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Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction
 VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and
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area.

Very Short Introductions available now:

ABOLITIONISM Richard S. Newman

THE ABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS Charles L. Cohen
ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes
ADDICTION Keith Humphreys
ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith
THEODOR W. ADORNO Andrew Bowie
ADVERTISING Winston Fletcher
AERIAL WARFARE Frank Ledwidge
AESTHETICS Bence Nanay
AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY Jonathan Scott Holloway
AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGION Eddie S. Glaude Jr
AFRICAN HISTORY John Parker and Richard Rathbone
AFRICAN POLITICS Ian Taylor
AFRICAN RELIGIONS Jacob K. Olupona
AGEING Nancy A. Pachana
AGNOSTICISM Robin Le Poidevin
AGRICULTURE Paul Brassley and Richard Soffe
ALEXANDER THE GREAT Hugh Bowden
ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins
AMERICAN BUSINESS HISTORY Walter A. Friedman
AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila
AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS Andrew Preston
AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer
AMERICAN IMMIGRATION David A. Gerber
AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
THE AMERICAN JUDICIAL SYSTEM Charles L. Zelden
AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY G. Edward White
AMERICAN MILITARY HISTORY Joseph T. Glatthaar
AMERICAN NAVAL HISTORY Craig L. Symonds
AMERICAN POETRY David Caplan
AMERICAN POLITICAL HISTORY Donald Critchlow
AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS L. Sandy Maisel
AMERICAN POLITICS Richard M. Valelly
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY Charles O. Jones
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Robert J. Allison
AMERICAN SLAVERY Heather Andrea Williams
THE AMERICAN SOUTH Charles Reagan Wilson
THE AMERICAN WEST Stephen Aron
AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY Susan Ware
AMPHIBIANS T. S. Kemp
ANAESTHESIA Aidan O’Donnell
ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Michael Beaney
ANARCHISM Alex Prichard
ANCIENT ASSYRIA Karen Radner
ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Christina Riggs
ANCIENT GREECE Paul Cartledge
ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN SCIENCE Liba Taub
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST Amanda H. Podany
ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas
ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom
ANGELS David Albert Jones
ANGLICANISM Mark Chapman
THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair
ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR Tristram D. Wyatt
THE ANIMAL KINGDOM Peter Holland
ANIMAL RIGHTS David DeGrazia
ANSELM Thomas Williams
THE ANTARCTIC Klaus Dodds
ANTHROPOCENE Erle C. Ellis
ANTISEMITISM Steven Beller
ANXIETY Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman
THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS Paul Foster
APPLIED MATHEMATICS Alain Goriely
THOMAS AQUINAS Fergus Kerr
ARBITRATION Thomas Schultz and Thomas Grant
ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn
ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne
THE ARCTIC Klaus Dodds and Jamie Woodward
HANNAH ARENDT Dana Villa
ARISTOCRACY William Doyle
ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes
ART HISTORY Dana Arnold
ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Margaret A. Boden
ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY Madeline Y. Hsu
ASTROBIOLOGY David C. Catling
ASTROPHYSICS James Binney
ATHEISM Julian Baggini
THE ATMOSPHERE Paul I. Palmer
AUGUSTINE Henry Chadwick
JANE AUSTEN Tom Keymer
AUSTRALIA Kenneth Morgan
AUTISM Uta Frith
AUTOBIOGRAPHY Laura Marcus
THE AVANT GARDE David Cottington
THE AZTECS Davíd Carrasco
BABYLONIA Trevor Bryce
BACTERIA Sebastian G. B. Amyes
BANKING John Goddard and John O. S. Wilson
BARTHES Jonathan Culler
THE BEATS David Sterritt
BEAUTY Roger Scruton
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN Mark Evan Bonds
BEHAVIOURAL ECONOMICS Michelle Baddeley
BESTSELLERS John Sutherland
THE BIBLE John Riches
BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY Eric H. Cline
BIG DATA Dawn E. Holmes
BIOCHEMISTRY Mark Lorch
BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION David Macdonald
BIOGEOGRAPHY Mark V. Lomolino
BIOGRAPHY Hermione Lee
BIOMETRICS Michael Fairhurst
ELIZABETH BISHOP Jonathan F. S. Post
BLACK HOLES Katherine Blundell
BLASPHEMY Yvonne Sherwood
BLOOD Chris Cooper
THE BLUES Elijah Wald
THE BODY Chris Shilling
THE BOHEMIANS David Weir
NIELS BOHR J. L. Heilbron
THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER Brian Cummings
THE BOOK OF MORMON Terryl Givens
BORDERS Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen
THE BRAIN Michael O’Shea
BRANDING Robert Jones
THE BRICS Andrew F. Cooper
BRITISH CINEMA Charles Barr
THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION Martin Loughlin
THE BRITISH EMPIRE Ashley Jackson
BRITISH POLITICS Tony Wright
BUDDHA Michael Carrithers
BUDDHISM Damien Keown
BUDDHIST ETHICS Damien Keown
BYZANTIUM Peter Sarris
CALVINISM Jon Balserak
ALBERT CAMUS Oliver Gloag
CANADA Donald Wright
CANCER Nicholas James
CAPITALISM James Fulcher
CATHOLICISM Gerald O’Collins
CAUSATION Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum
THE CELL Terence Allen and Graham Cowling
THE CELTS Barry Cunliffe
CHAOS Leonard Smith
GEOFFREY CHAUCER David Wallace
CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins
CHILD PSYCHOLOGY Usha Goswami
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Kimberley Reynolds
CHINESE LITERATURE Sabina Knight
CHOICE THEORY Michael Allingham
CHRISTIAN ART Beth Williamson
CHRISTIAN ETHICS D. Stephen Long
CHRISTIANITY Linda Woodhead
CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman
CITIZENSHIP Richard Bellamy
CITY PLANNING Carl Abbott
CIVIL ENGINEERING David Muir Wood
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Thomas C. Holt
CLASSICAL LITERATURE William Allan
CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY Helen Morales
CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson
CLAUSEWITZ Michael Howard
CLIMATE Mark Maslin
CLIMATE CHANGE Mark Maslin
CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY Susan Llewelyn and Katie Aafjes-van Doorn
COGNITIVE BEHAVIOURAL THERAPY Freda McManus
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE Richard Passingham
THE COLD WAR Robert J. McMahon
COLONIAL AMERICA Alan Taylor
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Rolena Adorno
COMBINATORICS Robin Wilson
COMEDY Matthew Bevis
COMMUNISM Leslie Holmes
COMPARATIVE LAW Sabrina Ragone and Guido Smorto
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE Ben Hutchinson
COMPETITION AND ANTITRUST LAW Ariel Ezrachi
COMPLEXITY John H. Holland
THE COMPUTER Darrel Ince
COMPUTER SCIENCE Subrata Dasgupta
CONCENTRATION CAMPS Dan Stone
CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS Ross H. McKenzie
CONFUCIANISM Daniel K. Gardner
THE CONQUISTADORS Matthew Restall and Felipe Fernández-Armesto
CONSCIENCE Paul Strohm
CONSCIOUSNESS Susan Blackmore
CONTEMPORARY ART Julian Stallabrass
CONTEMPORARY FICTION Robert Eaglestone
CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY Simon Critchley
COPERNICUS Owen Gingerich
CORAL REEFS Charles Sheppard
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY Jeremy Moon
CORRUPTION Leslie Holmes
COSMOLOGY Peter Coles
COUNTRY MUSIC Richard Carlin
CREATIVITY Vlad Glăveanu
CRIME FICTION Richard Bradford
CRIMINAL JUSTICE Julian V. Roberts
CRIMINOLOGY Tim Newburn
CRITICAL THEORY Stephen Eric Bronner
THE CRUSADES Christopher Tyerman
CRYPTOGRAPHY Fred Piper and Sean Murphy
CRYSTALLOGRAPHY A. M. Glazer
THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION Richard Curt Kraus
DADA AND SURREALISM David Hopkins
DANTE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey
DARWIN Jonathan Howard
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS Timothy H. Lim
DECADENCE David Weir
DECOLONIZATION Dane Kennedy
DEMENTIA Kathleen Taylor
DEMOCRACY Naomi Zack
DEMOGRAPHY Sarah Harper
DEPRESSION Jan Scott and Mary Jane Tacchi
DERRIDA Simon Glendinning
DESCARTES Tom Sorell
DESERTS Nick Middleton
DESIGN John Heskett
DEVELOPMENT Ian Goldin
DEVELOPMENTAL BIOLOGY Lewis Wolpert
THE DEVIL Darren Oldridge
DIASPORA Kevin Kenny
CHARLES DICKENS Jenny Hartley
DICTIONARIES Lynda Mugglestone
DINOSAURS David Norman
DIPLOMATIC HISTORY Joseph M. Siracusa
DOCUMENTARY FILM Patricia Aufderheide
DREAMING J. Allan Hobson
DRUGS Les Iversen
DRUIDS Barry Cunliffe
DYNASTY Jeroen Duindam
DYSLEXIA Margaret J. Snowling
EARLY MUSIC Thomas Forrest Kelly
THE EARTH Martin Redfern
EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE Tim Lenton
ECOLOGY Jaboury Ghazoul
ECONOMICS Partha Dasgupta
EDUCATION Gary Thomas
EGYPTIAN MYTH Geraldine Pinch
EIGHTEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford
THE ELEMENTS Philip Ball
EMOTION Dylan Evans
EMPIRE Stephen Howe
EMPLOYMENT LAW David Cabrelli
ENERGY SYSTEMS Nick Jenkins
ENGELS Terrell Carver
ENGINEERING David Blockley
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Simon Horobin
ENGLISH LITERATURE Jonathan Bate
THE ENLIGHTENMENT John Robertson
ENTREPRENEURSHIP Paul Westhead and Mike Wright
ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMICS Stephen Smith
ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS Robin Attfield
ENVIRONMENTAL LAW Elizabeth Fisher
ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS Andrew Dobson
ENZYMES Paul Engel
EPICUREANISM Catherine Wilson
EPIDEMIOLOGY Rodolfo Saracci
ETHICS Simon Blackburn
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Timothy Rice
THE ETRUSCANS Christopher Smith
EUGENICS Philippa Levine
THE EUROPEAN UNION Simon Usherwood and John Pinder
EUROPEAN UNION LAW Anthony Arnull
EVANGELICALISM John G. Stackhouse Jr.
EVIL Luke Russell
EVOLUTION Brian and Deborah Charlesworth
EXISTENTIALISM Thomas Flynn
EXPLORATION Stewart A. Weaver
EXTINCTION Paul B. Wignall
THE EYE Michael Land
FAIRY TALE Marina Warner
FAMILY LAW Jonathan Herring
MICHAEL FARADAY Frank A. J. L. James
FASCISM Kevin Passmore
FASHION Rebecca Arnold
FEDERALISM Mark J. Rozell and Clyde Wilcox
FEMINISM Margaret Walters
FILM Michael Wood
FILM MUSIC Kathryn Kalinak
FILM NOIR James Naremore
FIRE Andrew C. Scott
THE FIRST WORLD WAR Michael Howard
FLUID MECHANICS Eric Lauga
FOLK MUSIC Mark Slobin
FOOD John Krebs
FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY David Canter
FORENSIC SCIENCE Jim Fraser
FORESTS Jaboury Ghazoul
FOSSILS Keith Thomson
FOUCAULT Gary Gutting
THE FOUNDING FATHERS R. B. Bernstein
FRACTALS Kenneth Falconer
FREE SPEECH Nigel Warburton
FREE WILL Thomas Pink
FREEMASONRY Andreas Önnerfors
FRENCH CINEMA Dudley Andrew
FRENCH LITERATURE John D. Lyons
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY Stephen Gaukroger and Knox Peden
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION William Doyle
FREUD Anthony Storr
FUNDAMENTALISM Malise Ruthven
FUNGI Nicholas P. Money
THE FUTURE Jennifer M. Gidley
GALAXIES John Gribbin
GALILEO Stillman Drake
GAME THEORY Ken Binmore
GANDHI Bhikhu Parekh
GARDEN HISTORY Gordon Campbell
GENES Jonathan Slack
GENIUS Andrew Robinson
GENOMICS John Archibald
GEOGRAPHY John Matthews and David Herbert
GEOLOGY Jan Zalasiewicz
GEOMETRY Maciej Dunajski
GEOPHYSICS William Lowrie
GEOPOLITICS Klaus Dodds
GERMAN LITERATURE Nicholas Boyle
GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Andrew Bowie
THE GHETTO Bryan Cheyette
GLACIATION David J. A. Evans
GLOBAL CATASTROPHES Bill McGuire
GLOBAL ECONOMIC HISTORY Robert C. Allen
GLOBAL ISLAM Nile Green
GLOBALIZATION Manfred B. Steger
GOD John Bowker
GÖDEL’S THEOREM A. W. Moore
GOETHE Ritchie Robertson
THE GOTHIC Nick Groom
GOVERNANCE Mark Bevir
GRAVITY Timothy Clifton
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL Eric Rauchway
HABEAS CORPUS Amanda L. Tyler
HABERMAS James Gordon Finlayson
THE HABSBURG EMPIRE Martyn Rady
HAPPINESS Daniel M. Haybron
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE Cheryl A. Wall
THE HEBREW BIBLE AS LITERATURE Tod Linafelt
HEGEL Peter Singer
HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood
THE HELLENISTIC AGE Peter Thonemann
HEREDITY John Waller
HERMENEUTICS Jens Zimmermann
HERODOTUS Jennifer T. Roberts
HIEROGLYPHS Penelope Wilson
HINDUISM Kim Knott
HISTORY John H. Arnold
THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY Michael Hoskin
THE HISTORY OF CHEMISTRY William H. Brock
THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD James Marten
THE HISTORY OF CINEMA Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
THE HISTORY OF COMPUTING Doron Swade
THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS Thomas Dixon
THE HISTORY OF LIFE Michael Benton
THE HISTORY OF MATHEMATICS Jacqueline Stedall
THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE William Bynum
THE HISTORY OF PHYSICS J. L. Heilbron
THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT Richard Whatmore
THE HISTORY OF TIME Leofranc Holford‑Strevens
HIV AND AIDS Alan Whiteside
HOBBES Richard Tuck
HOLLYWOOD Peter Decherney
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE Joachim Whaley
HOME Michael Allen Fox
HOMER Barbara Graziosi
HORACE Llewelyn Morgan
HORMONES Martin Luck
HORROR Darryl Jones
HUMAN ANATOMY Leslie Klenerman
HUMAN EVOLUTION Bernard Wood
HUMAN PHYSIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Adrian Wilkinson
HUMAN RIGHTS Andrew Clapham
HUMANISM Stephen Law
HUME James A. Harris
HUMOUR Noël Carroll
IBN SĪNĀ (Avicenna) Peter Adamson
THE ICE AGE Jamie Woodward
IDENTITY Florian Coulmas
IDEOLOGY Michael Freeden
IMAGINATION Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei
THE IMMUNE SYSTEM Paul Klenerman
INDIAN CINEMA Ashish Rajadhyaksha
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY Sue Hamilton
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Robert C. Allen
INFECTIOUS DISEASE Marta L. Wayne and Benjamin M. Bolker
INFINITY Ian Stewart
INFORMATION Luciano Floridi
INNOVATION Mark Dodgson and David Gann
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Siva Vaidhyanathan
INTELLIGENCE Ian J. Deary
INTERNATIONAL LAW Vaughan Lowe
INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION Khalid Koser
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Christian Reus-Smit
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Christopher S. Browning
INSECTS Simon Leather
INVASIVE SPECIES Julie Lockwood and Dustin Welbourne
IRAN Ali M. Ansari
ISLAM Malise Ruthven
ISLAMIC HISTORY Adam Silverstein
ISLAMIC LAW Mashood A. Baderin
ISOTOPES Rob Ellam
ITALIAN LITERATURE Peter Hainsworth and David Robey
HENRY JAMES Susan L. Mizruchi
JAPANESE LITERATURE Alan Tansman
JESUS Richard Bauckham
JEWISH HISTORY David N. Myers
JEWISH LITERATURE Ilan Stavans
JOURNALISM Ian Hargreaves
JAMES JOYCE Colin MacCabe
JUDAISM Norman Solomon
JUNG Anthony Stevens
THE JURY Renée Lettow Lerner
KABBALAH Joseph Dan
KAFKA Ritchie Robertson
KANT Roger Scruton
KEYNES Robert Skidelsky
KIERKEGAARD Patrick Gardiner
KNOWLEDGE Jennifer Nagel
THE KORAN Michael Cook
KOREA Michael J. Seth
LAKES Warwick F. Vincent
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Ian H. Thompson
LANDSCAPES AND GEOMORPHOLOGY Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles
LANGUAGES Stephen R. Anderson
LATE ANTIQUITY Gillian Clark
LAW Raymond Wacks
THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS Peter Atkins
LEADERSHIP Keith Grint
LEARNING Mark Haselgrove
LEIBNIZ Maria Rosa Antognazza
C. S. LEWIS James Como
LIBERALISM Michael Freeden
LIGHT Ian Walmsley
LINCOLN Allen C. Guelzo
LINGUISTICS Peter Matthews
LITERARY THEORY Jonathan Culler
LOCKE John Dunn
LOGIC Graham Priest
LOVE Ronald de Sousa
MARTIN LUTHER Scott H. Hendrix
MACHIAVELLI Quentin Skinner
MADNESS Andrew Scull
MAGIC Owen Davies
MAGNA CARTA Nicholas Vincent
MAGNETISM Stephen Blundell
MALTHUS Donald Winch
MAMMALS T. S. Kemp
MANAGEMENT John Hendry
NELSON MANDELA Elleke Boehmer
MAO Delia Davin
MARINE BIOLOGY Philip V. Mladenov
MARKETING Kenneth Le Meunier-FitzHugh
THE MARQUIS DE SADE John Phillips
MARTYRDOM Jolyon Mitchell
MARX Peter Singer
MATERIALS Christopher Hall
MATHEMATICAL ANALYSIS Richard Earl
MATHEMATICAL FINANCE Mark H. A. Davis
MATHEMATICS Timothy Gowers
MATTER Geoff Cottrell
THE MAYA Matthew Restall and Amara Solari
THE MEANING OF LIFE Terry Eagleton
MEASUREMENT David Hand
MEDICAL ETHICS Michael Dunn and Tony Hope
MEDICAL LAW Charles Foster
MEDIEVAL BRITAIN John Gillingham and Ralph A. Griffiths
MEDIEVAL LITERATURE Elaine Treharne
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY John Marenbon
MEMORY Jonathan K. Foster
METAPHYSICS Stephen Mumford
METHODISM William J. Abraham
THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION Alan Knight
MICROBIOLOGY Nicholas P. Money
MICROBIOMES Angela E. Douglas
MICROECONOMICS Avinash Dixit
MICROSCOPY Terence Allen
THE MIDDLE AGES Miri Rubin
MILITARY JUSTICE Eugene R. Fidell
MILITARY STRATEGY Antulio J. Echevarria II
JOHN STUART MILL Gregory Claeys
MINERALS David Vaughan
MIRACLES Yujin Nagasawa
MODERN ARCHITECTURE Adam Sharr
MODERN ART David Cottington
MODERN BRAZIL Anthony W. Pereira
MODERN CHINA Rana Mitter
MODERN DRAMA Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
MODERN FRANCE Vanessa R. Schwartz
MODERN INDIA Craig Jeffrey
MODERN IRELAND Senia Pašeta
MODERN ITALY Anna Cento Bull
MODERN JAPAN Christopher Goto-Jones
MODERN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE Roberto González Echevarría
MODERN WAR Richard English
MODERNISM Christopher Butler
MOLECULAR BIOLOGY Aysha Divan and Janice A. Royds
MOLECULES Philip Ball
MONASTICISM Stephen J. Davis
THE MONGOLS Morris Rossabi
MONTAIGNE William M. Hamlin
MOONS David A. Rothery
MORMONISM Richard Lyman Bushman
MOUNTAINS Martin F. Price
MUHAMMAD Jonathan A. C. Brown
MULTICULTURALISM Ali Rattansi
MULTILINGUALISM John C. Maher
MUSIC Nicholas Cook
MUSIC AND TECHNOLOGY Mark Katz
MYTH Robert A. Segal
NANOTECHNOLOGY Philip Moriarty
NAPOLEON David A. Bell
THE NAPOLEONIC WARS Mike Rapport
NATIONALISM Steven Grosby
NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Sean Teuton
NAVIGATION Jim Bennett
NAZI GERMANY Jane Caplan
NEGOTIATION Carrie Menkel-Meadow
NEOLIBERALISM Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy
NETWORKS Guido Caldarelli and Michele Catanzaro
THE NEW TESTAMENT Luke Timothy Johnson
THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE Kyle Keefer
NEWTON Robert Iliffe
NIETZSCHE Michael Tanner
NINETEENTH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew
THE NORMAN CONQUEST George Garnett
NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green
NORTHERN IRELAND Marc Mulholland
NOTHING Frank Close
NUCLEAR PHYSICS Frank Close
NUCLEAR POWER Maxwell Irvine
NUCLEAR WEAPONS Joseph M. Siracusa
NUMBER THEORY Robin Wilson
NUMBERS Peter M. Higgins
NUTRITION David A. Bender
OBJECTIVITY Stephen Gaukroger
OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY Geoff Cottrell
OCEANS Dorrik Stow
THE OLD TESTAMENT Michael D. Coogan
THE ORCHESTRA D. Kern Holoman
ORGANIC CHEMISTRY Graham Patrick
ORGANIZATIONS Mary Jo Hatch
ORGANIZED CRIME Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou
ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY A. Edward Siecienski
OVID Llewelyn Morgan
PAGANISM Owen Davies
PAKISTAN Pippa Virdee
THE PALESTINIAN-ISRAELI CONFLICT Martin Bunton
PANDEMICS Christian W. McMillen
PARTICLE PHYSICS Frank Close
PAUL E. P. Sanders
IVAN PAVLOV Daniel P. Todes
PEACE Oliver P. Richmond
PENTECOSTALISM William K. Kay
PERCEPTION Brian Rogers
THE PERIODIC TABLE Eric R. Scerri
PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD Timothy Williamson
PHILOSOPHY Edward Craig
PHILOSOPHY IN THE ISLAMIC WORLD Peter Adamson
PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY Samir Okasha
PHILOSOPHY OF LAW Raymond Wacks
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND Barbara Gail Montero
PHILOSOPHY OF PHYSICS David Wallace
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Samir Okasha
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION Tim Bayne
PHOTOGRAPHY Steve Edwards
PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY Peter Atkins
PHYSICS Sidney Perkowitz
PILGRIMAGE Ian Reader
PLAGUE Paul Slack
PLANETARY SYSTEMS Raymond T. Pierrehumbert
PLANETS David A. Rothery
PLANTS Timothy Walker
PLATE TECTONICS Peter Molnar
PLATO Julia Annas
POETRY Bernard O’Donoghue
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY David Miller
POLITICS Kenneth Minogue
POLYGAMY Sarah M. S. Pearsall
POPULISM Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
POSTCOLONIALISM Robert J. C. Young
POSTMODERNISM Christopher Butler
POSTSTRUCTURALISM Catherine Belsey
POVERTY Philip N. Jefferson
PREHISTORY Chris Gosden
PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY Catherine Osborne
PRIVACY Raymond Wacks
PROBABILITY John Haigh
PROGRESSIVISM Walter Nugent
PROHIBITION W. J. Rorabaugh
PROJECTS Andrew Davies
PROTESTANTISM Mark A. Noll
PSEUDOSCIENCE Michael D. Gordin
PSYCHIATRY Tom Burns
PSYCHOANALYSIS Daniel Pick
PSYCHOLOGY Gillian Butler and Freda McManus
PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis
PSYCHOPATHY Essi Viding
PSYCHOTHERAPY Tom Burns and Eva Burns-Lundgren
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Stella Z. Theodoulou and Ravi K. Roy
PUBLIC HEALTH Virginia Berridge
PURITANISM Francis J. Bremer
THE QUAKERS Pink Dandelion
QUANTUM THEORY John Polkinghorne
RACISM Ali Rattansi
RADIOACTIVITY Claudio Tuniz
RASTAFARI Ennis B. Edmonds
READING Belinda Jack
THE REAGAN REVOLUTION Gil Troy
REALITY Jan Westerhoff
RECONSTRUCTION Allen C. Guelzo
THE REFORMATION Peter Marshall
REFUGEES Gil Loescher
RELATIVITY Russell Stannard
RELIGION Thomas A. Tweed
RELIGION IN AMERICA Timothy Beal
THE RENAISSANCE Jerry Brotton
RENAISSANCE ART Geraldine A. Johnson
RENEWABLE ENERGY Nick Jelley
REPTILES T. S. Kemp
REVOLUTIONS Jack A. Goldstone
RHETORIC Richard Toye
RISK Baruch Fischhoff and John Kadvany
RITUAL Barry Stephenson
RIVERS Nick Middleton
ROBOTICS Alan Winfield
ROCKS Jan Zalasiewicz
ROMAN BRITAIN Peter Salway
THE ROMAN EMPIRE Christopher Kelly
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC David M. Gwynn
ROMANTICISM Michael Ferber
ROUSSEAU Robert Wokler
RUSSELL A. C. Grayling
THE RUSSIAN ECONOMY Richard Connolly
RUSSIAN HISTORY Geoffrey Hosking
RUSSIAN LITERATURE Catriona Kelly
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION S. A. Smith
SAINTS Simon Yarrow
SAMURAI Michael Wert
SAVANNAS Peter A. Furley
SCEPTICISM Duncan Pritchard
SCHIZOPHRENIA Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone
SCHOPENHAUER Christopher Janaway
SCIENCE AND RELIGION Thomas Dixon and Adam R. Shapiro
SCIENCE FICTION David Seed
THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION Lawrence M. Principe
SCOTLAND Rab Houston
SECULARISM Andrew Copson
SEXUAL SELECTION Marlene Zuk and Leigh W. Simmons
SEXUALITY Véronique Mottier
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Stanley Wells
SHAKESPEARE’S COMEDIES Bart van Es
SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS AND POEMS Jonathan F. S. Post
SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES Stanley Wells
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW Christopher Wixson
MARY SHELLEY Charlotte Gordon
THE SHORT STORY Andrew Kahn
SIKHISM Eleanor Nesbitt
SILENT FILM Donna Kornhaber
THE SILK ROAD James A. Millward
SLANG Jonathon Green
SLEEP Steven W. Lockley and Russell G. Foster
SMELL Matthew Cobb
ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY John Monaghan and Peter Just
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Richard J. Crisp
SOCIAL WORK Sally Holland and Jonathan Scourfield
SOCIALISM Michael Newman
SOCIOLINGUISTICS John Edwards
SOCIOLOGY Steve Bruce
SOCRATES C. C. W. Taylor
SOFT MATTER Tom McLeish
SOUND Mike Goldsmith
SOUTHEAST ASIA James R. Rush
THE SOVIET UNION Stephen Lovell
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR Helen Graham
SPANISH LITERATURE Jo Labanyi
THE SPARTANS Andrew J. Bayliss
SPINOZA Roger Scruton
SPIRITUALITY Philip Sheldrake
SPORT Mike Cronin
STARS Andrew King
STATISTICS David J. Hand
STEM CELLS Jonathan Slack
STOICISM Brad Inwood
STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING David Blockley
STUART BRITAIN John Morrill
SUBURBS Carl Abbott
THE SUN Philip Judge
SUPERCONDUCTIVITY Stephen Blundell
SUPERSTITION Stuart Vyse
SYMMETRY Ian Stewart
SYNAESTHESIA Julia Simner
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY Jamie A. Davies
SYSTEMS BIOLOGY Eberhard O. Voit
TAXATION Stephen Smith
TEETH Peter S. Ungar
TERRORISM Charles Townshend
THEATRE Marvin Carlson
THEOLOGY David F. Ford
THINKING AND REASONING Jonathan St B. T. Evans
THOUGHT Tim Bayne
TIBETAN BUDDHISM Matthew T. Kapstein
TIDES David George Bowers and Emyr Martyn Roberts
TIME Jenann Ismael
TOCQUEVILLE Harvey C. Mansfield
LEO TOLSTOY Liza Knapp
TOPOLOGY Richard Earl
TRAGEDY Adrian Poole
TRANSLATION Matthew Reynolds
THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES Michael S. Neiberg
TRIGONOMETRY Glen Van Brummelen
THE TROJAN WAR Eric H. Cline
TRUST Katherine Hawley
THE TUDORS John Guy
TWENTIETH‑CENTURY BRITAIN Kenneth O. Morgan
TYPOGRAPHY Paul Luna
THE UNITED NATIONS Jussi M. Hanhimäki
UNIVERSITIES AND COLLEGES David Palfreyman and Paul Temple
THE U.S. CIVIL WAR Louis P. Masur
THE U.S. CONGRESS Donald A. Ritchie
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION David J. Bodenhamer
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT Linda Greenhouse
UTILITARIANISM Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer
UTOPIANISM Lyman Tower Sargent
VATICAN II Shaun Blanchard and Stephen Bullivant
VETERINARY SCIENCE James Yeates
THE VICTORIANS Martin Hewitt
THE VIKINGS Julian D. Richards
VIOLENCE Philip Dwyer
THE VIRGIN MARY Mary Joan Winn Leith
THE VIRTUES Craig A. Boyd and Kevin Timpe
VIRUSES Dorothy H. Crawford
VOLCANOES Michael J. Branney and Jan Zalasiewicz
VOLTAIRE Nicholas Cronk
WAR AND RELIGION Jolyon Mitchell and Joshua Rey
WAR AND TECHNOLOGY Alex Roland
WATER John Finney
WAVES Mike Goldsmith
WEATHER Storm Dunlop
THE WELFARE STATE David Garland
WITCHCRAFT Malcolm Gaskill
WITTGENSTEIN A. C. Grayling
WORK Stephen Fineman
WORLD MUSIC Philip Bohlman
WORLD MYTHOLOGY David Leeming
THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION Amrita Narlikar
WORLD WAR II Gerhard L. Weinberg
WRITING AND SCRIPT Andrew Robinson
ZIONISM Michael Stanislawski
ÉMILE ZOLA Brian Nelson

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THE GULAG Alan Barenberg
SIMONE WEIL A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone
DOSTOEVSKY Deborah Martinsen

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 Jack A. Goldstone

REVOLUTIONS
A Very Short Introduction
SECOND EDITION
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldstone, Jack A., author.
Title: Revolutions : a very short introduction / Jack A. Goldstone.
Description: Second edition. | New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | “First
Edition published in 2014” — Title page verso.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023034385 (print) | LCCN 2023034386 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197666302
(paperback) | ISBN 9780197666326 (epub)
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1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
To my wife, Gina, who makes everything possible
 Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgments

1 What is a revolution?

2 What causes revolutions?

3 Revolutionary processes, leaders, and outcomes

4 Revolutions in the ancient world

5 Revolutions of the Renaissance and Reformation

6 Constitutional revolutions: America, France, Europe (1830 and

1848), and Meiji Japan

7 Communist revolutions: Russia, China, and Cuba

8 Revolutions against dictators: Mexico, Nicaragua, and Iran

9 Color revolutions: the Philippines, Eastern Europe and the USSR,

and Ukraine

10 The Arab Revolutions of 2011: Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and

Yemen
11 Recent and future revolutions

References

Further reading

Index
List of illustrations

1 The Senate meeting in Rome

Fresco painting by Cesare Mccari in the Palazzo Madama, Rome, Italy

2 Girolamo Savonarola being hung and burned in Florence, 1498

Painting by Filippo Dolciati

3 The signing of the U.S. Constitution, 1787

Painting by Howard Chandler Christy, in U.S. House of Representatives, Washington,
DC, Architect of the Capitol

4 The storming of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789

Mary Evans Picture Library

5 White Army poster depicting Leon Trotsky as the deadly Red Menace of the
Russian Revolution, sitting on the wall of the Kremlin, 1919
Trotsky Archive Internet Photo Gallery

6 Chinese revolutionary propaganda poster, showing a bountiful harvest during

the famine of the Great Leap Forward, 1958 84
From the chineseposters.net Collections, PC-1958-024, International Institute of Social
History, Amsterdam

7 Leaders of the Cuban Revolution: Vilma Espin, Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and
Celia Sanchez, 1957 89
Photo from Juventude Rebelde 1957

8 Crowds in Wenceslas Square, Prague, creating the Velvet Revolution,

1989 113
Photo by Peter Dejong, Associated Press
9 Protesters with a poster of Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak as pharaoh
Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to fellow scholars of revolution for their comments on

parts of the manuscript:

Mark Beissinger, Steven Cook, William Doyle, John Foran, Stephen

Haber, Richard Hamilton, Mark Kishlansky, Alan Knight, Charles
Kurzman, John Markoff, John May, Ian Morris, Sharon Erickson
Nepstad, John Padgett, Silvia Pedraza, Elizabeth Perry, Eric Selbin, S.
A. Smith, Walter Scheidel, and Gordon Wood. They have saved me
from many errors; I bear responsibility for those that remain.

I also owe major debts to my editors at Oxford University Press—

Nancy Toff, Joellyn Ausanka, Chelsea Hogue, and Max Richman—for
their encouragement, support, exacting review, and superb
execution of this volume. Their insistence on quality in every respect
is a model for editors.

My wonderful wife, Gina Saleman-Goldstone, reviewed each chapter

for clarity and style; if this book is easy and enjoyable to read, the
credit goes to her.
Chapter 1
What is a revolution?

On the morning of July 14, 1789, a crowd of Parisian workers set out
to attack the royal prison of the Bastille. Joined by deserting soldiers
who brought cannons, and ignored by Royal Army troops camped
nearby, the crowds forced their way into the fortress by late
afternoon, killing the governor and parading his head on a pike. That
evening King Louis XVI reportedly asked the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld, “Is this a revolt?” To which the duc replied: “No, sire,
it is a revolution!”

The duc’s answer was shaped by his awareness that the crowds of
Paris were not simply demanding lower prices for bread, or the
dismissal of an unpopular minister, or protesting the selfish luxury of
the queen, Marie Antoinette. They were acting in support of the
National Assembly, led by the representatives of the Third Estate, or
commoners, to the Estates General. Three weeks earlier, the
assembly had defied the king and declared that they, not the Estates
of the Nobles or the Clergy, were the true leaders of France. If they
were supported by the people and the military defected to join
them, the old social and political order of France would be over.

Two great visions shape our views of revolution. One is the heroic
vision of revolution. In this view, downtrodden masses are raised up
by leaders who guide them in overthrowing unjust rulers, enabling
the people to gain their freedom and dignity. Though revolutions are
violent, this is necessary to destroy the old regime and vanquish its
supporters—the birth pangs of a new order that will provide social
justice. This ideal, rooted in Greek and Roman traditions of the
founding of republics, was promoted by defenders of the American
and French Revolutions such as Thomas Paine and Jules Michelet. It
was later given modern form as a theory of the inevitable triumph of
the poor over the rich by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong,
and their followers.

Yet there is a second, opposing vision, that revolutions are eruptions

of popular anger that produce chaos. In this view, however well-
meaning, reformers who unleash the mob find the masses
demanding blood and creating waves of violence that destroy even
the revolutionary leaders. Chasing unrealistic visions and their own
glory, revolutionary leaders lay waste to civilized society and bring
unwarranted death and destruction. This view was promoted by
English critics who feared the excesses of the French Revolution,
from Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle to Charles Dickens. It was
later taken up by critics of the Russian and Chinese revolutions who
emphasized the human costs of the transformations pursued by
Stalin and Mao.

In reality, the history of revolution reveals both faces. Actual

revolutions are enormously varied. Some are nonviolent whereas
others produce bloody civil wars; some have produced democracies
and greater liberty whereas others have produced brutal
dictatorships. Today, political leaders are less concerned with the
contending myths of revolution than with understanding why
revolutions occur and how they evolve. Revolutions erupting in
unexpected places—in Iran and Nicaragua in 1979, in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe in 1989–91, and across the Arab world in
2011—have not only come as shocks to rulers but have unsettled
the international order.
This book seeks to answer the questions of why revolutions occur
and why they surprise us, how they have developed over the course
of history, and where they have shaped national and global politics.
But first we need to have a clear idea of precisely what a revolution
is, and how revolutions differ from other kinds of disorders and
social change.

Defining “revolution”
Throughout history, people have suffered from misfortune and
oppression. Most of the time, people respond with fortitude and
resignation, or prayer and hope. Those who suffer usually see the
forces in power as too great to change and view themselves as too
isolated and weak to be agents of change. Even when people do
rebel against authorities, most such acts remain isolated and are
easily put down.

Revolutions are thus rare—much rarer than the instances of

oppression and injustice. They arise only when rulers become weak
and isolated, when elites begin to attack the government rather than
defend it, and when people believe themselves to be part of a
numerous, united, and righteous group that can act together to
create change.

Scholars of politics and history have defined revolution in different

ways. Most agree that revolutions involve a forcible change in
government, mass participation, and a change in institutions. But
some have argued that revolutions must be relatively sudden; others
that they entail violence; and still others that revolutions involve
class-based struggles of the poor against the rich and thereby
transform the social order. Yet in fact revolutions are diverse in these
respects.

In the Chinese Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong spent more than

twenty years in the countryside mobilizing the peasantry and fighting
the Nationalist regime before taking power. Most of the recent
“color” revolutions, such as the People Power Revolution in the
Philippines and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, were rapid,
unfolding in weeks; yet they remained nonviolent. And many
anticolonial revolutions—such as the American Revolution—pitted
members of all classes against the colonial power and produced little
or no redistribution of wealth or social status.

For much of the twentieth century, social scientists were reluctant to

deal with the subjective side of revolution. These “structuralists”
preferred to focus on the more easily observed features of conflict
and institutional change. Yet in recent years, students of revolution
have come to realize how critical the ideologies and narratives of
social justice are to revolutionary mobilization and revolutionary
outcomes. The pursuit of social justice is inseparable from how
people define their revolutionary identities and frame their actions.

We can therefore best define revolution in terms of both observed

mass mobilization and institutional change, and a driving ideology
carrying a vision of social justice. Revolution is the forcible overthrow
of a government through mass mobilization (whether military or
civilian or both) in the name of social justice, to create new political
institutions.

What revolutions are not

A key difficulty in defining revolutions is separating them from
similar, more common disruptive events, particularly since such
events almost always occur as part of revolutions. These component
events include peasant revolts, grain riots, strikes, social and reform
movements, coup d’états, secessions, and civil wars. All of these
have their own causes and outcomes, but only under certain
conditions do they lead to revolutions.
Peasant revolts are uprisings of rural villages. They sometimes aim
at resisting the demands of local landlords, sometimes at foiling
state agents (tax collectors or other officials). Usually they seek to
call attention to exceptional local hardships. Most often, their goal is
to get help from the government to resolve local problems, not to
change the government itself.

Grain riots are mass mobilizations to protest food shortages or

excessively high prices. They involve seizures of grain shipments or
stores, attacks on bakeries or merchants, and—in the style of Robin
Hood—efforts to distribute food to the poor, and demands to enforce
a maximum price or secure state subsidies. They usually occur in
cities, where people depend on buying grain and other necessities at
market prices, but they can also occur in rural areas at key points for
the transit or storage of grain. Grain riots arose in more than a
dozen African countries in the wake of high global food prices in
2007–8. Like peasant revolts, they usually seek government help,
rather than to change the government.

Strikes are mobilizations of workers to withhold work from

employers. They usually focus on workplace issues of pay, hours,
safety, and work rules, and are local to a particular region or
industry. However, if workers have widely shared grievances against
the government they may seek a general strike, in which workers
throughout the country refuse to work, or a political strike, in which
workers in key industries (mining, energy, transport) coordinate a
refusal to work until the government policies in question are
changed. Such strikes were crucial in bringing down the Soviet and
other communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Peasant revolts and grain riots are typical of traditional agricultural

societies. In most modern societies, by contrast, protests against
government policies take the form of social or reform movements.
Social movements are mass mobilizations on behalf of particular
groups or causes. Social movements can be disruptive and provoke
regime violence, as with the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war
movements in the United States. They employ such tactics as sit-ins,
marches, boycotts, and occupations of state buildings or public
places. Nonetheless, most social movements simply aim for policy
changes, not regime change.

Reform movements explicitly seek to change existing government

institutions. They may seek new laws to limit corruption, or voting
rights for more people, or greater autonomy for a region. Yet rather
than seeking to overthrow the existing government, they try to
attain their goals by working through lawful procedures for
institutional change, seeking to win court rulings or electoral
campaigns, pass new laws, or obtain constitutional changes. They
become revolutionary only when the government resists or delays
meaningful change and lashes out at reformers. Thus the Mexican
Revolution was unleashed when the dictator Porfirio Díaz jailed the
moderate reformer Francisco Madero and manipulated the results of
elections that reformers appeared to have won.

While peasant revolts, strikes, and social and reform movements

usually aim to remedy local or group grievances, other kinds of
events do aim to overthrow the government. These include coups,
secessions, and civil wars. But these do not usually produce
revolutions either.

The most common acts that forcibly overthrow governments are

coups d’état (literally, blows to the state). They occur when one
authoritarian leader or a small group of leaders (most often from the
military) takes over the government, without any large mass
mobilization or civil struggle. Although coups against democracies or
monarchies produce new political institutions, they hardly ever do so
in the name of broad principles of social justice. Rather, the coup
leaders usually claim their actions were necessary to restore order,
end intolerable corruption, or halt economic decay, and that they will
step down once their task is done. Recent military coups in Thailand
in 2006 and in Niger in 2010 are good examples.

On the other hand, coups can lead to revolutions if the coup leaders
or their followers present a vision for reshaping society on new
principles of justice and social order, embark on a program of mass
mobilization to build support for that vision, and then enact that
vision by creating new institutions. Atäturk’s secular nationalist
revolution in Turkey, Nasser’s Arab nationalist revolution in Egypt,
and the Portuguese Officers’ Revolution are all cases in point.

Secessions and civil wars often produce the forcible overthrow of

governments (in the case of secession, the opposition seeks the
overthrow of government authority in a particular region that wants
to become independent). These events can arise from dynastic
contests that pit claimants from the same family tree against each
other; from military officers falling out and competing for power
using their armed supporters; or from religious or ethnic groups
seeking to oust or expel their rivals. But in none of these cases is the
effort to overthrow the government driven by the dream of realizing
a new vision of social justice. Only when leaders with a revolutionary
vision seek to realize that vision via secession or overturning the
central authority would we call such events a revolution.

Revolutionary civil wars also arise after the old regime has been
overthrown. Those who enjoyed privileges under the old regime, or
even those simply resisting unwelcome changes, may mobilize
counterrevolutionary forces and go to war against the new
revolutionary government. Some of the most massive civil wars in
history, such as the Russian Whites against the Red Army in 1918–
21, and the Mexican Civil War of 1913–20, both of which killed
millions, arose when revolutionary leaders struggled against
counterrevolutions.
In addition to the aforementioned events, one often hears the terms
“rebellions, uprisings, insurrections, and guerrilla wars” used when
talking about revolutions. These are general terms that are
sometimes conflated with “revolution” but do not mean the same
thing. A rebellion is any act by a group or individual that refuses to
recognize, or seeks to overturn, the authority of the existing
government. Thus one can have an elite rebellion, as when courts
refuse to recognize a decree of the ruler; or one can have a popular
rebellion, as when crowds occupy a public square and refuse to obey
government demands that they disperse.

Any attempt at revolution is by definition a rebellion, so efforts to

overthrow a regime that fail are often called rebellions. Still, not
every rebellion that succeeds leads to revolution. If a duke with
dynastic claims to the throne takes up arms against the king, that is
a rebellion. But if the duke succeeds and becomes the new king, and
all the institutions of government remain much the same, then no
revolution has occurred. Uprisings and insurrections are types of
popular rebellions—uprisings are usually unarmed or primitively
armed popular rebellions, while insurrections involve some degree of
military training and organization, and the use of military weapons
and tactics by the rebels.

Guerrilla warfare is simply a style of warfare often used in rebellions

and revolutions. Whereas conventional warfare relies on fighters
who are massed in large-scale military units in regular formations,
and who are housed in barracks and supplied by military supply
trains, guerrilla warfare relies on smaller numbers of mobile fighters,
in irregular-sized units, living off the land or blending into and
supplied by the local population. Guerrilla warfare is particularly
useful for small forces trying to expel a larger, more powerful force
from their territory by inflicting a steady stream of losses while
avoiding pitched battles with the more powerful foe. It is therefore
often chosen by revolutionaries who are initially few in number and
facing a powerful government. The Chinese Communists, the Viet
Cong, Castro’s forces in Cuba, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas all
used guerrilla warfare. However, as the numbers of their supporters
increased and they gained access to more resources (often from
abroad), they shifted to more conventional warfare in the final
struggle for power.

Peasant revolts, grain riots, strikes, social movements, coups,

secessions, and civil wars thus all can arise in the course of
revolutions and are important constituent elements of revolutionary
struggles. Nevertheless, a revolution is something distinct from any
of these alone. What gives revolutions their distinctive role in history
and the popular imagination is that only revolutions combine all the
elements of forcible overthrow of the government, mass
mobilization, the pursuit of a vision of social justice, and the creation
of new political institutions. It is this combination that leads us to
conceive of revolutions as the process by which visionary leaders
draw on the power of the masses to seek to forcibly bring into
existence a new political order.
Chapter 2
What causes revolutions?

A common misperception about revolutions is that they are acts of

frustration—they happen when people say “We’re mad as hell and
we won’t take it anymore.” Yet scholarly research has shown that
this view is wrong.

Let us start by asking “won’t take any more of what?” One possible
answer is poverty: when people are so poor that their very survival
is threatened, they rebel. This is not entirely wrong, for economic
grievances often play a role in rebellions. Yet poverty is generally not
associated with revolution. The worst poverty usually arises in the
wake of crop failures and famines, yet the majority of famines—such
as the great Irish potato famine of the 1840s—did not lead to
revolutions.

In fact, revolutions occur more often in middle-income countries

than in the very poorest nations. When the American Revolution
occurred, the American colonists were far better off than European
peasants. Even in Europe, the French Revolution of 1789 arose in a
country whose peasants were generally better off than the peasants
of Russia, where revolution did not occur until more than a hundred
years later.
This is because poor peasants and workers cannot overthrow the
government when faced with professional military forces determined
to defend the regime. Revolutions can occur only when significant
portions of the elites, and especially the military, defect or stand
aside. Indeed, in most revolutions it is the elites who mobilize the
population to help them overthrow the regime.

Some scholars, recognizing that sheer poverty may produce popular

revolts but not revolutions, have argued that it is relative deprivation
that drives revolution—when inequality or class differences grow
unbearable, or when people’s expectations for further progress are
dashed, they rise up in protest. But extreme inequality can just as
easily lead to resignation and despair as to revolution; deep
inequality also leaves the poor without the resources to create an
effective revolutionary force. Throughout most of human history,
great inequality and severe poverty have been justified by religion
and tradition as natural and inevitable, and have been tolerated,
even accepted, as the normal order of things.

What turns poverty or inequality into a motivation for revolution? It

is the belief that these conditions are not inevitable but arise from
the faults of the regime. Only when elites and popular groups blame
the regime for unjust conditions—whether arising from the regime’s
incompetence, corruption, or favoritism for certain groups at the
expense of others—will people rise against it.

Another force often blamed for revolutions is modernization. Many

observers have argued that as preindustrial societies start to
modernize, people encounter free markets for goods and services,
inequality rises, and traditional religious and customary patterns of
authority lose their power. As traditional relationships break down,
people demand new, more responsive political regimes and turn to
force to create them.
With more study, however, it is clear that modernization is not a
single package of changes that arrived everywhere in the same way.
In some countries modernizing changes undermined regimes and
gave rise to revolutions; but in other countries modernizing changes
strengthened rulers and created more powerful authoritarian
regimes (as in Saudi Arabia today or Germany under Bismarck). In
still others, such as Canada, modernization brought a relatively
smooth transition to democracy. In a few nations revolutions
occurred just as modernization was beginning, as in Japan in 1868
and China in 1911. Yet in other nations revolutions occurred long
after modernization had been largely accomplished, as in Eastern
Europe in 1989–91. Clearly, modernization has no consistent
relationship to the onset of revolutions.

Finally, some observers attribute revolutions to the spread of new

ideologies. This view too has some truth, as ideological shifts play an
important role in revolutionary mobilization. Yet this does not explain
why people would be drawn to dangerous new political ideas. Rulers
and elites usually enforce beliefs that justify their rule, while harshly
punishing those who question their authority. So revolutionary
ideologies often languish without followers. New ideologies produce
revolutionary actions only when there has already been a shift in
elite positions, which creates space and opportunities to mobilize
people around new beliefs. New ideologies are a part of the story of
revolutions. But their appearance is not sufficient to produce
revolutionary change.

The reason that all these views of revolutionary causation are

inadequate is that they treat society as a passive structure—like a
concrete wall—that will crumble when sufficient force is applied.
Given enough poverty, inequality, modernization, or ideological
change, the social order will collapse and revolution will occur. Yet
society is not a passive structure. Rather, societies consist of millions
of active people and groups whose actions continually re-create and
reinforce the social order.
Rulers provide defense and services in return for taxes; elites
provide support for rulers in return for prestige and political and
material rewards; and popular groups engage in economic activities,
raise families, pray in churches, and receive protection in return for
their economic activity and political obedience. The whole of society
is continually being reconstituted by multiple overlapping
relationships. These relationships allow societies to reproduce
themselves over time while also being resilient, able to bounce back
and reconstitute themselves after famines, wars, epidemics, local
rebellions, religious heresies, and other crises. As long as elites
remain united and loyal to the regime, and most popular groups
remain reasonably content and focused on managing their own lives,
regimes can be stable for centuries despite considerable strains and
crises.

Revolutions as complex emergent processes

To understand what causes revolutions, it is also necessary to
understand what keeps societies stable and resilient. In a stable
society, popular groups engage in economic activities that generate
sufficient income to support themselves and their families, and to
pay the rents and taxes that support elites and the government.
Elites—both those working for the government and those leading
other organizations—act as the critical intermediaries between the
state and the populace, organizing political, economic, religious, and
educational activities, reinforcing existing beliefs and behavior, and
recruiting and training new elite members. The rulers provide
rewards, recognition, and support to the elites, who in turn support
the rulers’ authority. Rulers also aim to protect the populace from
banditry, invasions, famines, and other threats so that people can
pay their rents and taxes. Under these conditions, a society is stable
and resilient. It is resistant to the spread of rebellion and
revolutionary ideologies because loyal military, bureaucratic, and
religious elites will suppress opposition, and because most social
groups are invested in the status quo and would not take major risks
to change it.

Such a society can be described as being in “stable equilibrium.” This

concept comes from physical science. Imagine a ball sitting at the
bottom of a large depression; if a small force moves the ball in any
direction, it simply falls back into the depression, returning to its
former state. Thus, a stable equilibrium is one in which the response
to a moderate disturbance is a return to the original condition.
Similarly, in a society in stable equilibrium, the response to a peasant
revolt or strike, a war or economic crisis, is for rulers and elites and
even most popular groups to act to restore the existing social order.

Yet consider what happens if the ball is not sitting in a depression,

but resting on top of a hill. In the absence of any force the ball
remains in place, but a small force pushing the ball now leads it to
roll off the hill and head in a new direction. This is an unstable
equilibrium—a small disturbance leads to an ever larger departure
from the prior condition. This is precisely what happens to a society
in a revolution.

When we examine societies in the years leading up to a revolution,

we find that social relationships have changed. The rulers have
become weakened, erratic, or predatory so that many of the elites
no longer feel rewarded or supported, and are not inclined to
support the regime. Elites are no longer unified but instead have
become divided into mutually suspicious and distrusting factions.
Popular groups find that their efforts are not providing them with
expected rewards or outcomes. There may be shortages of land or
work, excessive rents or falling real wages, and growing banditry, so
that ordinary people are unsettled and distressed. Many elites and
popular groups view the rulers and other elites as unjust; they are
drawn to heterodox beliefs or ideologies that make sense of their
grievances and offer solutions through social change. Rulers may
attempt reforms, aiming to win elite or popular support and to gain
additional resources. But these are usually too little and too late, and
merely create more uncertainty and fresh opposition.

Under such conditions, a moderate or even small disturbance—a

war, an economic crisis, a local rebellion, or an act of exceptional
defiance or repression—can trigger spreading popular uprisings and
heightened confrontations among elite groups. If a significant
portion of the elites and diverse popular groups form a coalition
against the rulers and demand major changes, a revolution has
begun. If the military then suffers defections, and is reluctant or
unable to overcome the spreading resistance, the revolution will
succeed. This is how revolutions arise—over time, a society shifts
from a condition of stable equilibrium to unstable equilibrium. Then
even a small disorder can set off an accelerating movement toward
greater disorder and the overturning of the existing regime.

Revolutions do not arise simply from mounting discontent over

poverty, inequality, or other changes. Rather, revolution is a complex
process that emerges from the social order becoming frayed in many
areas at once.

Unstable equilibrium and the paradox of revolution

Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine whether a country
is in unstable equilibrium, as despite underlying changes it may
appear outwardly stable for a long time. Strikes, demonstrations, or
revolts may be dismissed as insignificant as long as they are small
and the military or police are willing and able to repress them. The
degree to which other groups sympathize with protests, or that there
is disaffection in the military and police, may not be visible until after
it is too late. Elites may hide their growing discord and opposition
until they seize an opportunity to act against the regime. Rulers may
embark on reforms believing they will succeed, or undertake
repressive acts believing they will end all opposition; it may not be
Another random document with
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eighteen months—he had received no remuneration; neither had he
been paid for the articles he had purchased for the men; at the same
time, the salary due to him, of ten pounds a year as chirurgeon of the
castle, was now more than two years in arrear. It was the greater
hardship, as those who had furnished the drugs and other articles
were pressing him for the debt, ‘for which he is like to be pursued.’
Moreover, he protested, as something necessary to support a claim of
debt against the state, that ‘he has been always for advancing of his
majesty’s interest, and well affected to their majesties’ government.’
The Council, in this case too, could only recommend the accounts
to the lords of the treasury.[57]
Sinclair of Mey, and a friend of his named 1691. Mar. 8.
James Sinclair, writer in Edinburgh, were
lodging in the house of John Brown, vintner, in the Kirkgate of Leith,
when, at a late hour, the Master of Tarbat and Ensign Andrew Mowat
came to join the party. The Master, who was eldest son of the
Viscount Tarbat, a statesman of no mean note, was nearly related to
Sinclair of Mey. There was no harm meant by any one that night in
the hostelry of John Brown; but before midnight, the floor was
reddened with slaughter.
The Master and his friend Mowat, who are described on the
occasion as excited by liquor, but not beyond self-control, were
sitting in the hall drinking a little ale, while beds were getting ready
for them. A girl named Jean Thomson, who had brought the ale, was
asked by the Master to sit down beside him, but escaped to her own
room, and bolted herself in. He, running in pursuit of her,
blunderingly went into a room occupied by a Frenchman named
George Poiret, who was quietly sleeping there. An altercation took
place between Poiret and the Master, and Mowat, hearing the noise,
came to see what was the matter. The Frenchman had drawn his
sword, which the two gentlemen wrenched out of his hand. A servant
of the house, named Christian Erskine, had now also arrived at the
scene of strife, besides a gentleman who was not afterwards
identified. At the woman’s urgent request, Mowat took away the
Master and the other gentleman, the latter carrying the Frenchman’s
sword. There might have now been an end to this little brawl, if the
Master had not deemed it his duty to go back to the Frenchman’s
room to beg his pardon. The Frenchman, finding a new disturbance
at his door, which he had bolted, seems to have lost patience. He
knocked on the ceiling of his room with the fire-tongs, to awaken two
brothers, Elias Poiret, styled Le Sieur de la Roche, and Isaac Poiret,
who were sleeping there, and to bring them to his assistance.
These two gentlemen presently came down armed with swords and
pistols, and spoke to their defenceless and excited brother at his
door. Presently there was a hostile collision 1691.
between them and the Master and Mowat in
the hall. Jean Thomson roused her master to come and interfere for
the preservation of the peace; but he came too late. The Master and
Mowat were not seen making any assault; but a shot was heard, and,
in a few minutes, it was found that the Sieur de la Roche lay dead
with a swordwound through his body, while Isaac had one of his
fingers nearly cut off. A servant now brought the guard, by whom
Mowat was soon after discovered hiding under an outer stair, with a
bent sword in his hand, bloody from point to hilt, his hand wounded,
and the sleeves of his coat also stained with blood. On being brought
where the dead man lay, he viewed the body without apparent
emotion, merely remarking he wondered who had done it.
The Master, Mowat, and James Sinclair, writer, were tried for the
murder of Elias Poiret; but the jury found none of the imputed
crimes proven. The whole affair can, indeed, only be regarded as an
unfortunate scuffle arising from intemperance, and in which sudden
anger caused weapons to be used where a few gentle and reasonable
words might have quickly re-established peace and good-fellowship.
[59]

The three Frenchmen concerned in this affair were Protestant

refugees, serving in the king’s Scottish guards. The Master of Tarbat
in due time succeeded his father as Earl of Cromarty, and survived
the slaughter of Poiret forty years. He was the father of the third and
last Earl of Cromarty, so nearly brought to Tower-hill in 1746, for his
concern in the rebellion of the preceding year, and who on that
account lost the family titles and estates.

Down to this time, it was still customary Apr.

for gentlemen to go armed with walking-
swords. On the borders of the Highlands, dirks and pistols seem to
have not unfrequently been added. Accordingly, when a quarrel
happened, bloodshed was very likely to take place. At this time we
have the particulars of such a quarrel, serving to mark strongly the
improvements effected by modern civilisation.
Some time in August 1690, a young man named William
Edmondstone, described as apprentice to Charles Row, writer to the
Signet, having occasion to travel to Alloa, called on his master’s
brother, William Row of Inverallan in passing, and had an interview
with him at a public-house in the hamlet of 1691.
Bridge of Allan. According to a statement
from him, not proved, but which it is almost necessary to believe in
order to account for subsequent events, Inverallan treated him
kindly to his face, but broke out upon him afterwards to a friend,
using the words rascal and knave, and other offensive expressions.
The same unproved statement goes on to relate how Edmondstone
and two friends of his, named Stewart and Mitchell, went afterwards
to inquire into Inverallan’s reasons for such conduct, and were
violently attacked by him with a sword, and two of them wounded.
The proved counter-statement of Inverallan is to the effect that
Edmondstone, Stewart, and Mitchell tried, on the 21st of April 1691,
to waylay him, with murderous intent, as he was passing between
Dumblane and his lands near Stirling. Having by chance evaded
them, he was in a public-house at the Bridge of Allan, when his three
enemies unexpectedly came in, armed as they were with swords,
dirks, and pistols, and began to use despiteful expressions towards
him. ‘He being all alone, and having no arms but his ordinary
walking-sword, did rise up in a peaceable manner, of design to have
retired and gone home to his own house.’ As he was going out at the
door, William Edmondstone insolently called to him to come and
fight him, a challenge which he disregarded. They then followed him
out, and commenced an assault upon him with their swords,
Mitchell, moreover, snapping a pistol at him, and afterwards beating
him over the head with the but-end. He was barely able to protect his
life with his sword, till some women came, and drew away the
assailants.
A few days after, the same persons came with seven or eight other
‘godless and graceless persons’ to the lands of Inverallan,
proclaiming their design to burn and destroy the tenants’ houses and
take the laird’s life, and to all appearance would have effected their
purpose, but for the protection of a military party from Stirling.
For these violences, Edmondstone and Mitchell were fined in five
hundred merks, and obliged to give large caution for their keeping
the peace.[60]

Upon petition, Sir James Don of Newton, June 25.

knight-baronet, with his lady and her niece,
and a groom and footman, were permitted 1691.
‘to travel with their horses and arms from
Scotland to Scairsburgh Wells in England, and to return again,
without trouble or molestation, they always behaving themselves as
becometh.’[61]
This is but a single example of the difficulties attending personal
movements in Scotland for some time after the Revolution. Owing to
the fears for conspiracy, the government allowed no persons of
eminence to travel to any considerable distance without formal
permission.

An act, passed this day in the Convention July 8.

of Royal Burghs for a commission to visit
the burghs as to their trade, exempted Kirkwall, Wick, Inverary, and
Rothesay, on account of the difficulty of access to these places!
The records of this ancient court present many curious details. A
tax-roll of July 1692, adjusting the proportions of the burghs in
making up each £100 Scots of their annual expenditure on public
objects, reveals to us the comparative populousness and wealth of
the principal Scottish towns at that time. For Edinburgh, it is nearly
a third of the whole, £32, 6s. 8d.; for Glasgow, less than a half of
Edinburgh, £15; Perth, £3; Dundee, £4, 13s. 4d.; Aberdeen, £6;
Stirling, £1, 8s.; Linlithgow, £1, 6s.; Kirkcaldy, £2, 8s.; Montrose, £2;
Dumfries, £1, 18s. 4d.; Inverness, £1, 10s.; Ayr, £1, 1s. 4d.;
Haddington, £1, 12s.
All the rest pay something less than one pound. In 1694, Inverary
is found petitioning for ‘ease’ from the four shillings Scots imposed
upon them in the tax-roll, as ‘they are not in a condition by their
poverty and want of trade to pay any pairt thereof.’ The annual
outlay of the Convention was at this time about £6000 Scots. Hence
the total impost on Inverary would be £240, or twenty pounds
sterling. For the ‘ease’ of this primitive little Highland burgh, its
proportion was reduced to a fourth.
The burghs used to have very curious arrangements amongst
themselves: thus, the statute Ell was kept in Edinburgh; Linlithgow
had charge of the standard Firlot; Lanark of the Stoneweight; while
the regulation Pint-stoup was confided to Stirling. A special measure
for coal, for service in the customs, was the Chalder of Culross. The
burgh of Peebles had, from old time, the privilege of seizing ‘all light
weights, short ellwands, and other 1691.
insufficient goods, in all the fairs and
mercats within the shire of Teviotdale.’ They complained, in 1696, of
the Earl of Traquair having interfered with their rights, and a
committee was appointed to deal with his lordship on the subject.[62]
To these notices it may be added that the northern burgh of
Dingwall, which is now a handsome thriving town, was reduced to so
great poverty in 1704 as not to be able to send a commissioner to the
Convention. ‘There was two shillings Scots of the ten pounds then
divided amongst the burghs, added to the shilling we used formerly
to be in the taxt roll [that is, in addition to the one shilling Scots we
formerly used to pay on every hundred pounds Scots raised for
general purposes, we had to pay two shillings Scots of the new
taxation of ten pounds then assessed upon the burghs], the stenting
whereof was so heavy upon the inhabitants, that a great many of
them have deserted the town, which is almost turned desolate, as is
weel known to all our neighbours; and there is hardly anything to be
seen but the ruins of old houses, and the few inhabitants that are left,
having now no manner of trade, live only by labouring the
neighbouring lands, and our inhabitants are still daily deserting us.’
Such was the account the town gave of itself in a petition to the
Convention of Burghs in 1724.[63]
Though Dingwall is only twenty-one and a half miles to the
northward of Inverness, so little travelling was there in those days,
that scarcely anything was known by the one place regarding the
other. It is at this day a subject of jocose allusion at Inverness, that
they at one time sent a deputation to see Dingwall, and inquire about
it, as a person in comfortable circumstances might send to ask after a
poor person in a neighbouring alley. Such a proceeding actually took
place in 1733, and the report brought back was to the effect, that
Dingwall had no trade, though ‘there were one or two inclined to
carry on trade if they had a harbour;’ that the place had no prison;
and for want of a bridge across an adjacent lake, the people were
kept from both kirk and market.[64]

Licence was granted by the Privy Council July 23.

to Dr Andrew Brown to print, and have sole
right of printing, a treatise he had written, entitled A Vindicatorie
Schedule about the New Cure of Fevers.[65]
 This Dr Andrew Brown, commonly called 1691.
Dolphington, from his estate in
Lanarkshire, was an Edinburgh physician, eminent in practice, and
additionally notable for the effort he made in the above-mentioned
work to introduce Sydenham’s treatment of fevers—that is, to use
antimonial emetics in the first stage of the disorder. ‘This book and
its author’s energetic advocacy of its principles by his other writings
and by his practice, gave rise to a fierce controversy, and in the
library of the Edinburgh College of Physicians there is a stout shabby
little volume of pamphlets on both sides—“Replies” and “Short
Answers,” and “Refutations,” and “Surveys,” and “Looking-glasses,”
“Defences,” “Letters,” “Epilogues,” &c., lively and furious once, but
now resting as quietly together as their authors are in the Old
Greyfriars’ Churchyard, having long ceased from troubling. There is
much curious, rude, hard-headed, bad-Englished stuff in them, with
their wretched paper and print, and general ugliness; much also to
make us thankful that we are in our own now, not their then. Such
tearing away, with strenuous logic and good learning, at mere clouds
and shadows, with occasional lucid intervals of sense, observation,
and wit!’[66]
Dolphington states in his book that he visited Dr Sydenham in
London, to study his system under him, in 1687, and presently after
returning to Edinburgh, introduced the practice concerning fevers,
with such success, that of many cases none but one had remained
uncured.
Some idea of an amateur unlicensed medical practice at this time
may be obtained from a small book which had a great circulation in
Scotland in the early part of the eighteenth century. It used to be
commonly called Tippermallochs Receipts, being the production of
‘the Famous John Moncrieff of Tippermalloch’ in Strathearn, ‘a
worthy and ingenious gentleman,’ as the preface describes him,
whose ‘extraordinary skill in physic and successful and beneficial
practice therein’ were so well known, ‘that few readers, in this
country at least, can be supposed ignorant thereof.’[67]
When a modern man glances over the pages of this dusky ill-
printed little volume, he is at a loss to 1691.
believe that it ever could have been the
medical vade-mecum of respectable families, as we are assured it
was. It has a classification of diseases under the parts of the human
system, the head, the breast, the stomach, &c., presenting under each
a mere list of cures, with scarcely ever a remark on special
conditions, or even a tolerable indication of the quantity of any
medicine to be used. The therapeutics of Tippermalloch include
simples which are now never heard of in medicine, and may be
divided into things capable of affecting the human system, and
things of purely imaginary efficacy, a large portion of both kinds
being articles of such a disgusting character as could not but have
doubled the pain and hardship of all ailments in which they were
exhibited. For cold distemper of the brain, for instance, we have
snails, bruised in their shells, to be applied to the forehead; and for
pestilential fever, a cataplasm of the same stuff to be laid on the soles
of the feet. Paralysis calls for the parts being anointed with
‘convenient ointments’ of (among other things) earthworms. For
decay of the hair, mortals are enjoined to ‘make a lee of the burnt
ashes of dove’s dung, and wash the head;’ but ‘ashes of little frogs’
will do as well. Yellow hair, formerly a desired peculiarity, was to be
secured by a wash composed of the ashes of the ivy-tree, and a fair
complexion by ‘the distilled water of snails.’ To make the whole face
well coloured, you are coolly recommended to apply to it ‘the liver of
a sheep fresh and hot.’ ‘Burn the whole skin of a hare with the ears
and nails: the powder thereof, being given hot, cureth the lethargy
perfectly.’ ‘Powder of a man’s bones burnt, chiefly of the skull that is
found in the earth, cureth the epilepsy: the bones of a man cure a
man; the bones of a woman cure a woman.’ The excreta of various
animals figure largely in Tippermalloch’s pharmacopœia, even to a
bath of a certain kind for iliac passion: ‘this,’ says he, ‘marvellously
expelleth wind.’ It is impossible, however, to give any adequate idea
of the horrible things adverted to by the sage Moncrieff, either in
respect of diseases or their cures. All I will say further on this matter
is, that if there be any one who thinks modern delicacy a bad
exchange for the plain-spokenness of our forefathers, let him glance
at the pages of John Moncrieff of Tippermalloch, and a change of
opinion is certain.
In the department of purely illusive recipes, we have for
wakefulness or coma, ‘living creatures applied to the head to dissolve
the humour;’ for mania, amulets to be worn about the neck; and a
girdle of wolf’s skin certified as a complete preventive of epilepsy. We
are told that ‘ants’ eggs mixed with the juice 1691.
of an onion, dropped into the ear, do cure
the oldest deafness,’ and that ‘the blood of a wild goat given to ten
drops of carduus-water doth powerfully discuss the pleurisy.’ It is
indicated under measles, that ‘many keep an ewe or wedder in their
chamber or on the bed, because these creatures are easily infected,
and draw the venom to themselves, by which means some ease may
happen to the sick person.’ In like manner, for colic a live duck, frog,
or sucking-dog applied to the part, ‘draweth all the evil to itself, and
dieth.’ The twenty-first article recommended for bleeding at the nose
is hare’s hair and vinegar stuffed in; ‘I myself know this to be the best
of anything known.’ He is equally sure that the flowing blood of a
wound may be repelled by the blood of a cow put into the wound, or
by carrying a jasper in the hand; while for a depraved appetite
nothing is required but the stone ætites bound to the arm. Sed jam
satis.
In Analecta Scotica is to be found a dream about battles and
ambassadors by Sir J. Moncrieff of Tippermalloch, who at his death
in 1714, when eighty-six years of age, believed it was just about to be
fulfilled. The writer, who signs himself William Moncrieff, and dates
from Perth, says of Tippermalloch: ‘The gentleman was, by all who
knew him, esteemed to be eminently pious. He spent much of his
time in reading the Scripture—his delight was in the law of the Lord.
The character of the blessed man did belong to him, for in that he did
meditate day and night, and his conversation was suitable thereto—
his leaf did not wither—he was fat and flourishing in his old age.’[68]

Dame Mary Norvill, widow of Sir David Aug. 11.

Falconer, president of the Court of Session,
and now wife of John Home of Ninewells, was obliged to petition the
Privy Council for maintenance to her children by her first husband,
their uncle, the Laird of Glenfarquhar, having failed to make any
right arrangement in their behalf. From what the lords ordained, we
get an idea of the sums then considered as proper allowances for the
support and education of a set of children of good fortune. David, the
eldest son, ten years of age, heir to his father’s estate of 12,565 merks
(about £698 sterling) per annum, over and above the widow’s
jointure, was to be allowed ‘for bed and board, clothing, and other
necessaries, and for educating him at schools and colleges as
becomes his quality, with a pedagogue and 1691.
a boy to attend him, the sum of a thousand
merks yearly (£55, 11s. 1⅓d. sterling).’ To Mistress Margaret, twelve
and a half years old, whose portion is twelve thousand merks, they
assigned an aliment for ‘bed and board, clothing, and other
necessaries, and for her education at schools and otherwise as
becomes her quality,’ five hundred merks per annum (£27, 15s. 6½d.
sterling). Mistress Mary, the second daughter, eleven years of age,
with a portion of ten thousand merks, was allowed for ‘aliment and
education’ four hundred and fifty merks. For Alexander, the second
son, nine years of age, with a provision of fifteen thousand merks,
there was allowed, annually, six hundred merks. Mistress Katherine,
the third daughter, eight years of age, and Mistress Elizabeth, seven
years of age, with portions of eight thousand merks each, were
ordained each an annual allowance of three hundred and sixty
merks. George, the third son, six years old, with a provision of ten
thousand merks, was to have four hundred merks per annum. These
payments to be made to John Home and his lady, while the children
should dwell with them.[69]
‘Mistress Katherine’ became the wife of Mr Home’s son Joseph,
and in 1711 gave birth to the celebrated philosopher, David Hume.
Her brother succeeded a collateral relative as Lord Falconer of
Halkerton, and was the lineal ancestor of the present Earl of Kintore.
It is rather remarkable that the great philosopher’s connection with
nobility has been in a manner overlooked by his biographers.
That the sums paid for the young Falconers, mean as they now
appear, were in accordance with the ideas of the age, appears from
other examples. Of these, two may be adduced:
The Laird of Langton, ‘who had gotten himself served tutor-of-law’
to two young persons named Cockburn, fell about this time into ‘ill
circumstances.’ There then survived but one of his wards—a girl
named Ann Cockburn—and it appeared proper to her uncle, Lord
Crossrig, that she should not be allowed to stay with a broken man.
He accordingly, though with some difficulty, and at some expense,
got the tutory transferred to himself. ‘When Ann Cockburn,’ he says,
‘came to my house, I did within a short time put her to Mrs Shiens,
mistress of manners, where she was, as I remember, about two years,
at £5 sterling in the quarter, besides presents. Thereafter she stayed
with me some years, and then she was 1691.
boarded with the Lady Harvieston, then
after with Wallyford, where she still is, at £3 sterling per quarter.’[70]
In 1700, the Laird of Kilravock, in Nairnshire, paid an account to
Elizabeth Straiton, Edinburgh, for a quarter’s education to his
daughter Margaret Rose; including, for board, £60; dancing, £14,
10s.; ‘singing and playing and virginalls,’ £11, 12s.; writing, £6; ‘satin
seame,’ £6; a set of wax-fruits, £6; and a ‘looking-glass that she
broke,’ £4, 16s.; all Scots money.[71]
It thus appears that both Mrs Shiens and Mrs Straiton charged
only £5 sterling per quarter for a young lady’s board.
The subject is further illustrated by the provision made by the
Privy Council, in March 1695, for the widowed Viscountess of
Arbuthnot (Anne, daughter of the Earl of Sutherland), who had been
left with seven children all under age, and whose husband’s
testament had been ‘reduced.’ In her petition, the viscountess
represented that the estate was twenty-four thousand merks per
annum (£1333 sterling). ‘My lord, being now eight years of age, has a
governor and a servant; her two eldest daughters, the one being
eleven, and the other ten years of age, and capable of all manner of
schooling, they must have at least one servant; as for the youngest
son and three youngest daughters, they are yet within the years of
seven, so each of them must have a woman to wait upon them.’ Lady
Arbuthnot was provided with a jointure of twenty-five chalders of
victual; and as her jointure-house was ruinous, she desired leave to
occupy the family mansion of Arbuthnot House, which her son was
not himself of an age to possess.
The Lords, having inquired into and considered the relative
circumstances, ordained that two thousand pounds Scots (£166, 13s.
4d. sterling) should be paid to Lady Arbuthnot out of the estate for
the maintenance of her children, including the young lord.
The lady soon after dying, the earl her father came in her place as
keeper of the children at the same allowance.[72]

The Quakers residing at Glasgow gave in Dec.

to the Privy Council a representation of the
treatment they received at the hands of their neighbours. It was set
forth, that the severe dealings with the 1691.
consciences of men under the late
government had brought about a revolution, and some very tragical
doings. Now, when at last the people had wrestled out from beneath
their grievances, ‘it was matter of surprise that those who had
complained most thereupon should now be found acting the parts of
their own persecutors against the petitioners [the Quakers].’ It were
too tedious to detail ‘what they have suffered since the change of the
government, through all parts of the nation, by beating, stoning, and
other abuses,’ In Glasgow, however, ‘their usage had been liker
French dragoons’ usage, and furious rabbling, than anything that
dare own the title of Christianity.’ Even there they would have
endured in silence ‘the beating, stoning, dragging, and the like which
they received from the rabble,’ were it not that magistrates connived
at and homologated these persecutions, and their continued silence
might seem to justify such doings. They then proceeded to narrate
that, on the 12th of November, ‘being met together in their hired
house for no other end under heaven than to wait upon and worship
their God,’ a company of Presbyterian church elders, ‘attended with
the rude rabble of the town, haled them to James Sloss, bailie, who,
for no other cause than their said meeting, dragged them to prison,
where some of them were kept the space of eight days.’ During that
time, undoubted bail was offered for them, but refused, ‘unless they
should give it under their hand [that] they should never meet again
there.’ At the same time, their meeting-house had been plundered,
and even yet the restoration of their seats was refused. ‘This using of
men that are free lieges would, in the case of others, be thought a
very great riot,’ &c.
The feeling of the supreme administrative body in Scotland on this
set of occurrences, is chiefly marked by what they did not do. They
recommended to the Glasgow magistrates that, if any forms had
been taken away from the Quakers, they should be given back![73]
There were no bounds to the horror with which sincere
Presbyterians regarded Quakerism in those days. Even in their
limited capacity as disowners of all church-politics, they were
thought to be most unchristian. Patrick Walker gravely relates an
anecdote of the seer-preacher, Peden, which powerfully proves this
feeling. This person, being in Ireland, was indebted one night to a
Quaker for lodging. Accompanying his host to the meeting, Peden
observed a raven come down from the 1691.
ceiling, and perch itself, to appearance, on a
particular person’s head, who presently began to speak with great
vehemence. From one man’s head, the appearance passed to
another’s, and thence to a third. Peden told the man: ‘I always
thought there was devilry amongst you, but I never thought he
appeared visibly to you; but now I see it.’ The incident led to the
conversion of the Quaker unto orthodox Christianity.[74]
On the 5th of April 1694, there was a petition to the Privy Council
from a man named James Macrae, professing to be a Quaker, setting
forth that he had been pressed as a soldier, but could not fight, as it
was contrary to his principles and conscience; wherefore, if carried to
the wars, he could only be miserable in himself, while useless to
others. He was ordered to be liberated, provided he should leave a
substitute in his place.[75]
It would have been interesting to see a contemporary Glasgow
opinion on this case.

Irregularities of the affections were not 1692.

now punished with the furious severity
which, in the reign of Charles I., ordained beheading to a tailor in
Currie for wedding his first wife’s half-brother’s daughter.[76] But
they were still visited with penalties much beyond what would now
be thought fitting. For example, a woman of evil repute, named
Margaret Paterson, having drawn aside from virtue two very young
men, James and David Kennedy, sons of a late minister of the Trinity
College Church, was adjudged to stand an hour in the jougs at the
Tron, and then to be scourged from the Castle Hill to the Netherbow,
after which a life of exile in the plantations was her portion. The two
young men, having been bailed by their uncle, under assurance for
five thousand merks, the entire amount of their patrimony, broke
their bail rather than stand trial with their associate in guilt. There
was afterwards a petition from the uncle setting forth the hardship of
the case, and this was replied to with a recommendation from the
lords of Justiciary to the lords of the treasury for a modification of
the penalty, ‘if their lordships shall think fit.’ In the case of Alison
Beaton, where the co-relative offender was a man who had married
her mother’s sister, the poor woman was condemned to be scourged
in like manner with Paterson, and then 1692.
transported to the plantations. It was a
superstitious feeling which dictated such penalties for this class of
offences. The true aim of jurisprudence, to repress disorders which
directly affect the interests of others, and these alone, was yet far
from being understood.
In January 1694, there came before the notice of the Court of
Justiciary in Edinburgh, a case of curiously complicated wickedness.
Daniel Nicolson, writer, and a widow named Mrs Pringle, had long
carried on an infamous connection, with little effort at concealment.
Out of a bad spirit towards the unoffending Jean Lands, his wife,
Nicolson and Pringle, or one or other of them, caused to be forged a
receipt as from her to Mr John Elliot, doctor of medicine, for some
poison, designing to raise a charge against her and a sister of hers, of
an attempt upon her husband’s life. The alleged facts were proved to
the satisfaction of a jury, and the court, deeming the adultery
aggravated by the forgery, adjudged the guilty pair to suffer in the
Grassmarket—Nicolson by hanging, and Pringle by ‘having her head
severed from her body.’
There were, however, curious discriminations in the judgments of
the Justiciary Court. A Captain Douglas, of Sir William Douglas’s
regiment, assisted by another officer and a corporal of the corps, was
found guilty of a shocking assault upon a serving-maid in Glasgow, in
1697. A meaner man, or an equally important man opposed to the
new government, would have, beyond a doubt, suffered the last
penalty for this offence; Captain Douglas, being a gentleman, and
one engaged in the king’s service, escaped with a fine of three
hundred merks.[77]

King William felt impatient at the Feb. 13.

unsubmissiveness of the Jacobite clans,
chiefly Macdonalds of Glengarry, Keppoch, and Glencoe, the Grants
of Glenmoriston, and the Camerons of Locheil, because it caused
troops to be kept in Scotland, which he much wanted for his army in
Flanders. His Scottish ministers, and particularly Sir John
Dalrymple, Master of Stair, the Secretary of State, carried towards
those clans feelings of constantly growing irritation, as latterly the
principal obstacle to a settlement of the country under the new
system of things. At length, in August 1691, the king issued an
indemnity, promising pardon to all that had been in arms against
him before the 1st of June last, provided 1692.
they should come in any time before the 1st
of January next year, and swear and sign the oath of allegiance.
The letters of Sir John Dalrymple from the court at London during
the remainder of the year, shew that he grudged these terms to the
Highland Jacobites, and would have been happy to find that a refusal
of them justified harsher measures. It never occurred to him that
there was anything but obstinacy, or a hope of immediate assistance
from France to enable them to set up King James again, in their
hesitation to swear that they sincerely in their hearts accepted King
William and Queen Mary as the sovereigns of the land equally by
right and in fact. He really hoped that at least the popish clan of the
Macdonalds of Glencoe would hold out beyond the proper day, so as
to enable the government to make an example of them. It was all the
better that the time of grace expired in the depth of winter, for ‘that,’
said he (letter to Colonel Hamilton, December 3, 1691), ‘is the proper
season to maul them, in the cold long nights.’ On the 9th of January,
under misinformation about their having submitted, he says: ‘I am
sorry that Keppoch and M‘Ian of Glencoe[78] are safe.’ It was the sigh
of a savage at the escape of a long-watched foe. Still he understood
Glengarry, Clanranald, and Glenmoriston to be holding out, and he
gave orders for the troops proceeding against them, granting them at
the utmost the terms of prisoners of war. In the midst of a letter on
the subject, dated the 11th January,[79] he says: ‘Just now my Lord
Argyle tells me that Glencoe hath not taken the oaths; at which I
rejoice—it’s a great work of charity to be exact in rooting out that
damnable sect, the worst in all the Highlands.’ Delighted with the
intelligence—‘it is very good news here,’ he elsewhere says—he
obtained that very day a letter from the king anent the Highland
rebels, commanding the troops to cut them off ‘by all manner of
hostility,’ and for this end to proclaim high penalties to all who
should give them assistance or protection. Particular instructions
subscribed by the king followed on the 16th, permitting terms to be
offered to Glengarry, whose house was strong enough to give trouble,
but adding: ‘If M‘Ian of Glencoe and that tribe can be well separated
from the rest, it will be a proper vindication of the public justice to
extirpate that sect of thieves.’ On the same day, Dalrymple himself
wrote to Colonel Hill, governor of 1692.
Inverlochy, ‘I shall entreat you that, for a
just vengeance and public example, the thieving tribe of Glencoe be
rooted out to purpose. The Earls of Argyle and Breadalbane have
promised they shall have no retreat in their bounds.’ He felt,
however, that it must be ‘quietly done;’ otherwise they would make
shift both for their cattle and themselves. There can be no doubt
what he meant; merely to harry the people, would make them worse
thieves than before—they must be, he elsewhere says, ‘rooted out
and cut off.’
In reality, the old chief of the Glencoe Macdonalds had sped to
Inverlochy or Fort William before the end of the year, and offered his
oath to the governor there, but, to his dismay, found he had come to
the wrong officer. It was necessary he should go to Inverary, many
miles distant, and there give in his submission to the sheriff. In great
anxiety, the old man toiled his way through the wintry wild to
Inverary. He had to pass within a mile of his own house, yet stopped
not to enter it. After all his exertions, the sheriff being absent for two
days after his arrival, it was not till the 6th of January that his oath
was taken and registered. The register duly went thereafter to the
Privy Council at Edinburgh; but the name of Macdonald of Glencoe
was not found in it: it was afterwards discovered to have been by
special pains obliterated, though still traceable.
Here, then, was that ‘sect of thieves’ formally liable to the
vengeance which the secretary of state meditated against them. The
commander, Livingstone, on the 23d January, wrote to Colonel
Hamilton of Inverlochy garrison to proceed with his work against the
Glencoe men. A detachment of the Earl of Argyle’s regiment—
Campbells, hereditary enemies of the Macdonalds of Glencoe—under
the command of Campbell of Glenlyon, proceeded to the valley,
affecting nothing but friendly intentions, and were hospitably
received. Glenlyon himself, as uncle to the wife of one of the chief’s
sons, was hailed as a friend. Each morning, he called at the humble
dwelling of the chief, and took his morning-draught of usquebaugh.
On the evening of the 12th of February, he played at cards with the
chief’s family. The final orders for the onslaught, written on the 12th
at Ballachulish by Major Robert Duncanson (a Campbell also), were
now in Glenlyon’s hands. They bore—‘You are to put all to the sword
under seventy. You are to have a special care that the old fox and his
son do on no account escape your hands. You’re to secure all
avenues, that none escape; this you are to put in execution at five
o’clock precisely, and by that time, or very 1692.
shortly after it, I’ll strive to be at you with a
stronger party. If I do not come to you at five, you are not to tarry for
me, but to fall on.’
Glenlyon was but too faithful to his instructions. His soldiers had
their orders the night before. John Macdonald, the chief’s eldest son,
observing an unusual bustle among the soldiers, took an alarm, and
inquired what was meant. Glenlyon soothed his fears with a story
about a movement against Glengarry, and the lad went to bed.
Meanwhile, efforts were making to plant guards at all the outlets of
that alpine glen; but the deep snow on the ground prevented the duty
from being fully accomplished. At five, Lieutenant Lindsay came with
his men to the house of the chief, who, hearing of his arrival, got out
of bed to receive him. He was shot dead as he was dressing himself.
Two of his people in the house shared his fate, and his wife,
shamefully treated by the soldiers, died next day. At another hamlet
called Auchnaion, the tacksman and his family received a volley of
shot as they were sitting by their fireside, and all but one were laid
dead or dying on the floor. The survivor entreated to be killed in the
open air, and there succeeded in making his escape. There were
similar scenes at all the other inhabited places in the glen, and before
daylight, thirty-eight persons had been murdered. The rest of the
people, including the chief’s eldest son, fled to the mountains, where
many of them are believed to have perished. When Colonel Hamilton
came at breakfast-time, he found one old man alive mourning over
the bodies of the dead; and this person, though he might have been
even formally exempted as above seventy, was slain on the spot. The
only remaining duty of the soldiers was to burn the houses and harry
the country. This was relentlessly done, two hundred horses, nine
hundred cattle, and many sheep and goats being driven away.
A letter of Dalrymple, dated from London the 5th March, makes us
aware that the Massacre of Glencoe was already making a sensation
there. It was said that the people had been murdered in their beds,
after the chief had made the required submission. The secretary
professed to have known nothing of the last fact, but he was far from
regretting the bloodshed. ‘All I regret is that any of the sect got away.’
When the particulars became fully known—when it was ascertained
that the Campbells had gone into the glen as friends, and fallen upon
the people when they were in a defenceless state and when all
suspicion was lulled asleep—the transaction assumed the character
which it has ever since borne in the public 1692.
estimation, as one of the foulest in modern
history.
The Jacobites trumpeted it as an offset against the imputed
severities of the late reigns. Its whole details were given in the
French gazettes, as an example of the paternal government now
planted in Britain. The government was compelled, in self-defence,
to order an inquiry into the affair, and the report presented in 1695
fully brought out the facts as here detailed, leaving the principal
odium to rest with Dalrymple. The king himself, whose signature
follows close below the savage sentence, ‘If M‘Ian of Glencoe,’ &c.,
did not escape reproach. True it is, that so far from punishing his
secretary, he soon after this report gave him a full remission, and
conferred on him the teinds of the parish in which lay his principal
estates.[80]

The Privy Council had before them a Feb. 16.

petition from Lieutenant Brisbane of Sir
Robert Douglas’s regiment, regarding one Archibald Baird, an Irish
refugee, imprisoned at Paisley for housebreaking. The sheriff
thought the probation ‘scrimp’ (scanty), and besides, was convinced
that ‘extreme poverty had been a great temptation to him to commit
the said crime.’ Seeing he was, moreover, ‘a proper young man fit for
service,’ and ‘willing and forward to go over to Flanders to fight
against the French,’ the sheriff had hitherto delayed to pronounce
sentence upon him. Without any ceremony, the Council ordered that
Baird be delivered to Brisbane, that he might be transported to
Flanders as a soldier.
The reader will probably be amused by the sheriff’s process of
ideas—first, that the crime was not proved; and, second, that it had
been committed under extenuating circumstances. The leniency of
the Privy Council towards such a culprit, in ordering him out of the
country as a soldier, is scarcely less characteristic. The truth is, the
exigencies of the government for additional military force were now
greater than ever, so that scruples about methods of recruiting had
come to be scarcely recognisable. Poor people confined in jail on
suspicion of disaffection, were in many instances brought to a
purchase of liberty by taking on as soldiers; criminals, who had pined
there for months or years, half-starved, were glad to take soldiering
as their punishment. Sturdy vagrants were 1692.
first gathered into the jails for the offence of
begging, and then made to know that, only by taking their majesties’
pay, could they regain their freedom. But freedom was not to be
instantly gained even in this way. The recruits were kept in jail, as
well as the criminals and the disaffected—little distinction, we may
well believe, observed between them. Not till ready to go on board for
Flanders, were these gallant Britons permitted to breathe the fresh
air.
An appearance of regard for the liberty of the subject was indeed
kept up, and on the 23d February 1692, a committee of the Privy
Council was appointed to go to the prisons of Edinburgh and
Canongate, and inspect the recruits kept there, so as to ascertain if
there were any who were unjustly detained against their will. But this
was really little more than an appearance for decency’s sake, the
instances of disregard for individual rights being too numerous even
in their own proceedings to allow any different conclusion being
arrived at.[81]

Two ministers at Dumfries, who had been Feb.

‘preachers before prelacy was abolished,’
gave displeasure to the populace by using the Book of Common
Prayer. On a Sunday, early in this month, a party of about sixteen
‘mean country persons living about four or five miles from Dumfries,
who disowned both Presbyterian and Episcopal ministers, and
acknowledged none but Mr Houston,’ came and dragged these two
clergymen out of the town, took from each his prayer-book, and gave
them a good beating, after which they were liberated, and allowed to
return home. At an early hour next morning, the same party came
into the town and burned one of the books at the Cross, on which
they affixed a placard, containing, we may presume, a declaration of
their sentiments. The Privy Council indignantly called the provost of
Dumfries before them, and while censuring him for allowing such a
riot to take place, enjoined him to take care ‘that there be no
occasions given for the like disorders in time coming.’ That is to say,
the Privy Council did not desire the Dumfries magistrates to take any
measures for preventing the attacks of ‘mean country persons’ upon
unoffending clergymen using the forms of prayer sanctioned in
another and connected kingdom not thirty miles distant, but to see
that such clergymen were not allowed to give provocations of that
kind to ‘mean country persons.’
Dumfries had at this time another trouble 1699. Mar.
on its hands. Marion Dickson in Blackshaw,
Isobel Dickson in Locherwood, Agnes Dickson (daughter of Isobel),
and Marion Herbertson in Mousewaldbank, had for a long time been
‘suspected of the abominable and horrid crime of witchcraft,’ and
were believed to have ‘committed many grievous malefices upon
several persons their neighbours and others.’ It was declared to be
damnifying ‘to all good men and women living in the country
thereabouts, who cannot assure themselves of safety of their lives by
such frequent malefices as they commit.’
Under these circumstances, James Fraid, John Martin, William
Nicolson, and Thomas Jaffrey in Blackshaw, John Dickson in Slop of
Locherwoods, John Dickson in Locherwoods, and John Dickson in
Overton of Locherwoods, took it upon them to apprehend the
women, and carried them to be imprisoned at Dumfries by the
sheriff, which, however, the sheriff did not consent to till after the six
men had granted a bond engaging to prosecute. Fortified with a
certificate from the presbytery of Dumfries, who were ‘fully
convinced of the guilt [of the women] and of the many malefices
committed by them,’ the men applied to the Privy Council for a
commission to try the delinquents.
The Lords ordered the women to be transported to Edinburgh for
trial.[82]

The government beginning to relax a little Mar. 29.

the severity it had hitherto exercised