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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