The Age of Revolution

The Age of Revolution is the historical period, generally dated from roughly 1774 to 1849 and closely associated with the historian Eric Hobsbawm's use of the term, encompassing a wave of political revolutions across the Atlantic world and beyond that overturned established monarchies and colonial arrangements and spread new ideas of popular sovereignty, nationalism and constitutional government. The period includes the American Revolution beginning in 1775, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic Wars that followed it, the Haitian Revolution that established the first independent Black-led republic in 1804, the wave of Latin American independence movements against Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule in the 1810s and 1820s, and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 that shook nearly every major monarchy on the continent in a single year. Together they marked a broad transition away from absolute monarchy toward liberalism, nationalism and republicanism.