On Revolutionary Waves Since the 16th Century

In the previous chapters Leonid Grinin surveyed revolutionary processes during the Modern period, starting from the Reformation epoch up to present time. In this chapter, he develops some approaches and ideas about revolutionary waves from the 16th to the twenty-first centuries. Grinin presents a full list of revolutionary waves and pays special attention to those of the late 18th and early nineteenth centuries. Among the latter the so called Atlantic wave of the late eighteenth century is of particular interest. A special section of the Chapter is entitled “Was there an Atlantic wave of revolutions?” Grinin suggests that we cannot speak of a single “Atlantic wave,” but should instead speak about the Atlantic “chain of revolutions” at the end of the eighteenth century because the two main events, namely the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, had quite different reasons and were not connected with the same world-system event. Instead of the Atlantic wave, Grinin suggests considering the events starting from 1789 as the wave of the French Revolution, and analyzes it in detail. In the last section Grinin considers the Haitian Revolution of 1804. Both its type of revolution—connected with racial segregation and racial contradiction—and its driving forces and objectives (the struggle of slaves against slavery) were unique. This was the only successful revolution of slaves to found a modern state. At the same time, this revolution was the precursor of national-liberation struggles in Latin America and the Ibero-Latin wave of revolutions that started in 1808–1826.