READ: Economic and Material Causes of Revolt

The end of the eighteenth century found a world in crisis. Social structures were changing rapidly. Three revolutions—the American, French, and Haitian—transformed global relationships. Though most people think of these as political upheavals, here you’ll explore the argument that the late eighteenth-century revolutions had economic causes.

The rise of a capitalist global economy produced social upheavals. Capitalism—an economic system in which property is privately held and profits are reinvested to increase production—was quickly becoming the dominant economic system in Western Europe and the Americas. Three important changes accompanied this system:

All of this took place during global turmoil. Rising populations and shifting social relations from 1500 to 1800 sparked thousands of peasant revolts and urban riots. Famine was a constant threat from Western Europe to Japan. One bad harvest could place millions at risk of starvation. In response to rising food prices, the poor took to the streets again and again, attacking the rich. In most cases, the government and land-owning aristocracy brutally repressed resistance. In America, France, and Haiti, however, these old tactics failed to stop people rising up to protest their material conditions.${}^1$‍

The great political revolutions of the long nineteenth century are usually described in political terms, but they had economic causes as well. The high-minded words of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were full of great, inclusive ideas. However, these revolutions were as much about taxes and property as they were liberty and political representation. The idea of popular sovereignty goes deeper than simply who decides who sits in power. A key part of sovereignty is a person’s control over the valuable products of their labor and the lucrative resources of their land.

War, also, is usually as financial as it is political. The historian C.A. Bayly argues that the American and French Revolutions were a direct result of the Seven Years’ War—the first global war. The Seven Years’ War was a conflict waged between England and France. It drew in every major European power, and its battles were fought on five continents. The war began as a struggle for colonial territory in North America and quickly spread to the rest of the world. The financial aftermath of this war—incredibly expensive for both sides—ignited the American and French Revolutions. So the two most significant revolutions in world history were set in motion not by lofty political ideals, but by two global empires killing each other to control the resources, labor, and markets of the Americas and Asia.

The American Revolution was really about taxes. Cash crops from the American colonies made Western European countries the richest in the world, and were the lifeblood of the British empire. The Seven Years’ War put the empire in serious debt, and the plan for financial recovery was to tax its American colonies.

American colonists resented the increased taxes as well as the changes in how goods like tobacco and tea were traded. As the price of tea imports rose and the price of tobacco exports fell, calls for colonial representation in the British Parliament increased. In a historical irony, American plantation owners declared their independence and belief in the natural equality of all men because they weren’t getting enough money for the tobacco that they grew with the labor of enslaved people.

The British defeat in the American Revolution helped set the stage for later waves of anti-colonial revolutions. With fewer American resources to fuel its growing industries, the British Empire increasingly set its eyes on expansion in Asia and Africa.

In France, people at the middle and bottom of the social pyramid started to question France’s social order. The aristocracy and clergy (church officials) dominated French politics and enjoyed lives of luxury. The rest of the country started to resent the dominance of the aristocracy. The upper-middle class resented that they lacked political rights no matter how much wealth they owned. Meanwhile, almost everyone else struggled to eat in years of bad harvest.

The harvest of 1788 was particularly bad. Combined with the rising taxes that King Louis XVI levied (charged) to pay for France’s wars against England, the rising price of bread drove people to revolt. In October 1789, thousands of women marched from the marketplace—where they were trying to buy bread for their families—and took up arms to besiege the Palace of Versailles. Though the working poor were often the ones rising up in the streets and storming the Bastille,${}^2$‍ the French bourgeoise directed the course of the early revolution and wrote its documents. The bourgeoise were the urban upper-middle class who became wealthy and educated as a result of the rise of a capitalist system. The bourgeoise rejected the traditional dominance of the aristocracy and revolted to seize power for themselves. As in America, these French revolutionaries grew their wealth in an imperialist system of global trade and cash crop plantations, made possible with the lives and labor of enslaved people.

There’s no good year for a bad harvest, but the one in 1788 could not have had worse timing. The French king raised taxes just as the increasingly wealthy middle class started to organize around Enlightenment ideas of popular sovereignty and the poor took to the streets to demand fair food prices. Not the best time to run out of food.

The French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue (today Haiti) was the most lucrative colony in the world. Coffee, sugar and the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved West Africans filled the treasury of the French Empire and lined the pockets of the French aristocracy. The colony produced 40 percent of the sugar and 60 percent of the coffee consumed by Europeans.

In Saint Domingue, class divisions were even more extreme than in France. Enslaved people were nearly 90 percent of the island’s population. Most had been born in Africa before slavers took them to the Caribbean. At the top of the social hierarchy, wealthy white landowners (grands blancs) controlled most of the colony’s resources and labor. Between enslaved people and rich white landowners, were two other groups: poor white laborers and artisans (petits blancs) and free people of color, who were often mixed-race children of grands blancs and enslaved people.

Each of these three classes had complaints. Grands blancs resented being taxed by the distant French monarch. Free people of color knew they would never be considered equal no matter how much money they had or how many enslaved people they owned. Petits blancs identified with the revolutionaries in France and rejected the superiority of grands blancs and free people of color. But it was the bottom of the social structure that made Saint Domingue so unstable. Most of the colony’s people had been born on a different continent before the French enslaved them and forced them to work under some of the most horrific conditions imaginable. In 1791, these social tensions erupted into open conflict, culminating in the world’s first successful revolt of enslaved people.

The Haitian constitutions took Enlightenment ideas about equality and applied them literally. Just like the French and American, the Haitian Constitution of 1806 guaranteed a right to property. But included under property was “the right to enjoy and dispose of...one’s work and industry.” That meant people had the right to choose and be paid for their work, rights incompatible with slavery. This stood in direct contrast to the ways that the American, French, and other European countries used the right to property to protect the institution of slavery. The Haitian Constitutions outlawed slavery and extended citizenship to all non- white foreigners who came to Haiti. In these ways, the Haitians took the ideas of the Enlightenment and applied them to the material conditions they faced.

As the historian Ada Ferrer puts it, “the abstract right of liberty proclaimed elsewhere was transformed into a concrete prohibition on slavery.” The Haitians embraced the right to property asserted by Enlightenment thinkers, but they defined it “in a way that no liberal power would have conceived at the time.” As a result, the nations of the Atlantic—including the United States—systematically excluded Haiti from the world economy. Fearful that Haiti would inspire enslaved people in America to claim freedom using Enlightenment ideas, President Thomas Jefferson refused to acknowledge the new nation.

These three Atlantic Revolutions—American, French, and Haitian—were part of a broader world crisis at the end of the eighteenth century. Sikh uprisings against the Mughal Empire in India, Pugachev’s Revolt in the Russian Empire, and the White Lotus Rebellion in China mirrored the rebellions in the Atlantic world. Bayly argues that the global conflict of the Seven Years’ War “hastened [quickened] the crisis of the old regimes in Europe.” And in turn, the Atlantic revolutions “deepened the crisis of the old order in the Americas, Asia, and North Africa.”

This cycle of revolution and crisis linked distant people and continued through the nineteenth century. These eighteenth-century revolutions were about national and popular sovereignty, yes. But at a deeper level, they were about restructuring the relationships between people and the way that goods and wealth were produced and distributed.

Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Maine at Augusta. Additionally, he is a Research Associate at Pitt’s World History Center. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century.