I was reading the column about Captain Bligh and the Mutiny on the Bounty, and I was wondering, why were people in the eighteenth century so fond of starting armed rebellions? The article talked about both the Bounty mutiny and the Rum Rebellion in Australia, but the Whiskey Rebellion and similar conflicts in America also came to mind. No matter how high the U.S. government raised taxes now, no one would seriously be talking about starting an actual revolt. I guess it’s just the natural state of mankind and Western civilization has adapted us out of it.
The thing is, though, these rebels and mutineers never seemed to have gotten much out of their rebellions (or at least the ones that were kept to a small scale). They might have gotten amnesty at best, on rare occasions, but much more often they simply got a death sentence. So why were there so many such small rebellions?
There was also Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 Virginia, and the Dutch War for Independence that went on until 1648, so it started earlier. And the English Civil War where an English king lost his head.
My guess would be that antiquated class structure played a part, as well as unfair taxation, and the plentiful new opportunities in the New World. There had been a major paradigm shift with new technologies (printing [began in the 15th century but was getting cheaper and more efficient constantly], sailing/naval technology, globalization) and the middle classes were becoming more politically powerful yet the aristocracies in the Old World and plutocracies in the New World were threatening new found liberties- in short the folks who were upwardly mobile were feeling their oats and the folks with money and privilege (but less power than previously) were pissing them off.
Where there really more revolts in the 18thC than the 17th or 19th? Most of Europe had a revolt in 1848. After WWI there were several Communist revolts.
I suppose you have to define your terms on what counts as revolt or mutiny but I don’t think that it has been any more common in a certain time period and just about every war has had a mutiny.
I’d say a major reason was the lack of non-violent alternatives, combined with the sheer unpleasantness of those in charge. A lot of the kind of aggrieved people who back then would rebel, these days would sue or write their congressman or join a pressure group. And reading the Captain Bligh column makes it pretty clear WHY they’d want to rebel. If your boss had you beaten with a whip or your co-workers killed, wouldn’t you be tempted to fight back ?
In terms of why so much then and not so much now, its that the quality of life in the Western World today is, universally, immensely better than it was in the 17th century. Back then death was all around, so risking it for a cause wasn’t as big a deal. You risked it walking outside of your village, or traveling by horse, or traveling at sea, or by not getting the crops sown in time, or just by drinking the water.
With so many potentially fatal risks just in daily life it wasn’t much of a leap to take one by rebelling. And, to come full circle, the reason people often risked death thru rebellion was because they were trying to reduce the risk of it from those other things!
Today we travel at breakneck speeds, in the air and in cars, every day, several times a day! Often for trivial things and we don’t give it a moment’s thought. There are so few things left in the modern world that can actually threaten our lives (by choice anyway), when they do occur its always an extreme situation.
BTW, this is an incredibly good thing and what every society everywhere on the planet should be doing.
The Irish War Of Independence
The Kenyan War Of Independence
The Zimbabwean War Of Independence
The Vietnamese War Of Independence
The Hungarian Uprising
The assorted revolutions that led to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc
amongst a truckload of rebellions in the 20th Century.
Over the last several years China has been having massive protests throughout the hinterlands. The news is largely suppressed, but it gets out & around a litle bit. 10,000 villagers marching on the county seat, that sort of thing. Yes it’s a big country, but there are (no exaggeration) a dozen or more of these events every week.
In general, the peasants are protesting getting screwed by the local Party folks who are acting like 18th century European barons. And usually, somebody gets shot & a few people disappear into the police system, never to be seen again.
So I would argue there is nothing inherently 18th century about it. It does predictably occur at a certain point in social / economic development though.
In pre-industrial economies, the smallholder has a definite stake in the system, and has a certain autonomy. He is stuck on his land, but he will be able to eat regardless of the economy and almost regardless of the size of the harvest. And gnerally, no body is trying to seize his land and thereby prevent his earning any kind of a living.
As industrialization takes hold, the concentration of capital ensures that certain people gain power, and simultaneously the smallholder loses his independence. So there is a massive change in who’s a winner & who’s a loser. Yes, the pie is getting bigger overall, but often the middle/lower-middle class finds their share stagnant or shrinking. Add in some piratical behavior by the new winners & you have a potent recipe for social unrest.
If things get really fouled up economically in the next 3-10 years it’ll be interesting to watch this dynamic play out in suposedly more “civilized” counties as well.
Bear in mind the 18th Century also saw a pretty major revolution in America, and an even more tumultuous revolution (or series of revolutions) in France. As previously mentioned, the 17th Century saw the successful overthrow of the king of England (and Scotland and Ireland); although the monarchy was eventually restored, subsequently another king of England (and Scotland and Ireland) was tossed out, though instead of replacing him with a republic, they settled for putting a different king on the throne, but all of this permanently affected the balance of power in the British Isles between the King and Parliament.
I would say that no one sets out to mount a small, easily-crushed mutiny or rebellion, with amnesty as the best outcome; rather, different groups set out–with varying degrees of planning, good luck, genuine understanding of their actual odds of success, and basic sanity–to change their situations by force. All of them presumably think they’re going to be the next George Washington or Lenin, or at least the next Oliver Cromwell, as opposed to being the next Wat Tyler or Nathaniel Bacon or Jefferson Davis. We (usually) tend to hear more about the ones who succeeded, as they wind up being acclaimed as the patriots and founding fathers of the new order of things, while the leaders of unsuccessful rebellions tend to meet with a less pleasant fate.
as said above, neither Washington or Cromwell intended to end up where they did when they started out on that journey. The Civil War [English] and the Revolution [American] started with people petitioning for the redress of their grievances. Only by stages were they driven to the end of overturning the social order.
