Age of Revolutions Part I: Chapters 1-3 Summary & Analysis

Part I: Revolutions Past
1. The First Liberal Revolution: The Netherlands
2. The Glorious Revolution: England
3. The Failed Revolution: France

In Chapter 1, Zakaria’s says that what we now call classical liberalism first found real-world expression in the Netherlands, in the late 16th century. Three reasons for this stand out in Zakaria’s discussion:

• Geography. In the low-lying nation, prone to flooding, land literally had to be created and then maintained by means of sophisticated technologies. This activity required local coordination that gave participants a voice and a stake in the outcome, not inefficient, from-a-distance management by a centralized national government.

• The Protestant Reformation, sweeping across Europe with the help of a new technology, the printing press. The Netherlands became a center of intellectual and creative activity, and as such, a haven for free-thinkers who felt unsafe elsewhere.

• Innovations in the world of commerce, everything from specialized sailing ships to publicly-traded corporate stocks. These innovations were encouraged by a government that saw its business as promoting the wealth of its citizens rather than extracting wealth from them.

Within the Netherlands, backlash to these developments took the form of tensions between the thriving coastal cities and the stagnating rural inland areas. However, the main backlash Zakaria identifies isn’t any sort of internal social conflict but an invasion by a foreign power, France.

The French invasion during the Frano-Dutch War of 1672-1678 was disastrous for the Netherlands and might have ended Europe’s experiment with liberal governance had not the Dutch head of state been William III of Orange. Although the Netherlands and England were longtime rivals, William was both nephew and son-in-law to England’s King James II. Chapter 2 describes the world-changing consequences of this happenstance of family relations. Like the Netherlands, Great Britain was politically less centralized than most European nations and at the same time more industrialized and urban. Unlike the Netherlands, Britain suffered from ongoing religious tensions. By 1688, the civil war that cost Charles I his head was 30 years in the past, and Oliver Cromwell’s decade-long Puritan dictatorship had been succeeded by a restored monarchy. But James II was aggressively pro-Catholic and unpopular with his mostly-Protestant subjects.

Seeking to end the power struggle between James and Parliament, a group of English nobles invited William and his wife Mary, James’s daughter, to mount a takeover of the British throne. This virtually bloodless Glorious Revolution installed William and Mary as co-monarchs, with powers defined by law, not bestowed by divine right. Tolerance was mandated for all types of Protestantism: Anglican, Calvinist, Baptist, and later Methodist. Persecution of Catholics eased as well. Thus began a long period of political and social stability as well as economic prosperity in Britain. Even as the Netherlands were in decline and retreating from their earlier free-market ideals, Britain was successfully adopting Dutch ways of doing business to power the growth of its global empire.

Read an explanation of a key quote (#1) about the Netherlands and Britain bettered the French in the use of laissez-faire economic practices.

In 1775, Britain’s American colonies rebelled. France, eager to see Great Britain weakened as a world power, lent the breakaway colonies material support. This was a double miscalculation. First, supplying the Continental Army helped bankrupt the French monarchy. And second, the successful American Revolution inspired French citizens to rebel against their own king in 1789. After Louis XVI came Robespierre, then Napoleon, and after him a century and a half in which periods of stability repeatedly ended in crisis. Chapter 3 goes into detail about all these events, deliberately contrasting developments in France with those in Britain, and finally extracts a simple moral: France’s revolution failed to bring stability and prosperity because too much of it was anti-liberal. Zakaria notes ways in which the revolution failed to tolerate religious diversity (it was militantly anti-religious) and ways in which it interfered with free markets (through tariffs and other regulations).

Read about Main Idea #3 of the book: Revolution naturally leads to backlash.