The ‘Revolutionary Age’ in the Wider World, c. 1790–1830

Abstract

This chapter interprets the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath as a series of events in global, rather than simply European or American history. It has three sections with complementary aims. First, I trace the impact and appropriation of revolutionary ideas and forms of government into the Asian world to parallel the well-developed idea of a Euro-Atlantic revolutionary space. Second, I develop points made in The Birth of the Modern World, which characterized conjunctural developments in the Muslim, Indian and Chinese worlds as forms of ‘revolution’ in the broadest sense.¹ Finally, I ask how revolutions were brought to an end at a transnational level and how a fragile ‘age of equipoise’ was achieved through both ideological and institutional compromise.