William St Clair
With Feeling
The opening premise of Tim Blanning’s attractive book is that there were three revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. More or less simultaneously, the Europeanised world experienced a ‘political revolution’ that began when most of the British mainland colonies in North America declared independence, to be soon followed by the violent overthrow of the old-regime governments in France and elsewhere; an ‘industrial revolution’, in which economies shifted from agriculture to manufacturing in factories; and a ‘romantic revolution’, which he describes as ‘a radically different approach to artistic creation’.
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