Revolutions in the West

Five revolutions made the modern West.The English have an unchallenged genius for deniable, incremental change, in a constitution which they built up over a thousand years or so, but even they had two authentic revolutions, one in 1641 and one in 1689, and they had a gruesome civil war in between. Additionally, we shall look at the American War of Independence (starting in 1776), the French Revolution (starting in 1789) and the Russian Revolution (starting in 1917).
The recurring theme is the willingness of those who get into a club to slam the door in the faces of those coming after them. People who think that the glimmer called the Arab Spring can be dealt with inside, say, five generations may wish to reflect on the English experience, or the Russian, or even the agony of France for the century after 1789, or the guilt of the United States before it was purged by its Civil War.
This book first looks at the old regimes before each revolution, the crises in those regimes, and then looks separately at the five overthrows. The book looks at the terror in two of them, and draws conclusions about revolutions elsewhere. The fourth volume of A History of the West. 74,000 words fully annotated.