Today’s topic is random thoughts on revolution. Seems fitting somehow as I write on Thanksgiving Eve 2021. Thanksgiving is a uniquely American (i.e. U.S.) holiday, although it has nothing to do with the American Revolution per se.

First, for Thanksgiving I have purchased a 12-pack of the Yard’s breweries “beers of the revolution”. Yards claims to have based these recipes on ones found in the actual papers of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. However literally or loosely they have interpreted whatever is in those papers, these beers are all yummy! I plan to drink “George Washington’s Porter” on Thanksgiving itself.

Second, I have purchased the novel Invisible Sun by Charles Stross, which is next in the Merchant Princes series and came out just recently. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the idea of revolution plays a role in this series. In fact, there is a book that serves as a sort of cheat sheet for how to avoid the mistakes of revolutions past and successfully mix politically revolution with catch-up technological progress. They seem to manage just this, although they do not avoid the ravages of global warming. A slight spoiler is that the American Revolution is not the primary model for their revolution, and neither is the British Revolution, the French Revolution, or any other European revolution a mostly ignorant American might have heard of. Nor is it based on communism, although they do seem to have decent public transportation, which we here in the U.S. know is a Commie plot!

Partly inspired by Charles Stross, I read a book called The Shortest History of Europe and another called Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West: 1560-1991. I learned that there was something called a Dutch revolution, which I had no idea of. My knowledge of the British and French revolutions was mostly based on being forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, which is mostly about the French revolution. The other fictional account I thought was about the French Revolution was Les Miserables, which I looked up and it is not about the (1789) French Revolution, but takes place around the 1830s. Like I said, I’m ignorant. But it’s not really my fault – in the course of my grade school studies, I had no less than three full years of American history, plus a full year of Virginia history around fourth or fifth grade. Wouldn’t it make sense if we had at least a year of European history at some point, maybe around the same time we are forced to read A Tale of Two Cities? The history of classical Greece and Rome, followed by Europe, used to be called “western civilization”. That might not be politically correct these days – well, maybe a two-year course covering those topics in a larger context of world history would make equal sense.

Continuing my historical theme this fall, I also read (listed to) S.P.Q.R. by Mary Beard, a historian of ancient Rome. I enjoyed this much more than the European history. It all ties together in a few ways. First, the fall of the Roman Republic in the first century B.C. (we are supposed to say B.C.E. now), along with the instability in many European countries around the 1700s right through the 1900s, convinces me that long-term stable governments are definitely the exception and not the rule in human affairs. Stable forms of government, democratic or not, seem to often be measured in years to decades. Centuries definitely seem to be the except to the rule, and I am not aware of any form of government that persisted for a millennium or more. So you could say the U.S. is doing pretty well as it approaches to 250-year mark, but getting pretty long in the tooth. Changes in government are not always sudden or violent. The Roman emperors maintained many of the nominal institutions of the Republic on paper, such as the Senate, while gradually usurping their functions. In the end, the Roman empire did “fall” so much as fade away into regional enclaves mixed in with the quasi-international Catholic and Orthodox churches. The breakup of the British, French, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires mirror this in many ways, and there may be some parallels to U.S. retrenchment in parts of the world, although that history is far from settled. There are probably good examples in the Eastern and Southern Hemispheres too, but I will have to chip away on my ignorance of those another time!

One final thought – something that surprised me is that episodes of inflation are a common theme that often coincide with or trigger political instability in history. Maybe I will give this some more thought and attempt to say intelligent things about it another time.