Bryan A. Banks (BB): Hi Nathan. Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview. Your newest book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024), will be of great interest to readers of this site. In it, you argue that we can best understand the revolutionary epoch as split between two generations. The first generation fought against the social and political hierarchies of the old order and in the process learned lessons about political mobilization that they taught the next generation. That second generation had seen the violence of the preceding generation and sought political change that reinforced new types of social and racial inequalities. This generational approach is an elegant way of reframing the Age of Revolutions. Can you tell us how this thesis originated?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (NPR): Hi Bryan! Thanks so much for inviting me on here to talk about The Age of Revolutions—and for the very kind words about the book.
I came to the generational thesis gradually, for sure; I would say it emerged when I was midway through the research and just starting to try to get my arms around how to organize the writing. What had struck me during the early phases of research was that I was seeing more commonalities than I expected among revolutionary movements that occurred around the same time, even when they developed in far-flung places. I was startled by the similarities that I perceived, for instance, between aspects of the American Revolution and the uprisings in South America in the early 1780s: the central role of creole elites in both, for instance, or the difficulties that patriots faced in surmounting internal divisions. And some of these similarities seemed to extend beyond the Americas, for instance to at least the early stages of the French Revolution.
As my research pushed into the nineteenth century, the chronological divide that I perceived became more and more pronounced. The scale of political organizing changed significantly after 1800, in both Europe and the Americas. (Though the forms that this took, as I discuss at length in the book, were quite different from region to region.) The way that revolutionaries talked about their political projects changed as well. I became convinced that something really fundamental had shifted around 1800. But what? My search for an answer to that question was what brought me to generations.
Generations provides a way of talking about significant changes in culture and political outlook that grounds them in lived experience and material realities. I’m not interested in the idea of generational zeitgeist or some kind of gauzy notion of a new “spirit.” A generational transition is a material shift—in which one group of human beings is replaced by another—and that rising cohort can have a meaningfully different outlook on the world, by virtue of their distinct experiences of the world as a group.