565721
research-article2014
EJT0010.1177/1354066114565721European Journal of International RelationsAnievas
EJIR
Article
Revolutions and international
relations: Rediscovering the
classical bourgeois revolutions
European Journal of
International Relations
2015, Vol. 21(4) 841­–866
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066114565721
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Alexander Anievas
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
In the modern era, revolutions have been central to the structure and dynamics
of international affairs. They have always been international events: international in
origin, ideology, process and effect, supercharging the rhythms and logics of any given
international system. Yet, within the discipline of International Relations, the study
of revolutions has remained something of a secondary subject. Not only have there
been relatively few studies theoretically engaging with revolution and international
relations, but the dominant theoretical frameworks in International Relations have
largely bracketed out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics.
Yet, if revolutions have been, in part, international in both cause and effect, thereby
transcending the confines of ‘second-’ and ‘third-image’ conceptions of international
relations, we require theoretical tools capable of capturing the sociological and
geopolitical dimensions of these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension
to the other. Drawing on the theory of uneven and combined development, this
article provides such a conception, organically uniting both ‘sociological’ and
‘geopolitical’ modes of explanation. It does so, in particular, by re-examining two of
the key ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions of the early-modern epoch: the English and
French revolutions.
Keywords
Bourgeois revolutions, capitalism, critical theory, international system, Marxism,
political economy
Corresponding author:
Alexander Anievas, University of Cambridge, The Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3
9DT, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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Introduction
In Martin Wight’s (1966) classic Power Politics, he estimated that as of 1960, the period
generally considered to span the history of modern international relations had witnessed
‘256 years of international revolution to 212 unrevolutionary’ years (Wight, 1966: 92).
Since that time, the world has experienced a near-perpetual state of revolution, as exemplified by the vast array of popular revolts, guerrilla wars and resistance movements
emerging over the period. It would seem, then, that the default setting of modern international relations has been one of revolution: an epoch perhaps best understood as a series
of continuing attempts to confront the challenges of social disorder and revolution
wrought by the international expansion of capitalist relations: in short, an era of permanent counter-revolution from which the discipline of International Relations (IR) itself
crystallized out of (cf. Van Pijl, 2014).
In the modern epoch, revolutions have been absolutely central to the changing structure and dynamics of international affairs. They have always been international events:
international in origin, ideology, process and effect, supercharging (both ideologically
and politically) the rhythms and logics of any given international system. The co-constitutive nature of revolutions and international relations is well captured by Arno Mayer
(2000: 534, 533), when he writes of how ‘at every point’ in a revolution’s development,
‘international politics impinges on’ its course, while the creation and consolidation of
revolutionary states ‘perhaps best dramatizes the centrality of interstate relations and
war’ to modern social development.
Yet, within the discipline of International Relations (IR), the study of revolutions has
remained something of a secondary subject. Not only have there been relatively few studies theoretically engaging with revolution and international relations, but the dominant
theoretical frameworks — notably, realism, liberalism and constructivism — have largely
bracketed-out revolutions from their conceptions of international politics (but see
Armstrong, 1993; Halliday, 1999; Walt, 1997). In the extreme case of structural realism,
revolutions have been altogether excluded from the study of international relations as they
remain outside Kenneth Waltz’s discretely conceived international system, which abstracts
from the sociological terrain (the so-called ‘domestic’) through which revolutions are supposedly formed.1 Hence, revolutions remain at the margins of the discipline, constituting
‘the great anomaly’, as Fred Halliday (2001: 693) put it, as they are continually viewed as
‘aberrations’ and/or ‘abnormalities’ to the regular anarchic dictates of the international
system conceived as a realm of perennial great power struggles over the balance of power.
Yet, if revolutions are, in part, international in both cause and effect, transcending the
confines of ‘second-’ and ‘third-image’ conceptions of international relations, we require
theoretical tools capable of capturing the sociological and geopolitical dimensions of
these Janus-faced events without reducing one dimension into the other. One might think
that historical sociology, which has commonly pointed to ‘the international’ as a cause of
revolutions (see, especially, Foran, 2005; Skocpol, 1979), would show us the way.
Nonetheless, here too, ‘the international’ remains ‘powerfully acknowledged but analytically unpenetrated’, leading to continual charges of ‘attaching an essentialized, Realist
conception of the international onto historical sociology’ (Rosenberg, 2006: 310).
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What we need, then, is a theory of socio-historical development that organically fuses
both sociological (‘internalist’) and geopolitical (‘externalist’) modes of explanation into
a single unified theoretical apparatus. It is perhaps no surprise that the most attuned
scholar of revolutions in IR, Fred Halliday (1999), would come to identify ‘uneven and
combined development’ (U&CD) as one such possible theory. Nonetheless, within
Halliday’s work, the concept remained something of an afterthought; Halliday never
systematically integrated the concept into his theoretical understandings of revolutions,
thus never realizing the potential of U&CD as a unified theory of socio-historical development. This task was left to one of Halliday’s students, Justin Rosenberg, who has
sought to rework Trotsky’s concept as a historical sociological theory of ‘the international’ (Rosenberg, 2006). What Rosenberg has demonstrated is that the concept of
U&CD uniquely interpolates a distinctly international dimension of causality as intrinsic
to the historical process of development itself (Rosenberg, 2010). This then renders ‘the
international’ historically and sociologically intelligible, overcoming both realist reifications of the international system as an absolutely autonomous (‘supra-social’) sphere and
classical sociology’s tendency to falsely subsume its distinctive causal dynamics and
behavioural patterns to unisocietal abstractions.
Given U&CD’s origins as a theoretical tool to explain the Bolshevik Revolution
(Trotsky, 1959 [1930]), it is, then, surprising that the theory has yet to be deployed in
explaining these international dimensions of revolutions (but see Matin, 2013). This is
the aim of the following article, which seeks to draw on and further develop the theory
in explaining two key instances of ‘bourgeois revolution’, the English and French. In
doing so, the article seeks to further tease out the theory’s implications for understanding
pre-capitalist periods of international relations, as demonstrated in the English case,
while remaining sufficiently attuned to the qualitative transformations that occurred over
the capitalist epoch.
The article is developed in four movements. The first section reconsiders the concept of ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in terms of the effects of revolutions in creating and
consolidating territorially demarcated sovereign centres of capital accumulation, rather
than defining them in terms of their agents. This ‘consequentialist’ interpretation of
bourgeois revolutions subverts revisionist and Political Marxist critiques of the concept while providing a more apposite framework to understand their differential effects
in their domestic and international dimensions. The section then concludes by spelling
out the main causal components of the theory of U&CD in explaining modern revolutions. The second section turns to examine the English Civil Wars of 1640–1651 and
the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689, highlighting the largely overlooked international origins and effects of the revolutions theoretically captured by the notion of
U&CD. The third section analyses the French Revolution of 1789–1815, arguing that
the revolution was, indeed, bourgeois and capitalist in both origin and outcome, subsequently transforming the character and dynamics of the European international system
over the Long Nineteenth Century. The conclusion then teases out the implications of
the preceding theoretically informed empirical analysis for understanding the relationship between revolutions and the modern international system for both IR and Marxist
theories.
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Bourgeois revolutions and Uneven and combined
development
Reconceptualising bourgeois revolutions: A consequentialist approach
Before providing a historical narrative and analysis of the ‘classical’ bourgeois revolutions, we must first define what we mean by ‘bourgeois revolution’. For many historians
and social scientists, the concept has been shown to be both empirically and theoretically
untenable. This has been the main finding of the ‘revisionist’ historiographies of the
French and English Revolutions currently fashionable within the Anglo-Saxon academy.
These were primarily initiated as a critique of the orthodox Marxist model of bourgeois
revolution emerging during the interwar years and after. For the revisionists, the revolutions were not heralded by the ascendancy of a distinctly capitalist bourgeois class:
during the revolutions, the bourgeoisie were not in the lead of political movements; after
the revolutions, the bourgeoisies did not hold power and were often further removed
from state control; and, finally, the revolutions did not result in the emergence or consolidation of capitalist states (cf. Davidson, 2012: ch. 15). More than anything else, the idea
of the bourgeoisie as the primary agent in the making of the revolutions has taken the
most sustained beating by revisionists.
While the bourgeoisie did, in fact, play some role in the classical revolutions, as examined later, this agent-centred conceptualization of bourgeois revolutions is itself unnecessary, if not unhelpful. Rather than looking at the intentions or composition of the agents
involved in the making of revolutions, there is a veritable tradition of thinking (Marxist and
non-Marxist) that conceptualizes revolutions in terms of their consequences (see Davidson,
2012: ch. 14). The most significant factor for this ‘consequentialist’ school of thought in
classifying a revolution as ‘bourgeois’ is whether or not a revolution removed the sociopolitical and ideological ‘obstacles’ (notably, the pre-capitalist state) to the development
and consolidation of capitalism by establishing the state as an autonomous site of capital
accumulation.2 For, ‘[i]f the definition of a bourgeois revolution is restricted to the successful installation of a legal and political framework in which the free development of capitalist property relations is assured’, Gareth Stedman Jones (1977: 86) writes, ‘there is then no
necessary reason why a “bourgeois revolution” need be the direct work of a bourgeoisie’.
Bourgeois revolutions are therefore best understood ‘not as revolutions consciously made
by capitalist agents’, but in terms of their developmental outcomes: the effects that a revolution has in promoting and/or consolidating a distinctly capitalist form of state that will, in
turn, benefit the capitalist class irrespective of the role that they may have played in such
revolutions. Bourgeois revolutions thereby denote a socio-political transformation — ‘a
change in state power, which is the precondition for large scale capital accumulation and
the establishment of the bourgeoisie as the dominant class’ (Callinicos, 1989: 124).
Whether a revolution was the necessary condition to bring about capitalism or worked
to facilitate an already-existing capitalism varied with each case, France largely being an
example of the former and England the latter. The focus of the theory of bourgeois revolution is, then, not on the origins of capitalism as a socio-economic system, but on the
elimination of the socio-political ‘barriers’ to ‘its continued existence and the overthrow
of restrictions to its further expansion’ (Davidson, 2012: 420). Moreover, rather than
viewing bourgeois revolutions as a single episode or event, more often than not they
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entailed much broader processes of long-term socio-political transformation, sometimes
involving wars and foreign conquest. While these processes involved ‘episode[s] of convulsive political transformation, compressed in time and concentrated in target’
(Anderson, 1984: 112), it would be a mistake to identify bourgeois revolutions as solely
comprised of such instances. While one must be cautious not to overstretch the concept
to cover developmental tendencies more broadly, it does seem that the extended temporalities of the English Civil Wars of 1640–1651 and Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689,
as well as the French Revolution of 1787–1815, can all be conceived as bourgeois revolutions that were part and parcel of more general systemic crises taking national and
international dimensions.
Furthermore, the evolving conditions of the international system, itself transformed
by the ensuing revolutions, had a major causal impact on the timing, form and trajectory
of these revolutions. Indeed, one might say that revolutions are almost universally international in origin, dynamic and impact. Structural adaptation to geopolitical-military
pressures has been a central causal component of modern revolutions, and their resulting
effects upon the nature of the international system have been profound. Dramatically
intensifying the competitive pressures of an increasingly capitalist international system
and world economy, each successive capitalist revolution handed down the ‘geo-social’
conditions from which the next would emerge. The bourgeois revolutions were, Perry
Anderson (1992: 116) writes, ‘historically interrelated, and the sequence of their connexions enters into the definition of their differences. Their order was constitutive of
their structure’ [emphasis added].
Reconfiguring consequentialism through uneven and combined
development
Rather than discounting different instances of revolution that failed to correspond to
some ideal-type notion of bourgeois revolution, the approach outlined earlier opens the
possibility for a more historically sensitive perspective, recognizing the inherently interconnected, co-constitutive and variegated nature of revolutions. Nonetheless, a potential
problem with contemporary applications of this ‘consequentialist’ approach has been
their tendency to emphasize ‘developmental identity’ over ‘developmental difference’.3
In other words, in the shift to conceptualizing revolutions in terms of their socialsystemic effects, some scholars have fallen into a problematic homogenization of revolutions in the modern epoch as almost universally capitalist (e.g. Callinicos, 1989;
Davidson, 2012). The very different developmental outcomes of such revolutions in, say,
North Vietnam (1945), China (1949) and Cuba (1959) are all conceived as establishing
different forms of ‘bureaucratic state capitalism’ through ‘deflected permanent revolutions’ (Cliff, 1963) — the ‘modern version or functional equivalent’ of bourgeois revolutions (Davidson, 2012: 459). While it seems indisputable that such regimes increasingly
incorporated features of capitalism over time, to conceive of these revolutions as ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ is to stretch such concepts beyond breaking point.
In providing a more satisfactory and historically attuned consequentialist approach, it
is therefore necessary to root it in a more robust conception of U&CD that adequately
sensitizes our analysis to the vast qualitative differences between revolutions while
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uniquely incorporating a distinctly international dimension of causality into its basic
conception of socio-historical development.4 For unevenness posits developmental variations both within and between societies, along with the attendant spatial differentiations
between them. The ‘force of uneven development’, Trotsky (1962 [1930/1906]: 131)
wrote, ‘operates not only in the relations of countries to each other, but also in the mutual
relationships of the various processes within one and the same country’. This conception
of unevenness thus transverses the multiple spatial fields of social constitution and
organization, breaking with any discretely conceived ‘inside–outside’ notions of the
‘national’ and ‘international’ (Walker, 1993) at the heart of disciplinary IR. As such, it
prefigures the later shift to conceptions of social relations as ‘networks’ (Mann, 1986:
9–13) or ‘webs’ (McNeil and McNeil, 2003) without losing sight of their territorialization in the modern epoch.
At the most abstract level, combination refers to the ways in which the internal relations of any given society are determined by their relations with other developmentally
differentiated societies, resulting in the intermingling and melding of ‘foreign’ and
‘native’ institutions and social structures within a single society. Although usually
rooted in the interlacing and fusion of differentiated modes of production, the effects of
a combined development suffuse every aspect of society (cf. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu,
forthcoming). It is much more than a simple economic phenomenon, but instead captures the totality of relations constitutive of a social order.
From the concepts of ‘unevenness’ and ‘combination’ follow a number of geo-social
causal mechanisms embedding ‘the international’ into the heart of U&CD’s conception
of development. These include: (1) the ‘whip of external necessity’ (the militaryeconomic pressures generated by interstate competition among a plurality of unevenly
developing societies); (2) the ‘privilege of historic backwardness’ (the opportunities
opened up to later-developing states to adopt the most cutting-edge technologies, institutions and practices from the leading states in the international system); (3) the ‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’ (the time-compressed character of this development
taking inorganic, spasmodic and destabilizing forms, unhinging traditional social structures in ways causally feeding back into the structures of the international system that
produced them); and (4) processes of ‘substitutionism’,5 whereby later-developers, in
attempting to developmentally supercharge their own societies, come to mobilize
‘replacement’ mechanisms for the various agents, institutions, technics and methods of
earlier processes of development. As examined later, in both England and France, these
mechanisms were at play in the making and effects of their respective revolutions.
Tying a ‘consequentialist’ understanding of revolutions to the theory of U&CD not
only solves the difficulties of revisionist interpretations of bourgeois revolutions, but
also the problematic relationship between IR and revolutions more generally. It does so,
in particular, by specifying the distinctive causal dynamics and behavioural patterns of
the international system effecting each and every revolution, while also theoretically
capturing the differential agencies, methods and outcomes of revolutions, which explains
the qualitative differences between revolutions as they co-constitutively interconnect in
time and space: their sequentiality being constitutive of their structures, thereby eliminating the possibility of historical repetition and the utility of ‘ideal-types’. This then
provides a theoretical explanation of why each bourgeois revolution was a ‘bastard birth’
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— an exception that proved the rule (Anderson, 1992: 116). It further explains the ‘dissonance’ between agents’ intentions and their effects: that is, how the consequences of a
revolution often turn out to be capitalist irrespective of the agents’ original intentions as
the systemic pressures and imperatives of ‘the international’6 decisively weigh on the
outcomes of the revolution. We should therefore expect each revolution to diverge (in
character, form and the agents involved) from previous revolutions: the sole criteria to
judge whether they can be considered capitalist is whether they establish the state as a
sovereign site of capital accumulation.
Rediscovering the British Revolution
The English Revolution in international context
The origins of the English Revolution, whether comprising the English Civil Wars of
1640–1651 or the entire period from 1640 to 1688, has produced an enormously rich and
varied body of literature. With few exceptions,7 however, ‘virtually the whole of this
literature’ has been ‘written as if England was not just an island, but was a closed entity,
separate from the political, economic and intellectual world of the rest of Europe’
(Halliday, 1999: 185). Yet, the international structure and context of which England
formed a part played a critical role in the causal and imaginative coordinates of its revolutionary experience. That the events of the English Revolution took place in an era of
‘general crisis’ riven by upheavals, rebellions and wars raging across Europe and beyond
has scarcely been taken into account when explaining its causal sources.
This international context of English events was hardly lost on contemporaries
(cf. Scott, 2000: 141–142). In 1649, Robert Mentet de Salmonet, a Scottish exile living
in France, prefaced his account of the English Revolution by noting that Europe was
passing through an ‘Iron Age’ marked by ‘Desolation of Countries commonly attending
War’, an era ‘famous for the great and strange revolutions that have happen’d in it’, with
‘revolts … frequent both in East and West’ (Mentet de Salmonet, 1739: 2). Similarly, in
January 1643, a protestant preacher, Jeremiah Whitaker, warned the House of Commons:
‘These days are a days of shaking … and this shaking is universal: the Palatinate,
Bohemia, Germany, Catalonia, Portugal, Ireland, England’ (quoted in Trevor-Roper,
2011 [1965]: 59). The crisis that beset the English state was European, if not global, in
nature and scope (see Parker, 2008). The socio-economic, ideological and political roots
of both the long-term (structural) and immediate (conjunctural) causes of the British
Revolution, through all its phases (1640–1642, 1688 and 1745), were, then, decisively
international. How are we to understand the interaction of international and domestic
conditions leading to the English Revolution?
The notion that the domestic situation of the Stuart monarchy was reasonably stable
— a key tenet of revisionist historiography (cf. Russell, 1990) — seems gravely misplaced when taking into account the broader European maelstrom of the era, of which
England was hardly immune. Over the 16th and 17th centuries, English society underwent rapid socio-economic and demographic change, leading to a prolonged period of
economic instability and heightened social tensions. Surveying the state of the English
agrarian economy during this period, Peter Bowden (1990: 41) concludes that the
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1620s–1640s were times of ‘extreme hardship in England … probably the most terrible
years through which the country has ever passed’. This was a period marked by intense
social unrest and class conflict (a persistent ‘crisis of order’, as David Underwood (1996:
61) describes the years between 1560 and 1640), escalating to the point where ‘contemporaries were conscious of a threat of popular revolt’ (Hill, 1981: 115; cf. Carlin, 1999;
Manning, 1991).
The immediate events leading to the English Civil War are well known (cf. Carlin,
1999). In 1640, under the military pressure of an advancing Scottish force, King Charles
I reconvened Parliament for the first time since its disbandment 11 years earlier. For
much of his reign, Charles I had been attempting to strengthen obedience and loyalty to
the Crown by building up a monarchical absolutism stylized on the Catholic monarchies
of the continent, with comparable (though in no way analogous) counter-reformation
policies. This was seen as an imperative given the military ineffectuality and weaknesses
of the monarchy on display in the wars of the 1620s, which imperilled the domestic
legitimacy of the Stuart state. Through these wars, the fierce political and religious conflicts engulfing the European continent were incorporated into the domestic political
structures of England. ‘The polarization of English politics by 1629–30’, L.J. Reeve
(2003: 220) writes, ‘can be seen as one aspect of the polarization of international politics
under the pressure of war’.
It had become increasingly clear that, on a geopolitical scale, the Stuart state was simply no match for its Catholic absolutist rivals. It was in this sense that England’s ‘failure
in war in Europe established the context for rebellion and civil war at home’ (Scott, 2000:
55, 114). The historical unevenness of state-building in Europe, affecting a particular
‘whip of external necessity’, was thus crucial to the outbreak of the English Civil Wars.
Far from having ‘no influence on the English social revolution and relatively little influence on the English political revolution’ (Teschke, 2003: 194, fn. 16), international military pressures were decisive in the making of the English Revolution. The Thirty Years’
War was itself further rooted in this overall unevenness of social development on the
European continent: an ‘example of two civilizations in ideological conflict’ wherein the
‘political fronts and coalitions of power’ in the war reflected deep developmental differences among the states involved (Polišenský, 1971: 9; cf. Davidson, 2012: 565–574).
Generally speaking, the war pitted the least developed (in feudal terms) areas of Europe,
which had nonetheless begun to make the first strides towards capitalism — particularly,
the Netherlands, England and Bohemia — against the most developed and wealthiest
regions, where feudalism was most entrenched — notably, the Spanish and Holy Roman
Empires (Davidson, 2012: 570). The ‘general crisis’ of the 17th century in Europe
(Hobsbawm, 1954) was thereby rooted in the protracted, uneven transition from feudalism to capitalism, finding its material bases in the intensified class conflicts over the distribution of income explaining the ‘system-wide attempts at geopolitical accumulation in
the form of the Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years’ War’ (Teschke, 2003: 170).
The failed attempts at absolutist state-building during the Tudor period (particularly
between 1529 and 1547), and Elizabeth’s abandonment of all ambitions to develop a
continental-style monarchy, had left the monarchy painfully dependent upon Parliament
for raising the revenues required for waging war (Scott, 2000: 68–72; Stone, 1972:
60–64). In terms of military and fiscal effectiveness, the Stuart state was relatively
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‘backward’ in comparison to its continental competitors. The centralizing attempts by the
Stuart monarchs, first James I and then Charles I, had brought them into direct conflict
with England’s powerful landed classes dominating Parliament, as the latter had to assent
to new taxes or give up control over fiscal policy. This was a landlord class that had
become increasingly capitalist-oriented over the preceding century, as they ‘gradually
gave up the magnate form of politico-military organization, commercialized their relationships with their tenants, rationalized their estates, and made use of — but avoided
dependence upon — the court’ (Brenner, 1989: 302; cf. Stone, 1965).
The conflicts between Crown and Parliament over war-funding had been a major
reason for Charles I’s initial dismissal of Parliament in 1629. One conclusion from the
1625–1629 years was that war was impossible without state reform and that a financially
exhausted government required peace in order to do so. The reprise from war was, however, fatefully interrupted by the Scottish Rebellion of 1637–1640 sparked by Charles I’s
attempt to impose Anglican services on the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. With the
Scottish invasion of 1640, the military conflict in Europe moved back to England. As
Scott (2000: 141) notes:
A catholicising king, associated with Spain and catholic Ireland, found himself divided from his
English and Scots protestant subjects. This was one military outcome of the ideological impact
made upon the Stuart kingdoms by the Thirty Years’ War. In the period 1637–40, then, the
military struggle between reformation and counter-reformation moved to British soil. That it
was not followed by continental European military intervention was a consequence only of the
exhaustion of the great powers after more than two decades of war.
The European upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War consequently formed the immediate
geopolitical context for the English Civil Wars and eventual collapse of Charles I’s monarchy. It was against this international background that such widespread English fears of
‘popery’ must be understood as Catholic Spain spearheaded the counter-reformation
across Europe. The majority of parliamentary oppositionists, particularly the ‘new merchants’ involved in the American colonial trades, were ‘militantly anti-Spanish’ in their
foreign policy orientations (Brenner, 1993: 245–255). The ideological (if not military)
threats of the European Catholic powers were seen as clear and present dangers.
The reconvening of Parliament unleashed a storm of political controversies as the
parliamentarians sought to reassert their political power against an increasingly ‘popish’
and autocratic Crown, while Charles I sought to defend his perceived monarchical right to
rule without undue parliamentary interference. The Irish Rebellion of October 1641 added
further fuel to the fire as it now raised the question of who (Parliament or Crown) would
control the English armed forces to suppress the rebellion. The eventual outcome of these
insoluble conflicts between Crown and Parliament, representing two fundamentally different conceptions of sovereignty, was the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1642.
Social forces in the making of the British Revolution
In examining the character of class conflicts in the making of this first ‘stage’ in the
English Revolution, traditional social explanations have focused on the role of the rising
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gentry — conceived as an emerging bourgeois class — as the key social force in the
making of the ‘Great Revolution’ of 1640 (see Hill, 1940; Tawney, 1941). The two sides
in the Civil War, parliamentary forces and royalists, are thus considered agents of two
opposing classes representing antagonistic modes of production: a rising capitalism and
a declining feudalism. The traditional interpretation has not fared well with more contemporary historiographical accounts and has been largely abandoned (see Brenner,
1993: 638–644; Carlin, 1999: chs 3, 4). One problem with this interpretation has been the
difficulty in identifying the continuing existence of a distinctly feudal class to which the
ascendant capitalist bourgeoisie was opposed since, by the time of the English Civil
Wars, the ruling landed classes were, according to Robert Brenner (1993: 642), ‘by and
large … capitalist, in the sense of depending on commercial farmers paying competitive
rents, rather than one that was sharply divided into advanced and backward sectors’. For
the ‘revisionists’ and their Political Marxist counterparts, pre-revolutionary English society is thus conceived as fully capitalist, calling into question any classification of the
years between 1640 and 1688 as inaugurating a bourgeois revolution (cf. Lacher, 2006:
77; Teschke, 2003: 165–167; Wood, 1999: 63).
Yet, the extent of Brenner’s and other revisionists’ depiction of such a thoroughgoing
capitalist transformation of pre-revolutionary English society remains open to much
debate. As Henry Heller (2011: 120–121) has pointed out, the nobility in North-Western
England remained an outpost of feudal reaction and royalist stronghold throughout the
period. Using Brenner’s own conception of capitalism as existing with the full commodification of labour-power, Robert Albritton (1993) has similarly argued that English agriculture could not be considered completely capitalist in the early 17th century. Moreover,
if we are to take quantitative measures regarding the extent of proletarianization in
England from the mid- to late 16th century, it would appear that English society was only
slightly more advanced than the European continent (compare figures in Tilly, 1984:
35–36; Whittle, 2001: 227–231).
In short, the feudal ‘remnants’ of English society had yet to be fully washed away by
the building capitalist tide in the period preceding the revolution. It would therefore be
more accurate to characterize English society over the 15th to 17th centuries as a combined form of development wherein feudalism and capitalism coexisted, interacted and
fused in various ways, with the latter progressively coming to predominate in the immediate pre-1640 period in ways facilitating the conditions for revolution (cf. Anievas and
Nişancıoğlu, forthcoming: ch. 6). Important to note here is how these processes of socioeconomic change assisting the development of capitalism over the period were very
much ‘a result and part of an international process, involving foreign trade, changes in
intra-European relations following on from the discovery of the Americas, and the rivalry
of rising mercantile powers in Europe’ (Halliday, 1999: 187; cf. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu,
forthcoming: chs 3–6).
With this said, there nonetheless remain other problems with the traditional interpretations, not the least of which is the fact that capitalists could be found, as R.H. Tawney
admitted, ‘on both sides’ of the contending parties (quoted in Davidson, 2012: 353; cf.
Tawney, 1941: 18). While disagreeing with Brenner’s (1993) characterization of pre1640 English society as fully capitalist, his alternative social interpretation is, indeed, a
powerful one. Particularly useful is Brenner’s account of the political role played by
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different segments of capitalists comprising the London merchant community during the
Civil Wars. Specifically, Brenner delineates two distinct factions of merchant capital:
one dominant faction centred around the City, tied to the East India Company and importing from the Levant; and a second faction of ‘new merchants’ coming from outside the
City and connected to the American colonial trades. While the former faction relied
heavily on the Crown for politically protected trade routes and monopolies, the latter was
much less dependent on the state, given their socio-economic backgrounds, as they were
excluded from government-sanctioned charter companies. It was this second faction
of colonial merchants — whom had begun the process of subsuming labour to capital
(cf. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, forthcoming: ch. 5) — that would come to play a leading
role in supporting Oliver Cromwell and the Independents during the revolution. These
merchants ‘stood at the head of the City popular movement and played a critical role in
connecting that movement to the national parliamentary opposition’, of which many
formed a crucial part of its leadership (Brenner, 1993: 317, 244).
The majority of parliamentary oppositionists were not, however, seeking a revolution,
but sought instead to roll back Charles’s absolutist state-building drive. Yet, once war
broke out, the intervention of social forces from below (the ‘middling sort’ comprised of
wage-labouring peasants, craftsmen, artisans and independent small producers) pushed
parliamentary leaders in a more radical direction while driving much of the nobility and
gentry into the Royalist camp (Carlin, 1999: 162; Manning, 1991: chs 1–5). While the
parliamentary opposition never embraced the radical demands of the London crowds and
other sections of the ‘middling sort’, they nonetheless utilized the mass movement as a
vehicle to victory, which they secured in December 1648 through Cromwell’s New
Model Army. In an early case of substitutionism, it was this New Model Army that acted
as a surrogate for a capitalist class that, although economically dominant, was not yet
politically capable of assuming leadership in the new state, while also functioning as a
key agent of capital accumulation alongside the bourgeois classes (Davidson, 2012:
573). After the execution of Charles I, the monarchy was overthrown and the republican
Commonwealth of England declared.
Although the war had ended, the mass radicalism that it had unleashed did not. The
need to restore social order was foremost in the minds of the conservative landowning
gentry. Initially fearful of the Republic, the landed classes nonetheless (partially) reconciled themselves to Cromwell’s protectorate as it proved itself an effective bulwark
against radicalism and a protector of private property. However, when Cromwell’s successors proved themselves incapable of providing effective central government, the gentry ‘panicked, fearing as they had in the early 1650s that a social revolution would occur
unless effective central government was restored without delay’ (Coward, 1992: 217).
The result was the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, with Charles II taking the crown
in 1660. The restoration was not, however, a return to the status quo of pre-revolution
times, but rather continued the reforms of the post-revolutionary period.
Under the ‘whip of external necessity’ represented by the Anglo-Dutch wars of
1665–1667 and 1672–1674, and later during the Anglo-French wars of 1689–1714, the
English-cum-British state underwent a number of dramatic transformations, leading to
the emergence of a modern fiscal-military state capable of harnessing vast resources in
waging war. Indeed, the period witnessed a process of English state-building characterized
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by the assimilation of the most advanced fiscal, military and administrative practices
developed by the Dutch (Scott, 2000: 397–404). In this sense, the British state enjoyed a
certain ‘privilege of backwardness’ in comparison to its chief Dutch competitor. Yet, for
the English monarchy, it was the continental monarchies that remained the chief geopolitical models of emulation. When Charles II’s successor, James II, sought to repeat his
father’s effort to build an absolutist regime, he was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution
of 1688 and replaced by the invading forces of William of Orange from the Netherlands
(see Pincus, 2009). The primary aim of the Dutch invasion was to co-opt England to the
Dutch-led war against the French, to which William was successful. Once again, European
geopolitics decisively intervened in (re)shaping English state–society relations.
The sum result of the socio-economic and political changes taking place over the
revolutionary epoch of 1640 to 1688 was the establishment of a form of state conducive
to the maximization of capitalist development:
what emerged [from the revolution] was a state in which the administrative organs that most
impeded capitalist development had been abolished … in which the executive was subordinated
to the men of property, deprived of control over the judiciary, and yet strengthened in external
relations by a powerful navy and the Navigation Act; in which local government was safely and
cheaply in the hands of the natural ruler, and discipline was imposed on the lower orders by a
Church safely subordinated to Parliament. (Hill, 1985: 117)
Nonetheless, the revolutionary process was not yet complete as the newly capitalist
English state still faced internal and external systemic threats. Abroad, the single greatest
counter-revolutionary threat to England was the French absolutist state. At home, the
counter-revolutionary threat lay in Scotland, which, in contrast to the maturing capitalist
order in England, remained an outpost of feudal reaction. After the Union of 1707, this
systemic unevenness of development between the two hitherto separate monarchies was
transformed into a unique pattern of combined development, juxtaposing and fusing the
most ‘archaic’ and ‘advanced’ social relations in contradictory and explosive ways.8
Within the British state, a ruling class of feudal lords persisted in the Scottish countryside, drawing their wealth in the form of feudal rents, while, in England, the landed
ruling classes were now predominately capitalist. At the same time, after the 1707 Union,
Scottish industries began to rapidly assimilate the most highly advanced English technologies and organizational methods, experiencing the kinds of ‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’ that would come to characterize future combined forms of
capitalist development (see Davidson, 2003).
However, as long as feudalism existed in Scotland, the consolidation of capitalism in
Britain remained perilously incomplete, liable to systemic reversal. The Union was correctly perceived by the Scottish Jacobite lords as a threat to their socio-economic status
and territorial privileges and they would come to gamble on counter-revolution as a
means to preserve themselves as the ruling class. The final episode came in 1745 when
nearly the whole of the English army was sent to Belgium to fight France during the War
of Austrian Succession, providing the Jacobites with the opportunity to overthrow the
Hanover monarchy. The Jacobite uprising was crushed, leading to the enactment of a
number of legislative acts (notably, the Tenures Abolition Act and Disarming Act of 1746
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and Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1747) signalling the end of feudalism in Scotland and
thus the culmination of the British bourgeois revolution (Davidson, 2003: ch. 6).
The year 1789 in the history of uneven and combined
development
Capitalism and the absolutist state in France
If the English case of bourgeois revolution represents an instance where an alreadyexisting capitalist order was consolidated by the overthrow of the socio-political conditions obstructing its advancement, the French Revolution signifies a very different case:
one where the dominance of the capitalist production mode was a consequence of the
revolutionary settlement. This is not to argue that capitalist relations were entirely absent
from pre-revolutionary France, nor that the absolutist state was entirely detrimental to
capitalist development. Indeed, the notion of the fundamentally non-capitalist nature of
French absolutism has become something of a cardinal tenet among many revisionists
and Political Marxists (see, e.g., Brenner, 1985; Comninel, 1987; Lacher, 2006: 73–76;
Mooers, 1991: 45–102; Taylor, 1967; Teschke, 2003: 167–188; Wood, 1999: 79–80,
103–105). For the latter, absolutist France is conceived as the non-modern Other to the
impeccably ‘pristine’ capitalist England.
Positing the ‘radically non-capitalist’ (Lacher, 2006: 77) nature of French absolutism,
Political Marxists have accepted the main findings of the revisionist historiography of
the French Revolution: though the leaders of the French Revolution may have been bourgeois, they were emphatically not capitalist and the socio-economic order resulting from
the revolutionary settlement ‘entrenched rather than removed pre-capitalist forms’
(Wood, 1999: 121). What is more, the entire theoretical edifice of Marx and Engels’s
conception of bourgeois revolutions is questioned, given that they are alleged to have
‘uncritically accepted the liberal theory of bourgeois revolution in their early works’
(Teschke, 2003: 165; cf. Brenner, 1989; Comninel, 1987: 53–76, 104–178; Lacher, 2006:
77; Wood, 1999: 62–63). On both empirical and theoretical grounds, then, the idea of a
bourgeois revolution in France is refuted and, more generally, the concept is relegated to
the dustbin of history (see Teschke, 2005).
Here, we leave aside the exegetical question as to whether Marx and Engels’s conception of bourgeois revolutions reflects an uncritically digested liberal theory of sociopolitical change9 and instead concentrate on the empirical foundations of revisionist and
Political Marxist claims regarding the fundamentally non-capitalist nature of French
absolutism. On closer inspection, it would seem that such arguments are based upon an
overly static conception of French development during the pre-revolutionary period.
Indeed, a number of recent works on the French economy during the period have offered
a more rounded picture of its development (cf. Chevet, 2009; Heller, 2000, 2002, 2009a,
2009b; Hoffman, 1996; Horn, 2006, 2010; Lemarchand, 1990). As Henry Heller (2000,
2009a) has shown, capitalist social forces were already making themselves felt in late
16th-century France, particularly through the effects of the Wars of Religion (1562–1598),
which, despite the general economic decline during the wars, acted as a long-term stimulus
to technological and economic innovations during the reign of Henry IV. The Wars of
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Religion also hastened the process of primitive accumulation taking place in the French
countryside, where poorer peasants were uprooted from the land, resulting in widespread
proletarianization and the revaluation of land as capital. Consequently, by the 17th century, nearly three-quarters of the peasantry were deprived of the necessary means of
production (land) to support themselves. Furthermore, by the beginning of the century,
estimates show that as much as 22% of the rural workforce in France was engaged in
industry (Heller, 2000: 257).
Accompanying this process of primitive accumulation was an increasing differentiation among the peasantry between a mass of wage-labourers and a nascent rural bourgeoisie (Ado, 1990; Lemarchand, 1990). At the same time, feudal rights over the
management, sale and acquisition of property were increasingly weakened as peasants
became more or less able to dispose of their property on the market (Heller, 2009a: 41–
42, 44; cf. Heller, 2000). This process of primitive accumulation would continue over the
18th century as peasant proprietorship steadily declined, particularly in the last decades
of the ancien régime, as the French countryside emerged as a region of significant capitalist experimentations (see Vardi, 1993). In a recent study, Gérard Béaur concluded that
up to 90% of the rural population in 18th-century France did not have enough land to
support themselves, with about 20% being completely landless (cited in Heller, 2009b:
47). Hence, by the early 18th century, the ‘availability of growing pools of cheap wagelabour became a structural feature of the French economy’ (Heller, 2009a: 55, emphasis
added). Alongside this increasing mass of market-dependent wage-labourers, 18thcentury France also witnessed the emergence of a sizeable capitalist bourgeoisie primarily made up of merchants, artisans, shopkeepers and the paysannerie marchande. On
Colin Jones’s (1998: 165) calculations, the French bourgeoisie grew over the century
from approximately 700,000–800,000 individuals in 1700 to about 2.3 million in 1789,
making up nearly 10% of the population. Citing the spread of commercialization in prerevolutionary France, Jones (1998: 174) argues that France witnessed the relative ‘bourgeoisification’ of the Old Regime as the tastes and attitudes of the bourgeoisie permeated
French society, ‘challenging the former hegemony of the aristocracy’ (Lewis, 1999: 15).
As even the revisionist historian William Doyle (1989: 22–23) notes:
the relative weight of the bourgeoisie in society was increasing ever more rapidly than their
numbers. Their share of national wealth was enormous. Most industrial and all commercial
capital, amounting to almost a fifth of all French private wealth, was bourgeois owned.
One might criticize the use of the term ‘bourgeoisie’ here as conflating it with a distinctly
capitalist class, instead of viewing it as a non-capitalist bourgeoisie, as the term was used
in the 18th century to refer to town-dwellers or anyone holding non-noble status.
However, as noted, a growing fraction of this broader bourgeoisie derived their incomes
from the exploitation of wage-labour. While a non-capitalist bourgeoisie surely existed
in pre-revolutionary France, much of this bourgeoisie was decisively transformed in a
capitalist direction over the 17th and 18th centuries. It was during this period that France
underwent an era of dramatic socio-economic development, characterized by substantial
growth in manufacturing and agriculture, making the country arguably the ‘strongest
economy in continental Europe’ (Heller, 2009b: 14).
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Statistical indexes confirm the vibrant and dynamic nature of French economic development during the period. French industrial output grew on an annual basis by 1.9%
between 1701–1710 and 1781–1790, as compared with 1.1% in Britain. By the beginning of the 18th century, industry made up about a quarter of France’s total output, as
compared with a third in Britain. By 1780, industry accounted for two-thirds in both
countries. Further, by 1789, the iron industry in France was significantly larger than in
Britain, producing nearly two-and-a-half times the tonnage. Overall, France’s manufacturing output was approximately three times as great as Britain’s in 1789 (Duplessis,
1997: 242; Horn, 2006: 89). Moreover, the increase in industrial output per head in
France during the 18th century was likely faster than that in Britain (Milward and Saull,
2013: 31). From 1715 to 1785, the British economy grew by about 50%, as compared
with the expansion of the French economy by nearly 100%, while the annual average
growth of the French economy between 1701–1710 and 1781–1790 was 1%, as compared with 0.7% for Britain (Heller, 2009b: 40). Between 1716–1720 and 1784–1788,
France’s external commerce multiplied by a factor of three, against a British expansion
of 2.4. As such, by the end of the 1780s, France had become the largest trading power in
Europe, with a total value of long-distance trade equalling £25 million, trumping Britain,
whose trade amounted to £20 million (Daudin, 2004: 144).
Despite this impressive growth over the 18th century, and while leading in certain
economic sectors over Britain, the French economy did nonetheless remain relatively
‘backward’ as compared with its chief economic and geopolitical competitor. Like its
English predecessor, France reaped a certain ‘privilege of backwardness’, adopting
numerous technological innovations from its more advanced British competitor (see
Heller, 2009b: 38–39; Horn, 2010: 88–92). Yet, as demonstrated, absolutist France was
far from the developmental ‘dead-end’ (Teschke, 2003: 192) that revisionists have made
it out to be.
Nevertheless, capitalist relations were not yet dominant in pre-revolutionary France
as feudal methods of extra-economic exploitation remained salient. Despite the development of a substantial bourgeoisie, the aristocracy continued to dominate — if not monopolize — political power, with the nobles occupying most key positions in the army, navy
and judiciary (Lewis, 1999: 14). The growing socio-economic weight of French capitalists had not yet been transformed into direct political power. How, then, might we conceptualize the pre-revolutionary French social structure?
Some historians have conceived of French absolutism as a ‘transitional’ social formation, amalgamating features of both feudalism and capitalism. Such was the view of
Perry Anderson, who described the absolutist states of Western Europe as ‘a complex of
feudal and capitalist modes of production, with a gradually rising urban bourgeois and a
growing primitive accumulation of capital, on an international scale’ (Anderson, 1974:
428–429). Similarly, Neil Davidson (2012: 587) speaks of the ‘transitional, combined
nature of the [pre-1789] French economy’ [emphasis in original].
French absolutism represented a distinctive form of combined development, albeit
one dominated by its feudal aspects. The absolutist state denoted a transfigured form of
the separation of the political and the economic that characterized the emergence of capitalism in England. Despite the growing significance of capitalist relations in town and
country, which witnessed the divorcing of the producers from direct relations of personal
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domination and dependency characteristic of feudalism, the state remained a locus of
economic dependency through the sale of venal offices.10 Absolutist France was thus
marked by what Kamran Matin (2013: 204) has described as ‘personal independence
based upon dependence mediated by the state’ [emphasis in original],11 where differential access to the state apparatus was a key source of conflict. The particular ‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’ engendered by this pattern of U&CD in France, in
turn, witnessed ‘the precarious compromise between the building of a modern state and
the preservation of principles of social organization inherited from feudal times’ (Furet,
1981: 110). It was not simply that feudal and capitalist relations coexisted in pre-revolutionary France, but that they were ‘inextricably interlaced in the society of the Old
Regime forming a conflictual unity’ in which ‘[m]ixed forms of property and hybrid
social groups played an important role on the eve of the revolution [emphasis added]’
(Ado, 1990: 364).
The origins of the bourgeois revolution in France
If Political Marxists are incorrect in their characterizations of the French absolutist state
as radically non-capitalist, they are on more solid ground in foregrounding the role of
international rivalries in precipitating the revolutionary crisis. As Colin Mooers (1991:
93–94) writes:
It was through state military competition that the backwardness of French productive relations
was initially, and disastrously, demonstrated. The coercive force of England’s more advanced
system of social relations was experienced by France in a succession of military defeats and the
ultimate bankruptcy of the absolutist state.
It was this ‘whip of external necessity’, represented by the internationally mediated modernizing challenge of capitalist Britain, that occasioned the revolutionary crisis in France.
In this sense, the British Revolution of the previous century had laid down the ‘geosocial’ conditions for the French Revolution as the international terrain on which France
had to compete in the 18th century had been radically transformed by the social order
inaugurated by the British Revolution. The differential developmental trajectories
between Britain and France (uneven development) and their attendant geopolitical and
sociological consequences (combined development) were thus critical to the making of
the French Revolution.
Throughout the 18th century, British power had been steadily increasing, buoyed by
the country’s predominance in American trade and markets. Those states that held colonies or access to the Atlantic system were provided significant economic-cum-military
advantages. In this sense, the European balance of power of the 18th century was built
on the pedestal of the Atlantic slave trade. As French Secretary of State (1761–1766)
César Gabriel de Choiseul put it:
in the present state of Europe it is colonies, trade and in consequence sea power, which must
determine the balance of power upon the continent. The House of Austria, Russia, the King of
Prussia are only powers of the second rank, as are all those which cannot go to war unless
subsidized by the trading powers. (Quoted in Kennedy, 1989: 147)
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A central aim of French foreign policy was, then, as Foreign Minister Vergennes stated,
to ‘reduce England to a position of equality … to take from her a share of her strength,
her monopoly of American trade and markets’ (quoted in Stone, 2004: 19). It was with
this aim in mind that the French regime would embroil itself in a series of costly colonial
wars, particularly the Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) and the American War of
Independence (1778–1783), which would ultimately bankrupt the regime. This geopolitically driven bankruptcy was the immediate ‘trigger’ for the revolutionary crisis of
1787–1788, when, having borrowed until no more money was forthcoming, the new
comptrôleur-général, Calone, sought to implement a radical programme of reforms —
taxes on all landowners irrespective of rank and the creation of new provincial assemblies — which provoked the political crisis leading to the monarchy’s downfall (Lewis,
1999: 21–22). The state’s fiscal crisis not only came to increasingly loosen the ideological and political cohesion of the French ruling classes, but also translated into an ‘unbearable’ tax burden on the peasantry (Matin, 2013: 51), fuelling widespread social discontent
and rebellion in the countryside (Lewis, 1999: 60).
The economic crisis affecting France at the time was, however, of a more general
nature. Signs of economic troubles had emerged in several key economic sectors as early
as the 1760s. According to some, ‘the economic slowdown marked the exhaustion
of further possibilities for accumulation within the system’ (Heller, 2009b: 67;
cf. Lemarchand, 1990). Further industrial development was blocked owing to a shortage of
capital; stagnation had become apparent in various branches of industry, reflecting insufficient demand at home in a time of growing protectionism; the agricultural economy
was affected by severe grain shortages in 1788–1789; and manufacturing was further
weakened by the Treaty of Eden of 1786, lowering tariffs between France and Britain
(Heller, 2009b: 67–71). The second half of the 18th century was also marked by a notable escalation in urban violence and peasant conflict: nearly three-quarters of the 4400
recorded collective protests in the years 1720–1788 occurred after 1765, mostly in the
form of food riots and anti-seigneurialism (McPhee, 2002: 33). These were, in part, a
consequence of the increasing burden of taxes on the labouring classes (Lewis, 1999:
60). The nobility were also further squeezing the peasantry by usurping communal rights
and increasing feudal charges on their tenants (Heller, 2009b: 69). In short, the Old
Regime was in crisis.
Decisive in the immediate conjuncture of revolution, the role of ‘the international’ in
the long-term (structural) origins of the revolution was also significant as 18th-century
France witnessed a series of geopolitically induced social transformations, preparing
the conditions for the regime’s eventual collapse. Over the 17th and 18th centuries, the
French regime gradually shifted from a relatively defensive foreign policy posture visa-vis the Habsburgs to a more expansionist foreign policy on the continent and overseas. The domestic effects of this transformation in France’s foreign relations were
decisive in laying the conditions for the 1789 revolution. Bailey Stone (2004: 260) lists
the key developments emerging from this ‘dynamic interplay between international and
domestic forces’ as including ‘the proliferation of venal offices, the deepening divisions
within the army, the gradual reduction of social-status-related tax exemptions, and
the growing constitutional confrontation between the crown and the tax-resisting
parlements of the realm’. These changes, wrought by the attempt to uphold French
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absolutism in a changing international context, increasingly came into conflict with the
social and ideological basis of the ancien régime — upholding noble privilege and the
monarchical state.
In order to fund the Bourbon monarchy’s belligerent foreign policy, the French state
sold off enormous numbers of noble titles and even more offices conferring nobility or
enhanced social status. Scholars have estimated that as many as 10,000 people were
ennobled over the century: ‘Multiplied by five for the families who inherited noble
status from their newly ennobled heads, this gives a minimum total of 32,500 or a maximum of 50,000 new nobles during the eighteenth century’ (Stone, 2004: 42). The purchase of ennobling offices thereby acted as a key means of bourgeois infiltration into
French society’s elite ranks, ‘into its central and provincial administration, its financial
apparatus, its judiciary, and its armed forces’ (Stone, 2004: 42). The overall effect was
to decisively increase the weight of the bourgeoisie within France’s political order as
the ‘government was driven by geostrategic and derivative fiscal necessity to encourage
the assimilation of “new” civilian officeholding (or “robe”) nobility to older military (or
“sword”) noblesse, and of wealthy bourgeoisie to recent “robe” nobility’ (Stone, 2004:
42). ‘In this sense’, Stone (2004: 42) concludes, ‘the crown was indeed an agent of
social evolution … of the metamorphosis of exclusive nobility into more inclusive
“notability”’.
Yet, despite the mass of office sales to replenish the state’s ailing finances, it was actually becoming more difficult for the bourgeoisie to become nobles as increases in offices
failed to keep pace with the dramatic expansion of the bourgeoisie over the 18th century
(cf. Doyle, 1984; Lucas, 1973). Moreover, intensified competition and increased office
prices meant that a more aspirant bourgeoisie than ever were failing to purchase their
way up the social ladder, consequently fuelling bourgeois resentment against the old
order (Doyle, 1984: 858). The traditional means of social promotion were therefore contracting in the final years of the Old Regime. It was hardly surprising, then, that when the
Estates General met in May–June 1789, the bourgeoisie of the Third Estate was overwhelmingly in favour of a single chamber that it would dominate.
The ensuing revolution sparked by the geopolitically induced bankruptcy of the state
would see the bourgeoisie act as a chief leader of the revolutionary movement throughout its phases. Reviewing the social backgrounds of those who held office during the
revolution, Lynn Hunt (1984: 117) writes:
The revolutionary political class can be termed ‘bourgeois’ both in terms of social position and
of class consciousness. The revolutionary officials were the owners of the means of production;
they were either merchants with capital, professionals with skills, artisans with their own shops,
or more rarely, peasants with land…. The ‘consciousness’ of the revolutionary elite can be
labelled insofar as it was distinctly anti-feudal, anti-aristocratic, and anti-absolutist.
The bourgeois revolution in France was, indeed, exceptional for the leadership role that
the bourgeois played in it. Yet, the bourgeoisie had not originally sought to overthrow the
ancien régime, but instead to merely reform the state. It was only under the pressure of
counter-revolution from both within and without and popular pressures from below —
especially through the intervention of the peasantry — that the bourgeoisie were driven,
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particularly under the Jacobins, to smash the old order (Callinicos, 1989: 146–147;
Hobsbawm, 1996: 60–62; Soboul, 1998: 32).
However, was the socio-political order established by the revolution conducive to
capitalist development? A main argument against the notion of a French bourgeois revolution is that the post-revolutionary regime was actually antithetical to capitalist modernization. If bourgeois revolutions are to be understood in terms of their outcomes, an
anti-capitalist revolutionary settlement would surely pose a problem. According to
George Comninel (1987: 202), the French Revolution:
did very little in the way of transforming the essential social relations of production … it did
not produce capitalist society. Instead, the Revolution further entrenched small-scale peasant
production, and with it the extraction of agrarian surplus through rent, mortgages, etc.
What are we to make of such arguments?
First, to judge the essential character of a revolution, one must look at its consequences in its temporal totality (i.e. 1789–1815). The issue is not whether capitalist conditions were immediately established, but whether the outcome of the revolution was
conducive to capitalist development in the medium to long term. From this perspective,
it seems indisputable that the revolution established the socio-political conditions for
capitalist development. As Albert Soboul (1998: 32) writes:
By wiping the slate clean of all feudal vestiges, by liberating the peasants of seigniorial rights
and ecclesiastical tithes, and to a certain degree from community constraints, by destroying the
trade monopolies and unifying the national market, the French Revolution marked a decisive
stage on the path to capitalism. Suppressing feudal landed property, it even freed small direct
producers, making possible the differentiation of the peasant mass and its polarization between
capital and wage labor. This led to entirely new relations of production; capital, once under
feudal domination, was able to make the value of work mercenary. In this way, the autonomy
of capitalist production was finally assured in the agricultural domain as well as the industrial
sector.
Further, in an early instance of what can be retrospectively understood as a state capitalist form of substitutionism, the Committee of Public Safety nationalized the existing
armouries and built a massive new armaments manufacturer in Paris (employing over
5000 wage-labourers) and more elsewhere. The majority of furnaces and forges (over a
thousand) were confiscated from the ecclesiastics and nobles by the state and rented out
and operated by the so-called maîtres de forges, who were bourgeois in origin. Under the
Directory and later Napoleon, these industries were then sold off to these same individuals, who came to rapidly centralize ownership and control over the 1789–1815 period.
‘The stage was set for a future transformation of this industry — key to the development
of nineteenth century industrial capitalism — under the auspices of the maîtres de forges
who now operated these means of production as their private property’ (Davidson, 2012:
532; cf. Heller, 2009b: 90, 96, 103).
Second, the revisionist view that the agrarian settlement established by the revolution,
which entrenched a smallholding peasantry supposedly retarding agricultural innovation, has been forcefully challenged by more recent studies (see Chevet, 2009; Heller,
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2009b: 99–103; McPhee, 1989). Comninel’s and others’ conclusions regarding the detrimental effect of small-scale peasant production on capitalist development essentially
assimilates the road taken by French agrarian capitalism to the large-scale capitalist tenant farming of the English model. Yet, this merely reproduces the kind of unilinear conceptions of socio-historical development characteristic of modernization theories,
whereby the ‘raison d’etre of agrarian society should have been to increase productivity
along English lines’ (McPhee, 1989: 1280). According to Anatolii Ado, if the rapid
development of agrarian capitalism was inhibited during the 19th century, it was an
effect of the persistence of large property and the burden of rent, not small peasant property. Hence, ‘the popular revolution of the petty producers ought to be seen as an essential element of the capitalist dynamic characteristic of this upheaval’ (Heller, 2009b:
103). As Peter McPhee (1989: 1276) concludes:
the economic, social, and ultimately political changes in the French countryside in the nineteenth
century are best understood as a slow extension of ‘simple commodity production’, that
‘historical premis’ of capitalism, whose full capacity as the ‘really revolutionising path’ was
limited by the ‘retrograde’ effects of large property rented in small holding.
Although French agriculture lagged behind Britain’s throughout the 19th century, this
should not be interpreted as a denial of its capitalist character. For the outcome of the
revolution’s agrarian settlement ‘undoubtedly benefitted the “really existing” capitalist
class in France as opposed to some ideal construct derived from comparison with
England’ (Callinicos, 1989: 151). Moreover, one would expect that the path of French
capitalist development would diverge from that of England as the international conditions of its emergence had been dramatically transformed. Indeed, one of the key reasons
why French industrialization, like much of the European continent, diverged from the
British path was due to the more serious revolutionary threat emanating from below
(Horn, 2010). While deviating from the British model, France was, in fact, comparatively successful in its industrial drive as ‘industry grew relatively rapidly in the period
1815 to 1850 when the era of war ended’ (Horn, 2010: 99; cf. Horn, 2006).
The international effects of the French Revolution were no less profound as the revolution and Napoleonic Wars decisively transformed the 19th-century geopolitical order
and, consequently, the form that subsequent bourgeois revolutions would take. Regarding
the former, Metternich’s ‘Concert of Europe’ inaugurating the so-called ‘Hundred Years
Peace’ was conceived as a conscious reaction to the revolutionary forces unleashed by
1789 as conservative European state managers sought to balance against both states in
the international system and radical social forces at home (see Halperin, 2004). The radicalization of the French Revolution was also viewed by the European ruling classes as a
warning sign of things to come, while inhibiting the bourgeoisie to play their ‘assigned’
revolutionary roles lest the ‘underclasses’ got out of hand, as witnessed in the revolutions
of 1848–1849.
Subsequent revolutions in Europe and beyond would thus come to take the form of
‘revolutions from above’, or what Gramsci called ‘passive revolutions’: largely elitedriven affairs limiting the popular participation of the subaltern classes — as exemplified
in the Italian, German and Japanese revolutionary experiences of the late 19th century
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— and involving ‘molecular’ processes of transformation, ‘progressively modify[ing]
the pre-existing composition of forces’ in the ruling classes’ ‘gradual but continuous
absorption of its ‘“antithesis”’ (the proletariat) (Gramsci, 1971: 58, 109). The European
ruling classes had learned the lessons of the French bourgeoisie, heeding Bismarck’s
advice of 1866 that ‘[i]f revolution there is to be, let us rather undertake it than undergo
it’ (quoted in Gall, 1986: 305). Under the transformed ‘geo-social’ milieu handed down
by the experience of 1789, passive revolutions would become the primary means through
which later-developing states would achieve their own bourgeois revolutions. Such revolutions can be thus conceived as organically emerging from the transfigured worldhistorical conditions unleashed by the ‘Great Transformation’ and its political consequences, heralding a particularly intense form of U&CD generalized through the rise of
a distinctly capitalist world economy (see Allinson and Anievas, 2010).
Conclusion
As this article has shown, international relations have been causally decisive in the origins, dynamics and outcomes of revolutions. In turn, revolutions have been essential
features in the development and reproduction of geopolitical orders, instilling them with
distinct social logics and purposes. International relations have, then, been concerned not
only with the problems of war and peace, but, fundamentally tied to these, with ‘the
management of change in domestic political orders’ (Rosenberg, 1994: 35). Only by
grasping revolutions in these international dimensions can one begin to fully understand
their world-historical meanings.
The re-conceptualization of bourgeois revolutions offered in this article has important
implications for both Marxist and IR theory. Regarding the former, it means a fundamental rethinking of historical materialism’s basic theoretical premises as it necessitates the
incorporation of a distinctly ‘international’ dimension of social development and reproduction into its guiding ‘general abstractions’. This can be seen to represent (in Lakatosian
terms) a ‘progressive problem-shift’ within the historical materialist research programme,
introducing and ‘stretching’ an auxiliary theory consistent with the ‘hard-core’ premises
of that programme. Rather than protecting these hard-core premises by limiting their
explanatory scope (‘monster-barring’) or identifying anomalies as exceptions or pathologies, the theory of U&CD aims to magnify the explanatory power of the original research
programme (cf. Anievas, 2014: ch. 2).
For IR theory, the preceding analysis challenges the persistent theoretical separation
of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ dimensions of social reality (Walker, 1993) at the heart of
mainstream IR. Capturing the fused linkages between revolutions and ‘the international’
requires a fundamental rethinking of some of the core categories of IR theory itself, such
as the ‘balance of power’, as their empirical referents necessarily cut across and interconnect with both ‘second-’ and ‘third-’level images of international relations, thereby
scrambling their hitherto assumed meanings. This not only means dispensing with the
‘national-territorial totality’ (Halliday, 1994: 78) as the primary ontological unit of analysis, but also requires the development of theoretical concepts capable of capturing the
multiple, interconnected spatial fields of social constitution and organization. Rather
than beginning with analytically distinct conceptualizations of discrete spheres of
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domestic and international politics that only subsequently interact, IR theory needs to be
reconstructed upon the foundations of wider macro-processes of socio-historical change,
as captured by U&CD. Only in these ways can we then begin to understand the interconnections between revolutions and international relations as organically emerging from a
unified process of world-historical development.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Pepijn Brandon, Henry Heller, Kamran Matin and Kerem Nişancıoğlu for comments on
earlier drafts. Usual disclaimers apply.
Funding
I would like to acknowledge the generous funding and support provided by the Leverhulme Trust.
Notes
1. However, see Stephen Walt’s (1997) attempt to fit revolutions within the system-level framework of neorealism, the result of which is the usual ‘external interaction’ model whereby
processes occurring at discretely conceived levels of analysis (revolutions in the ‘domestic’;
wars in the ‘international’) are theorized as externally interacting in a way that leaves the
basic ontological assumptions of the theory intact.
2. For our purposes here, capitalism may be defined as a historically distinct mode of production
characterized by the systemization of competitive accumulation primarily (but not exclusively) based on the exploitation of wage-labour (cf. Anievas and Nişancıoğlu, forthcoming).
3. I owe this formulation to one of the peer reviewers.
4. This approach partially compliments Kamran Matin’s (2013: 48, ch. 3) reformulation of bourgeois revolutions from the perspective of U&CD while nonetheless maintaining the consequentialist approach that he criticizes.
5. On processes of substitutionism being intrinsic to combined development, see Matin (2013:
19).
6. In order to avoid structural realist (mis)conceptions of ‘the international’ as an absolutely
autonomous, supra-social sphere of geopolitical interaction, the concepts of ‘the international’ and ‘international system’ as used here neither to denote a permanent state of anarchy
nor necessarily imply competition between discretely conceived political units in which the
autonomous logic of this competition dictates their strategies. I must thank one of the peer
reviewers for pushing me to clarify this important point.
7. Most notably, Scott (2000).
8. The analysis here is somewhat reminiscent of Gramsci’s (1994: ch. 4) discussion of the
‘Southern Question’ in Italy.
9. For a systematic refutation of this argument, see Davidson (2012: 133–180).
10. Offices sold by the state to raise additional taxes.
11. Here, Matin (2013) is describing the ‘rentier state’ of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran.
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Author biography
Alexander Anievas is an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the Department of Politics and
International Studies, University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Capital, the State, and
War: Class Conflict and Geopolitics in the Thirty Years’ Crisis, 1914–1945 (University of
Michigan Press, 2014) and co-author (with Kerem Nişancıoğlu) of How the West Came to Rule:
The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (Pluto Press, forthcoming). He has co-edited volumes on
The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology (Routledge, 2015),
with Richard Saull, Neil Davidson and Adam Fabry, and Race and Racism in International
Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2015), with Nivi Manchanda and
Robbie Shilliam, and is the editor of Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of
Modern World Politics (Brill Press, 2015). He is also an editorial member of the journal Historical
Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.
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