Writing the History of Modern Revolutions: (Writing History)

Writing the History of Modern Revolutions provides students with a comprehensive overview of the history of revolutions and how these histories have been framed, debated, and understood since the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 19th century with historical accounts of the French Revolution, the book traces how contemporary politics and new developments in the humanities and social sciences have shaped existing scholarship and analysis of revolutionary phenomenon. Not only this, but the book also offers a concise and synthetic account of how scholars have addressed contemporary critical political and social issues in a historical context, which will be of value to both scholars across disciplines as well as students taking courses in political science, sociology, and modern history. The book will provide students with a solid understanding of some of the most dramatic moments in modern history, including Revolutions relevant to Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the post-colonial world. It will encourage students to think critically about how the history of modern revolutions have been written and provide them with a thorough understanding of the approaches to revolution, key works and scholars in the field, as well as an understanding of the wider contexts in which these revolutions occurred.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1.The Start of a Tradition 2. Marxism and Revolution as Social Process 3. Seeking the Structures of Revolution 4. A Return to the Political? 5. Revolution in Transnational and Non-Western Frameworks 6. What are Revolutions?: A Historical Perspective Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Gavin Murray-Miller is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Cardiff University, UK. He is the author of The Cult of the Modern: Trans-Mediterranean France and The Construction of French Modernity (2017) and Revolutionary Europe, (Bloomsbury 2020)

Review :
This fascinating book argues that revolutions and the modern discipline of history developed together. While historical narratives have sought to make sense of revolutionary episodes, these histories have, in turn, had a major impact on how revolutions are practised. Murray-Miller unpacks this dynamic process of meaning making with great subtlety in an elegantly written, well-crafted narrative that takes the reader from 18th century French republicans to 21st century militant Salafists. The result is a book of great dexterity and acumen. This is a must read for all students and scholars of revolutions. Since R. R. Palmer, Jacques Godechot and Eric Hobsbawm, the historiography of revolutions has grown and expanded from a Western- or Atlantic- focused area of scholarship into a field of research and critical reflection responding to global challenges. Gavin Murray-Miller offers his readers an extremely useful vade mecum to help them come to terms with the contours and multiplicity of directions marking the historiography of revolutions as global phenomena, at the same time reminding us, very reasonably, that the subject has a much longer lineage going back to the Abbé Raynal and, of course, Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and to the great historians, French and British, of the nineteenth century. A very welcome and sobering invitation to critical self- awareness addressed to historians of revolutions of all persuasions and to general readers wishing to understand the logic of the narrative of revolutionary change.