Age of Revolutions was happy to interview Nathan Perl-Rosenthal about his new book, entitled The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024).

Bryan A. Banks (BB): Hi Nathan. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your newest book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024), will be of great interest to readers of this site. In it, you argue that we can best understand the revolutionary epoch as split between two generations. The first generation fought against the social and political hierarchies of the old order and in the process learned lessons about political mobilization that they taught the next generation. That second generation had seen the violence of the preceding generation and sought political change that reinforced new types of social and racial inequalities. This generational approach is an elegant way of reframing the Age of Revolutions. Can you tell us how this thesis originated?

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (NPR): Hi Bryan!  Thanks so much for inviting me on here to talk about The Age of Revolutions—and for the very kind words about the book.

I came to the generational thesis gradually, for sure; I would say it emerged when I was midway through the research and just starting to try to get my arms around how to organize the writing.  What had struck me during the early phases of research was that I was seeing more commonalities than I expected among revolutionary movements that occurred around the same time, even when they developed in far-flung places.  I was startled by the similarities that I perceived, for instance, between aspects of the American Revolution and the uprisings in South America in the early 1780s: the central role of creole elites in both, for instance, or the difficulties that patriots faced in surmounting internal divisions.  And some of these similarities seemed to extend beyond the Americas, for instance to at least the early stages of the French Revolution.

As my research pushed into the nineteenth century, the chronological divide that I perceived became more and more pronounced.  The scale of political organizing changed significantly after 1800, in both Europe and the Americas.  (Though the forms that this took, as I discuss at length in the book, were quite different from region to region.)  The way that revolutionaries talked about their political projects changed as well.  I became convinced that something really fundamental had shifted around 1800.  But what?  My search for an answer to that question was what brought me to generations.

Generations provides a way of talking about significant changes in culture and political outlook that grounds them in lived experience and material realities.  I’m not interested in the idea of generational zeitgeist or some kind of gauzy notion of a new “spirit.”  A generational transition is a material shift—in which one group of human beings is replaced by another—and that rising cohort can have a meaningfully different outlook on the world, by virtue of their distinct experiences of the world as a group.  

BB: Taking a “generational” turn of sorts is really interesting. How do the two generations you explore in this book reflect on their own time period in generational terms? Do they recognize this shift explicitly in their documents? 

NPR: There’s no doubt that the actors in each revolution were conscious of generational changes taking place.  You can see it, for instance, in Fourth of July orations.  After 1800, as members of the younger generation started to give more of the orations, they would literally point out the veterans of the war—the old codgers—in their audiences.  There is a definite consciousness in their speeches of that generation fading away.  You can also see this awareness of generational transition in one of my favorite texts of the period, Etienne de Jouy’s Hermit of the Chaussée d’Antin (1811-1814).  The “Hermit” of the title was one of the first literary figures of a flâneur or walker in the city.  Jouy has his character constantly describing all of the ways in which the younger generation has completely transformed Paris over the previous two decades. 

It’s less clear to what extent members of the second generation in different places were conscious of a shared generational identity.  That kind of consciousness of collective generational experience seems to become more explicit later in the nineteenth century—for instance for the children of 1848 or 1870/71.

BB: In your introduction, you frame your book as an “anti-exceptionalist history.” Can you explain this to the readers of this interview and in particular, frame it against the historiography? 

NPR: Exceptionalism, in historical writing, is the idea that some historical scene (event, process, nation, period…) differed from the norm in some important way, usually with important consequences.  For instance, there is a hoary old idea that colonial North America did not have an “aristocracy,” that it was therefore more innately “liberal,” and thus followed a distinctive “liberal” path into modernity.  Or the idea that Germany, for a variety of reasons, had a “special path” into modernity that led to the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust.  Exceptionalism can be either positive or negative; the crux of it is this notion of an exception, whether for good or ill.

There are plenty of things wrong with exceptionalism.  One problem is that every historical event, if seen from the right angle, is an exception—in the sense that each event is distinctive, no two are exactly alike.  A bigger issue is that exceptionalist arguments implicitly assert that there is some historical “norm” that the allegedly exception deviates from.  I don’t know about you, but I am not very comfortable with the idea that there is a normative or “expected” pattern to the past.  That leaves far too little room for contingency, and those claims (in my experience) don’t usually hold up well to scrutiny.

Revolutionary histories have always been quite prone to exceptionalism.  Historians of the American and French Revolutions since the early nineteenth century have never stopped declaring the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their respective objects of study.  Most of this seems like little more than special pleading to me.  Each of these revolutions—and others, like the Haitian and Spanish American revolutions—contributes a great deal to the emergence of modern politics.  But the notion that one was “exceptional,” in the sense that it alone diverged from the norm, seems to me both false and unhelpful.

As much as possible in this book, I try to not assume that there is a “norm” or a “standard” by which revolutions should be measured.  I try to take each one on its own terms, and to consider how revolutionary processes connected, related, and interacted.

BB: What were the most significant challenges you faced researching the book? 

NPR: Aside from the obvious challenges of time and travel?  There were a bunch of those!  Research for this book took me all over Europe and the United States and also to Peru.  Gathering materials, having to go back more than once to some archives—the challenges we all face.  I recognize how fortunate I was to have support from my university and from external funders that made it possible for me to do that work.

Still, the most significant challenge with this book wasn’t getting the materials that I used.  It was deciding what I had to leave out.  Because the book has a long chronological sweep and a wide geography, I had to make a lot of hard decisions about the events, people, and places that I wasn’t going to be able to explore as fully as I would have liked.  Sometimes I would figure this out early on in the research process for a section or a chapter.  Sometimes, unfortunately, I would only figure it out after I had already done the research.  The worst was when I only figured it out after writing part of a chapter!  I have lots of pages about the so-called Giraffe of 1827, for instance, that didn’t make it into the book.  And a bunch of stuff on farsas and theatre in the 1790s and early 1800s that just ended up on the cutting room floor.  It was hard to let this stuff go.  I tell myself that there will be articles, other books…  But it was hard to let go.

BB: This book is geared towards a general audience as well as a scholarly one. How did you strike a balance in your writing? Specifically, how did you balance writing in a narrative style without sacrificing your analytical vigor?

NPR: I don’t think there is a contradiction between narrative and analytic rigor.  Maybe I am in the minority on this point among our colleagues.  But for me, narrative is a form of rigor itself—or an invitation to rigor.  Human beings live their lives in chronological order.  (Well, for the most part!)  Every day is a string of individual things that happen, but behind it there are patterns: the pattern of a mind, of a life, of social structures.  To follow a person or a group of people or a movement day by day, month by month, you are forced to confront how the bits and pieces that make up our lives can be squared with the fact that our lives are more than just fragments.  They are given their shape and a logic by our minds, our wills, our desires—but also the material, ideological, and social worlds in which we live.

Narrative history as a form demands that one keep in focus both the big patterns and the infinite variations, colorings, and subtleties of everyday life and experience.  The former gives coherence and argument, the latter contingency and specificity.  In that sense, I think, narrative is really conducive to analytic rigor, if by that we mean history that is grounded in primary sources, and faithful to what we interpret them to mean, while also making claims about change over time and its significance.

BB: Thank you so much Nathan. Can you share any upcoming projects or plans for future books?

NPR: I have two projects cooking.  The one I’m ready to talk about right now is a global history of maritime prize law, from about 1500 to 1916.  Prize was the law that governed the capture and adjudication of ships and cargoes captured at sea during wartime in the early modern era.  I think about prize law as a form of sovereign power that was flexible, scalable, and exercised through private property.  The book will show, on a global scale, how prize law was crucial to the making and then the unmaking of European maritime empires over four centuries.  I’m already into the archives for this project and I’m really excited about what I’m finding.

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Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history, focusing on the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, at the University of Southern California.  He focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Americas in the age of revolution, with particular attention to the transnational influences that shaped modern national politics.  

Bryan A. Banks PhD is Associate Professor of History at Columbus State University. He teaches courses on European history, the Age of Enlightenment, the French Revolution, nineteenth-century Europe, and historical writing. His current research focuses on Huguenot refugees during the French Enlightenment and French Revolution.