Welcome to our Age of Revolutions Bibliographies page!

In 2016, we asked experts to recommend the top five books that newcomers to their fields should consult. Their lists resulted in our reading lists for Atlantic Revolutions, American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and Cuban Revolution.

In an effort to provide a greater guide to scholarship in the field, we’ve created the following bibliographies of seminal texts:

American Revolution

Atlantic Revolutions

French Revolution

Haitian Revolution

Latin American Revolutions

Cuban Revolution

Here are some general books about revolution:

Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Penguin Books, 1963.

Armitage, David, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Auslander, Leora. Cultural Revolutions: Everyday Life and Politics in Britain, North America, and France.University of California Press, 2009.

Baker, Keith Michael and Dan Edelstein. Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Barcia, Manuel. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas. LSU Press, 2012.

Barducci, Marco. Hugo Grotius and the Century of Revolution, 1613-1718: Transnational Reception in English Political Thought. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Best, Geoffrey, War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.

Bourke, Richard. Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Brinton, Crane. The Anatomy of Revolution. Reprint. Vintage, 1965

Censer, Jack. Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas. Bloomsbury, 2016.

Ellis, H. Generational Conflict and University Reform: Oxford in the Age of Revolution. Brill, 2012.

Foran, John, ed. Theorizing Revolution. Routledge, 1997.

Garric, Jean-Philippe, ed. Charles Percier: Architecture and Design in an Age of Revolutions. Yale University Press, 2017.

Goldstone, Jack ed. The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions. Congressional Quarterly, 1998.

— ed. Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Studies. Wadsworth, 2008.

—. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Routledge, 2016.

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

Hawthorne, Walter. From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830 (African Studies). Cambridge University Press, 2010. 

Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848. Vintage, 1996.

Jones, Colin and Dror Wahrman, eds. The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750-1820.  University of California Press, 2002.

Lenin, V.I. The State and Revolution. Penguin edition, 1993.

Lok, Matthijs, Friedemann Pestel and Juliette Reboul, eds. Cosmopolitan Conservatisms: Countering Revolution in Transnational Networks, Ideas and Movements (C. 1700-1930). Brill Studies in the History of Political Thought, 2021.

Lovejoy, Paul E. Jihad in West Africa During the Age of Revolution. Ohio University Press, 2016.

Malia, Martin. History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World. Yale University Press, 2006.

Parker, David, ed. Revolutions and the Revolutionary Traditions in the West 1560-1991. Routledge, 2000.

Skocpol, Theda. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Tilly, Charles. European Revolutions 1492-1992. Wiley-Blackwell, 1996.

Yaucioglu, Ali. Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolution. Stanford University Press, 2016.

Title image: Benjamin Franklin by David Rent Etter, after Charles Willson Peale, after David Martin (1835)

Have suggestions for other books to add in English or other languages? Comment below!