Many have hailed the half century beginning in 1770 as a revolutionary epoch in both Europe and the Americas. Some identify this with class and democracy – the “era of democratic revolutions” is Palmer's (1959) label – others with the revolutionary rise of nations across the two continents (Anderson 1983). Some countries did move toward nationalism and democracy; but most revolutions did not succeed, the French Revolution remained incomplete and the American was only ambiguously revolutionary. Moveover, these events inspired other regimes to avoid revolution by compromising with rising classes and nations. Their compromises proved of world-historical significance, for they were institutionalized in enduring forms. This chapter sums up what proved to be the main creative phase of modern Western history. The four greatest modern state crystallizations – capitalism, militarism, representation, and the national issue – were institutionalized together. And far from being opposites, classes and nations rose together, structured by all four sources of social power; and though rival segmental and local-regional organizations were diminished, they survived, transformed.

To explain all this, I start from the three power revolutions of the period. First, the economic revolution turned more on capitalism than on industrialism. Only in Britain (and lesser regions of Europe) did industrialization occur now, yet British distributive power changes were no greater than elsewhere. Chapter 4 shows how British industrialism was molded by a commercial capitalism that was already institutionalized.