Social Revolutions in France, Russia, and China emerged from specifically political crises centered in the structures and situations of the old-regime states. The events of 1787-9 in France, of the first half of 1917 in Russia, and of 1911-16 in China not only undermined autocratic monarchical regimes but also disorganized centrally coordinated administrative and coercive controls over the potentially rebellious lower classes. The revolutionary crises developed when the old-regime states became unable to meet the challenges of evolving international situations. Monarchical authorities were subjected to new threats or to intensified competition from more economically developed powers abroad. And they were constrained or checked in their responses by the institutionalized relationships of the autocratic state organizations to the landed upper classes and the agrarian economies. Caught in cross-pressures between domestic class structures and international exigencies, the autocracies and their centralized administrations and armies broke apart, opening the way for social-revolutionary transformations spearheaded by revolts from below.

To understand the nature and causes of the political crises that launched the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions, we need a sense of the structures of the Old Regimes and of the conflicts to which they were prone in the times before the outbreaks of the Revolutions. We may begin with the fact that prerevolutionary France, Russia, and China were countries held together by autocratic monarchies focused upon tasks of maintaining internal order and of contending with external foes. In all three Old Regimes there were fully established imperial states — that is, differentiated, centrally coordinated administrative and military hierarchies functioning under the aegis of the absolute monarchies. These imperial states were proto-bureaucratic: Some offices, especially at higher levels, were functionally specialized; some officials or aspects of official duties were subject to explicit rules and hierarchical supervision; and the separation of state offices and duties from private property and pursuits was partially institutionalized (though in different particular ways) in each regime. None of these imperial states, however, was fully bureaucratic. Concomitantly, none was as fully centralized or powerful within society as a modern national state would be.