Reframing the Age of Revolutions is a Research Network supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) in 2022-23. It brings together scholars of different aspects of the ‘age of revolutions’ of c. 1750-1850.
The project asks two main questions. First, what are the contours of the ‘age of revolutions’, in space and areas of life? Originally referring to political and economic changes in the North Atlantic c. 1750-1850, the term ‘age of revolutions’ has come to be applied to an increasingly global range of locations, and across intellectual, cultural, scientific, and religious as well as political and economic history. Yet this expansion has not generally been accompanied by a re-examination of the conceptual framing of a ‘revolutionary age’. We therefore aim, initially, to bring historians with an interest in the age of revolutions, working on a wide variety of geographies and through a range of disciplinary approaches, into dialogue and debate with each other.
Second, we hope to move from this question to consider the nature of change in the ‘age of revolutions’. Is a single coherent explanation of a ‘revolutionary age’ possible? What were the ruptures and continuities? Should we think of uneven patterns of change in different spheres of human activity across time and space? In this second phase of the project, we will also consider parallels between 1750-1850 and the overlapping crises and rapid changes which we face in the 21st century.
