ABSTRACT
Revolutions have always played a key role in the trajectory of history. As significant turning points in the history of societies and markers of change, they help historians to divide eras, centuries and decades into discrete frames of time. They are one of those ‘events’, along with war and the death of monarchs, for example, that form part of the periodisation so central to the historians’ task. We are most familiar with the term ‘revolution’ as applied to major periods of political upheaval and transformation, such as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. Neither of these, nor the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, could really be described as ‘events’ as such, although in the case of France and Russia, the dates 1789 and 1917 have acted as useful emblems both to signify the beginning of change and, in Ludmilla Jordanova’s words, ‘conjure up a whole historical era’. 1 What is more, the term ‘revolution’ has been applied to a range of political, economic, social and cultural transformations, where change has appeared to be radical and dramatic, and resulted in significant shifts in the structures, forms and power relations of societies. 2
