Revolution: 500 Years of Struggle for Change - Hardcover

Mark Almond is Lecturer in Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford and Fellow of the Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies, London.

This eye-catching album from a reputable British historian should inspire students to investigate further whatever particular revolution transfixes them. Almond sets forth generic qualities of political revolutions, including causes, tensions between radicalization and reaction, leaders, ideological underpinnings, and ramifications for neighboring countries. Powerful propagandistic images buttress Almond's typology, which then segues into a narrative history that begins with the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish Hapsburgs, the English Glorious Revolution, and the mother of all modern revolutions, the great French Revolution. During the first half of the nineteenth century, revolutions developed as liberal and nationalistic outbursts; as examples of these, Almond profiles the fizzled European revolutions of 1848. Disappointment with those failures changed the next 100 years' worth of revolutions into somewhat more planned rather than purely spontaneous events, guided by Leninist-type communist parties whose efforts were emulated by fascist ones. Almond affords a robust introduction to the bundle of social instability, injustice, utopian overreaching, ghastly brutality, and romantic exhilaration characteristic of most revolutions. Gilbert Taylor