Gurr: Why Men Rebel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971).

  12. 12.

    See for political science Carl Joachim Friedrich (ed.), Revolution (New York: Atherton Press, 1966); Barbara Salert, Revolutions and Revolutionaries. Four Theories (New York: Elsevier, 1976) she mainly compares theories of Mancur Olson, Ted Gurr, Chalmers Johnson and Karl Marx; see as an anthropological study which also employed a comparative perspective, in this case on revolutions in Russia, Mexico, China, Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba, Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Colophon, 1969).

  13. 13.

    See Irving Louis Horowitz, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot. Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT. Press, 1967); Joy Rohde, Armed with Expertise: The Militarization of American Social Research during the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). See for Asia John W. Lewis (ed.), Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

  14. 14.

    Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966); Perez Zagorin, ‘Prolegomena to the Comparative History of Revolution in Early Modern Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 18/2 (1976), pp. 151–174. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions. A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). A very good summary and critique is Michael S. Kimmel, Revolution. A Sociological Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). See also Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A Comparative Study of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978); idem., The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

  15. 15.

    See, for example, Bruce Mazlish, ‘The French Revolution in Comparative Perspective’, Political Science Quarterly, 85/2 (1970), pp. 240–258; on Bolivia in 1952 see Merilee Grindle and Pilar Domingo (eds.), Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003).

  16. 16.

    Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens, and Ann Shola Orloff, ‘Introduction: Social Theory, Modernity and the Three Waves of Historical Sociology’, in idem. (eds.), Remaking Modernity. Politics, History, and Sociology (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 1–72, p. 12.

  17. 17.

    Skocpol, States, p. 4.

  18. 18.

    See also Kimmel, Revolution, pp. 185–188.

  19. 19.

    For the telling debate between Skocpol and Sewell, see William H. Sewell Jr., ‘Ideologies and Social Revolutions: Reflections on the French Case’, Journal of Modern History 57/1 (1985), pp. 57–85; Theda Skocpol, ‘Cultural Idioms and Political Ideologies in the Revolutionary Reconstruction of State Power: A Rejoinder to Sewell’, Journal of Modern History 57/1 (1985), pp 86–96.

  20. 20.

    See, for example, Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Revolution und Gesellschaft. Zur Entwicklung des neuzeitlichen Revolutionsbegriffs (Innsbruck: Inn-Verlag, 1980); Reinhart Koselleck, Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Bürgerkrieg, in: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 5 (Klett Cotta: Stuttgart, 1984) pp. 653–788.

  21. 21.

    George Lawson, Negotiated Revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa and Chile (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); for intriguing comparisons between the peaceful revolutions of 1989 with the transnational transformations of 1968 and 1945, see Gerd-Rainer Horn and Padraic Kenney (eds.), Transnational Moments of Change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

  22. 22.

    John Foran (ed.), The Future of Revolutions. Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization (New York: Zed Books, 2003).

  23. 23.

    David Simpson, States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

  24. 24.

    See on the idea of common or different ‘scripts’ Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein, Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). The book is strongly focused on intellectuals; more focused on cultural aspects (stories people use to rework past conflicts, struggles and injustice) is Eric Selbin, Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story (London: Zed Books, 2010).

  25. 25.

    Jim Aulich, ‘Conclusion: Reflections on Protest and Political Transformation Since 1789’, in Aidan McGarry, Itir Erhart, Hande Eslen-Ziya, Olu Jenzen and Umut Korkut (eds.), The Aesthetics of Global Protest: Visual Culture and Communication (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 269–291.

  26. 26.

    Adams, Clemens and Orloff, ‘Introduction’, p. 22. See also: Mary Ann Tetreault, Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia and the New World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Maha El Said, Lena Meari and Nicola Pratt (eds.), Rethinking Gender in Revolutions and Resistance: Lessons from the Arab World (New York: Zed Books, 2015); Wunyabari O. Maloba, African Women in Revolution (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2007) is looking at involvement of women in revolutions in Algeria, Kenia, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and South Africa; for female activities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including food riots, see Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (eds.), Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). See also the contributions on agency, gender and mobilization in John Foran (ed.), Theorizing Revolutions (London: Routledge, 1997).

  27. 27.

    Stephen A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China. A Comparative History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), see also his Russia in Revolution. An Empire in Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Bailey Stone, Rethinking Revolutionary Change in Europe. A Neostructuralist Approach (Lanham, Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); idem., The Anatomy of Revolution Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). The author underlines the importance of the state and of power struggles, political cultures and external and internal factors that influenced revolutions.

  28. 28.

    On early modern revolutions, see Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) who presented revolutions as products of ‘ecological crises’ meeting with inflexible economic, social and political institutions. Also: Yves-Marie Bercé, Revolt and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: An Essay on the History of Political Violence (Manchester University Press, 1987). Moving to modern times, Neil Davidson, How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? (New York: Haymarket Books, 2012), asked the question how revolutionary the bourgeois revolutions actually were in England, France and the US. See also Jonathan Sperber, Revolutionary Europe 1780–1850, 2nd edition (Milton Park: Routledge 2017) on the many revolutions taking place in Europe during the first half of the long nineteenth century; specifically on the mid-century revolutions, associated with 1848, see idem., The European Revolutions 1848–1851, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Dieter Dowe, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Dieter Langewiesche and Jonathan Sperber (eds.), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000); Heiner Timmermann (ed.), 1848–Revolution in Europa: Verlauf, politische Programme, Folgen und Wirkungen (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999). On the 1968 revolution, compare Gerd-Rainer Horn, The Spirit of 68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Gildea, James Mark and Anette Warring (eds.), Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). On the 1989 revolutions, see Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (London: Allen & Unwin, 1990); also Wolfgang Müller, Michael Gehler, Arnold Suppan (eds.), The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook (Vienna: ÖAW, 2015); furthermore, on 1989 in Czechoslovakia and China (Tiananmen square): Daniel Brook, Modern Revolution: Social Change and Cultural Continuity in Czechoslovakia and China (Lanham: University Press of America, 2005); on the legacies of 1989 globally see Piotr H. Kosicki and Kyrill Kunakovitch (eds.), The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019).

  29. 29.

    See for Europe: Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); on the Americas compare Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); comparing characteristics across a wide variety of different revolutions in the Atlantic world is Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World. A Comparative History, 2nd edition (New York: New York University Press, 2018); focusing on Britain, US, France, Haiti, Spanish America is Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra. Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000); R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); on ‘the West’, see David Parker (ed.), Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West, 1560–1991 (London: Routledge, 2000); on the Ottoman world, Iran, and Russia as revolutionary space, see Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); for the global south see Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out. States and Revolutions in the Third World, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001); also John W. Lewis (ed.), Peasant Rebellion and Communist Revolution in Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974); on the Arab world see Said Amir Arjomand, The Arab Revolution of 2011: A Comparative Perspective (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2015).

  30. 30.

    See, for example, Nader Sohrabi, ‘Global Waves, Local Actors: What the Young Turks Knew About Other Revolutions and Why It Mattered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 44/1 (2002), pp. 45–79. For the transnational connections between the US-American civil war and the 1848 revolutions, see: Patrick J. Kelley, ‘The European Revolutions of 1848 and the Transnational Turn in Civil War History’, Journal of the Civil War Era 4/3 (2014), pp. 431–443, and Andrew Zimmerman, ‘Guinea Sam Nightingale and Magic Marx in Civil War Missouri: Provincializing Global History and Decolonizing Theory’, History of the Present 8 (Fall 2018), pp. 140–176.

  31. 31.

    Beatrix Bouvier, Französische Revolution und deutsche Arbeiterbewegung: die Rezeption des revolutionären Frankreichs in der deutschen sozialistischen Arbeiterbewegung von den 1830er Jahren bis 1905 (Bonn: J.W.H. Dietz, 1982).

  32. 32.

    Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l’éspace franco-allemande, XVIII et XIX siècle (Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1988); also in English Michael Werner and Bénedicte Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45/1 (2006), pp. 30–50; on specific revolutions and the history of transfers see, for example, Helmut Reinalter (ed.), Die französische Revolution, Mitteleuropa und Italien (Berne: Peter Lang, 1992).

  33. 33.

    See Jack A. Goldstone and Daniel P. Ritter, ‘Revolution and Social Movements’, in Daniel Snow et al. (eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2019), pp. 682–697; Dieter Rucht, Research on Social Movements. The State of the Art in Western Europe and the USA (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1991); Stefan Berger and Holger Nehring (eds.), The History of Social Movements in Global Perspective. A Survey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Berch Berberoglu (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Social Movements, Revolution, and Social Transformation (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). See also Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture (New York: Free Press, 1978). For the wide influence the contentious politics-approach had in the comparative history of revolutions see Stephen K. Sanderson, Revolutions. A Worldwide Introduction to Social and Political Contention, 2nd edition (Milton Park: Routledge, 2010).

  34. 34.

    Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly. Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  35. 35.

    Kevin Morgan, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs Under Lenin and Stalin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Marcel van der Linden, Transnational Labour History: Explorations (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2017); Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Abingdon: Ashgate, 1990); James F. Rinehart, Revolution and the Millennium: China, Mexico and Iran (New York: Praeger, 1997).

  36. 36.

    John Foran, ‘Theories of Revolution Revisited: Toward a Fourth Generation?’, Sociological Theory 11/1 (1993), pp. 1–20; Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory’, Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001), pp. 139–187.

  37. 37.

    See Randall Collins, Violence. A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). In the 1970s Collins had contributed to solving a range of conceptual problems related to histories of revolutions. See his: Conflict Sociology. Toward an Explanatory Science (New York: Academic Press, 1975); see also Trutz von Trotha (ed.), Soziologie der Gewalt (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997). On political violence compare: Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), especially the chapters on genocide, revolution, terrorism and war. Looking at the intimate relationship between revolution and war is Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), which examines, next to the French revolution, revolutions in Russia, Iran, US, Mexico, Turkey and China. See also: Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

  38. 38.

    Alan Knight, ‘Patterns of Protest and Revolution in Latin America: 1810–1910–2010’, in Claude Auroi and Aline Helg (eds.), Latin America 1810–2010. Dreams and Legacies (London: Imperial College Press, 2012), pp. 125–155; Matthew Rothwell, Transpacific Revolutionaries. The Chinese Revolution in Latin America (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013); John Foran, Taking Power. On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); idem. (ed.), The Future of Revolutions. Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization (London: Zed Books, 2003); John Foran, David Lane and Andreja Zivkovic (eds.), Revolution in the Making of the Modern World: Social Identities, Globalization, and Modernity (Milton Park etc.: Routledge, 2008).

  39. 39.

    Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World. A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 514–571; a global view onto 1917 and the interrelationship of the First World War, the peace arrangements at the end of it and the revolutionary movements sweeping across the globe, is provided by Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt (eds.), Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and Its Aftermath from a Global Perspective (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2017). See also David Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On the nineteenth century see David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds.), The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); Michael D. Richards (ed.), Revolutions in World History (London: Routledge, 2004), amounts to a country by country comparison of Britain, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam and Iran with attempts to provide comparative perspectives in the introduction and conclusion of this volume.

  40. 40.

    Julian Go and George Lawson (eds.), Global Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Some excellent examples included here are George Lawson, ‘A Global Historical Sociology of Revolution’, pp. 76–98 and Andrew Zimmerman, ‘Conclusion: Global Historical Sociology and Transnational History—History and Theory Against Eurocentrism’, pp. 241–251.

  41. 41.

    Benjamin Abrams, ‘A Fifth Generation of Revolutionary Theory Is Yet to Come’, Journal of Historical Sociology 32/3 (2019), pp. 378–386.

  42. 42.

    Lawson, Anatomies, p. 57f.

  43. 43.

    Lawson, Anatomies, p. 5.

  44. 44.

    Hannah Arendt, Über die Revolution, 6th edition (Munich: Piper, 2016), p. 34. See also Jörn Leonhard, ‘Über Revolutionen’, Journal of Modern European History 11 (2013), pp. 170–186.

  45. 45.

    Martin Schulze Wessel, ‘The Impact of Religion on the Revolutions in France (1789) and Russia (1917)’, in Manfred Hildermaier (ed.), Historical Concepts Between Eastern and Western Europe (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), pp. 48–58; Dominic Erdozain, The Dangerous God. Christianity and the Soviet Experiment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Douglass Sullivan-González, The Black Christ of Esquipulas. Religion and Identity in Guatemala (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016); John F. Schwaller, The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

  46. 46.

    See Mark N. Katz (ed.), Revolution: International Dimensions (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2001). As a first starting point we might benefit from the availability of statistical. The analysis of data sets from 150 countries between 1919 and 2003 on the relationship between economic growth and the likelihood of a successful revolution found a strong correlation between short-term low economic growth and successful revolutions, see Carl Henrik Knutsen, ‘Income Growth and Revolutions’, Social Science Quarterly 95/4 (2014), pp. 920–937.

  47. 47.

    See as recent conceptualizations of micro history Angelika Epple, ‘Globale Mikrogeschichte. Auf dem Weg zu einer Geschichte der Relationen’, in Ewald Hiebl and Ernst Langthaler (eds.), Im Kleinen das Große suchen. Mikrogeschichte in Theorie und Praxis (Innsbruck, Wien, Bozen: Studien Verlag, 2012), pp. 37–47; and the special issue of Past and Present 242 (2019) Supplement 14.

  48. 48.

    See Kim A. Wagner, Amritsar 1919. An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); and for a broader context his: ‘Savage Warfare. Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 85 (2018), pp. 217–237.

  49. 49.

    See Sarah Knott, ‘Narrating the Age of Revolution’, The William and Mary Quarterly 73/1 (2016), pp. 3–36.

  50. 50.

    Knott, ‘Narrating’, p. 24.

  51. 51.

    See Bjørn Thomassen, ‘Notes Towards an Anthropology of Political Revolutions’, Comparative Studies in History and Society 54/3 (2012), pp. 679–706. As the author demonstrates keywords could be ‘liminality’, ‘social drama’, ‘frame’, ‘play’, ‘communitas’, ‘imitation’.

  52. 52.

    Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Formation, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks 2/4 (2002), pp. 301–334.

  53. 53.

    Tyler Stovall, White Freedom. The Racial History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Manisha Sinha and Penny von Eschen (eds.), Contested Democracy. Race, and Power in American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

  54. 54.

    Oleksa Drachewych, The Communist International, Anti-Imperialism and Racial Equality in British Dominions (London: Routledge, 2018).

  55. 55.

    Colin J. Beck, ‘The Structure of Comparison in the Study of Revolution’, Sociological Theory 36/2 (2018), pp. 134–161.

  56. 56.

    See James E. Cronin and Carmen Sirianni (eds.), Work, Community, and Power. The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Chris Wrigley (ed.), Challenges of Labour: Central and Western Europe, 1917–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993); Francis L. Carsten, Revolution in Central Europe, 1918–1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Charles L. Bertrand (ed.), Revolutionary Situations in Europe 1917–1922. Germany, Italy, Austria-Hungary (Montréal: Interuniversity Centre for European Studies, 1977); Helmut Konrad and Karin Maria Schmidtlechner (eds.), Revolutionäres Potential in Europa am Ende des ersten Weltkrieges: die Rolle von Strukturen, Konjunkturen und Massenbewegungen (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991).

  57. 57.

    For a detailed assessment of the 1905 revolution on Poland, see Wiktor Marzec, Rising Subjects: The 1905 Revolution and the Origins of Modern Polish Politics (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

  58. 58.

    See Knott, ‘Narrating’, p. 18f; Klooster, ‘Revolutions’, p. 181; Manisha Sinha and Penny von Eschen, ‘Introduction’, in idem., Contested Democracy. Race, and Power in American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 1–8, p. 3.

  59. 59.

    The importance of local processes of democratisation in post-1945 Western Europe is convincingly studied by Martin Conway, Western Europe’s Democratic Age, 1945–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

  60. 60.

    Gerald Horne, Red Seas. Ferdinand Smith and Radical Black Sailors in the United States and Jamaica (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005).

  61. 61.

    Stefan Berger and Sean Scalmer (eds.), The Transnational Activist: Transformations and Comparisons from the Anglo-World since the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017).

  62. 62.

    Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Wahrnehmungszäsur ohne Deutungszäsur. Das Jahr 1917 in Großbritannien’, in Elena Korowin and Jurij Lileev (eds.), Russische Revolution 1917. Kulturtransfer im europäischen Raum (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 63–85.

  63. 63.

    See María Inés Tato, ‘Global Moments, Local Impacts. Argentina at the Critical Juncture of 1917’, in Stefan Rinke and Michael Wildt (eds.), Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions: 1917 and its Aftermath from a Global Perspective (Frankfurt, New York: Campus, 2017), pp. 219–234; Florian Grafl, ‘Labour Conflict and Everyday Violence as “Revolution”?’, in Klaus Weinhauer, Anthony McElligott and Kirsten Heinsohn (eds.), Germany 1916–23. A Revolution in Context (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), pp. 83–101; Angel Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction. Catalan labour and the Crisis of the Central State (New York: Berghahn, 2007); Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona 1898–1937 (London: Routledge, 2005).

  64. 64.

    Michael Mann also points to the proletarian character of the first wave of revolutions during the twentieth century but lets this period end already around 1923, see his The Sources of Social Power, Volume 3: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 167–207.

  65. 65.

    Alf Lüdtke, ‘Polymorphous Synchrony: German Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life’, in Marcel van der Linden (ed.), The End of Labour History? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 39–84; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990).

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  1. Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Berger

  2. Faculty of History, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Klaus Weinhauer

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  1. Stefan Berger
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  1. Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Berger

  2. Faculty of History, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

    Klaus Weinhauer

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Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (2023). Three Decades of Global Revolution at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Search for Democracy, Social Justice and National Liberation. In: Berger, S., Weinhauer, K. (eds) Rethinking Revolutions from 1905 to 1934. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04465-6_1

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