Revolution

A revolution is the sudden overthrow and replacement of government leaders or a political system, usually through a violent or forceful uprising by the population. The term is differentiated from a rebellion, which is an open and often violent resistance to a government that does not result in a change of political leadership. The word revolution was derived from the Latin verb revolvere, which means "to revolve" or "roll back." It was first used to refer to the movements of the planets in the sky but became attached to political upheavals around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

For most of history, revolutions were often violent conflicts or full-scale wars that led to the overthrow of a leader or system of government. Beginning in the late twentieth century, many revolutions were categorized by relatively nonviolent, organized resistance that forced political change. While there are several conflicting thoughts about what constitutes a revolution, a shift in ideology or an uprising among the lower classes is usually not enough to lead to significant change. Each of these may produce a rebellion, but true revolutions typically involve the participation of the dissatisfied middle and upper classes and include the backing of the military.

Early History

A candidate for history's first recorded revolution occurred about 2800 BCE in the Sumerian city of Lagash, located in modern-day Iraq. Ancient tablets tell of a series of corrupt rulers and a wealthy upper class who paid for their extravagant lifestyles by imposing heavy taxes on the population. A reformer named Urukagina led a popular uprising that ousted the leaders of Lagash and installed himself as ruler. Urukagina established a code of laws that provided for the needy and promoted economic justice. His revolution, however, was short-lived as rival states saw the political change he implemented as an opportunity to invade. They captured Lagash and overthrew Urukagina just seven years after he became king.

While Urukagina is sometimes referred to as history's first reformer, another revolution that occurred about 507 BCE in the Greek city-state of Athens had a more profound impact on future generations. At the time, the city was under the rule of a tyrant named Isagoras. With the help of allies from the city-state of Sparta, Isagoras began dismantling the government of Athens and imposing his own laws. The Athenian population rose up in anger and trapped Isagoras and the Spartan leaders in the Acropolis for two days. The men were forced to agree to the crowd's demands and fled the city. An exiled reformer named Cleisthenes was installed as leader and instituted a three-tiered system of government called demokratia, or "rule by the people." History's first democracy lasted only a few decades, but its concepts inspired later governments and evolved into the modern form of democracy.

In the fourth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote extensively on his theory of what constitutes a revolution. Revolutions, he argued, are a fight for perceived justice, when people feel the need to be treated equally and rise up against those they see as unfairly benefitting from a situation. Aristotle believed that for a revolution to be considered successful, the governing constitution of a state must be replaced or changed by the popular revolt.

Modern Revolution

Prior to the sixteenth century, the word revolution was used by astronomers to refer to the motion of planets through the sky. Astrologers adopted the word to denote sudden, unforeseen events brought about by celestial conjunctions. One of the first uses of the word to describe political change was during the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when Catholic King James II of England was forced from the throne by his own daughter, Mary II, and her husband, Dutch Protestant William III, who became the new king.

The eighteenth century saw a pair of major revolutions that altered the landscape of world power. The American Revolution that began in 1776 was born from the desire of British colonists in North America to break free of English rule. The seeds of the revolution were planted in the 1760s when England emerged victorious from a war with France and Spain. Fighting the conflict nearly bankrupted the British Crown, which looked to its colonial holdings as a way to pay its debt. England began imposing a series of taxes on the colonists, prompting angry responses and rising levels of frustration. The colonists believed their rights were being ignored by the British and rallied around the concept of national sovereignty. By 1775, events had progressed to the point that war broke out. The colonists declared their independence in 1776 and won it in 1783 when they defeated the British forces. When the new United States of America adopted its own Constitution, it incorporated some of the concepts first developed by Cleisthenes in Athens thousands of years earlier.

The American Revolution caused a chain reaction across the Atlantic a few years later. The French population, upset with conditions caused by France's involvement in the American war and the excessive spending of its nobility, rose up against the monarchy in 1789. By 1793, the king, the queen, and many French nobles had been executed. Unlike in the United States, France devolved into infighting and retribution, as thousands of people suspected of being enemies of the revolution were guillotined. Eventually, the French Revolution led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who seized power in 1799.

Violent revolution was commonplace for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba, and many other nations were subject to bloody political change. In 1979, an exiled Iranian religious leader named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini fueled an uprising in his native country that overthrew the reigning monarch. Upon his return, Khomeini instituted a regime governed by Islamic religious law.

In the late twentieth century, however, a different type of revolution became increasingly common. Revolution began moving away from violent confrontation and toward civil disobedience, mass demonstrations, and coordinated labor strikes to force political change. Many of these revolutions occurred in former Communist nations after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2010 and 2011, a series of antigovernment protests swept across North Africa and the Middle East in a movement known as the Arab Spring. In some cases, such as Tunisia and Egypt, these revolutions resulted in a relatively peaceful transfer of power. In others, however, government troops responded to the protests with military force, and the revolutions escalated into violent conflict. Similarly, in 2018 peaceful protests in Armenia brought down the unpopular prime minister and ushered in the opposition leader as the new head of government. The movement was known as the Velvet Revolution and brought about a more democratic system in the country. 

Bibliography

Allison, Robert. The American Revolution: A Concise History. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Goldstone, Jack A. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Goldstone, Jack A. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. University of California Press, 1991.

"French Revolution." History.com, www.history.com/topics/french-revolution. Accessed 28 Dec. 2024.

Mackenzie, Donald A. Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. Kessinger Publishing, 2010.

Ohanyan, Anna, and Nerses Kopalyan. “How to Train Your Dragon: Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in an Authoritarian Orbit.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 55 no.1, 2022, 24-51, doi.org/10.1525/j.postcomstud.2022.55.1.24. Accessed 28 Dec. 2024.

Richards, Michael D. Revolutions in World History. Routledge, 2004.

Wagner, Heather Lehr. The Iranian Revolution. Chelsea House, 2010.

Williams, Carol J. "Where the Arab Spring Revolutions Went Wrong." Los Angeles Times, 9 Oct. 2015, www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-arab-spring-recap-hml-20151009-htmlstory.html. Accessed 28 Dec. 2024.