The repercussions of the Atlantic revolutions reverberated far beyond their points of origin and persisted long after those upheavals had been concluded. Britain’s loss of its North American colonies, for example, fueled its growing interest and interventions in Asia, contributing to British colonial rule in India and the Opium Wars in China. Napoleon’s brief conquest of Egypt opened the way for a modernizing regime to emerge in that ancient land and stimulated westernizing reforms in the Ottoman Empire (see Reform and Its Opponents). During the nineteenth century, the idea of a “constitution” found advocates in Poland, Latin America, Spanish-ruled Philippines, China, the Ottoman Empire, and British-governed India.
Within Europe, which was generally dominated by conservative governments following Napoleon’s final defeat, smaller revolutionary eruptions occurred in 1830, more widely in 1848, and in Paris in 1870. They expressed ideas of republicanism, greater social equality, and national liberation from foreign rule. Such ideas and social pressures pushed the major states of Western Europe, the United States, and Argentina to enlarge their voting publics, generally granting universal male suffrage by 1914. An abortive attempt to establish a constitutional regime even broke out in autocratic Russia in 1825. It was led by military officers who had been influenced by ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution while campaigning in Europe against Napoleon. More generally, the American and French revolutions led sympathetic elites in Central Europe and elsewhere to feel that they had fallen behind, that their countries were “sleeping.” As early as 1791, a Hungarian poet gave voice to such sentiments: “O you still in the slave’s collar . . . And you too! Holy consecrated kings . . . turn your eyes to Paris! Let France set out the fate of both king and shackled slave.”17
Beyond these echoes of the Atlantic revolutions, three major movements arose to challenge continuing patterns of oppression or exclusion. Abolitionists sought the end of slavery; nationalists hoped to foster unity and independence from foreign rule; and feminists challenged male dominance. Each of these movements bore the marks of the Atlantic revolutions, and although they took root first in Europe and the Americas, each came to have a global significance in the centuries that followed.