Constant Turmoil

Washington Post columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria — author of The Gang of Three and The Future of Freedom — weaves historical facts and economic trends to offer fresh perspectives on the causes and results of revolutions, past and present.

Holland, England, France

The Dutch Republic was founded in 1588, and by the 17th century, it was the wealthiest nation in Europe. The Dutch rejected absolute monarchies and pursued republicanism, and the Dutch Golden Age offered freedom of expression to thinkers and religious minorities. The republic’s rise to global power remains relevant, proving that a small nation with a modest military can dominate through economic growth and innovation.

Today, as we undergo our own great waves of globalization, technological innovation, and identity revolution, the Dutch story has much to tell us. Fareed Zakaria

The Dutch improvised systems of water pumps and windmills, and created a tax system to pay for it. These systems required the cooperation of many communities, so the Netherlands developed a decentralized political system. The Dutch built a fleet of private ships and a navy to protect them. The Netherlands became center of global commerce from 1590 to 1740. It invented global trade, but by the mid-1700s, it had lost its edge over England.

Britain focused its larger labor force on manufacturing and innovations, ushering in industrialization based on fossil fuels. By the mid-19th century, England combined industrial might with dominance of the seas. It mastered innovations such as coal-burning blast furnaces and steam engines.

The French Revolution sought to overthrow the monarchy, which spent massively on itself and the military. In 1789, Louis XVI proposed new taxes, and parliament revolted. Everyday people demanded democratic governance, but Austria and Prussia declared war on revolutionary France. Maximilien Robespierre seized power and led France into a Reign of Terror, followed by Napoléon’s dictatorship. He instituted social reforms, establishing a secular legal system and fairer treatment of European Jews. But Napoléon’s battlefield successes concealed his mismanagement of the French economy. When the war machine failed, France reverted to political instability.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution gave birth to the middle class and universal education. It raised life expectancies, changed humanity’s relationship with time, created the modern consumer economy, granted women new political power, and gave rise to movements to protect society’s most vulnerable people.

The Dutch Revolution and its 1688 sequel modernized Britain, but Britain’s Industrial Revolution modernized much of the world. Fareed Zakaria

During the 1800s, Britain rode a wave of prosperity. Wages rose, the population soared, and cities mushroomed. London’s population went from one million in 1800 to 6.5 million in 1900. Britain invented the concept of leisure time for the masses. Factories and mills were harsh workplaces, but typical Brits in a factory fared better than their parents and grandparents had on starvation-level farms.

In the original American Revolution, English colonists cast off the monarchy for a republican form of democracy. Human enslavement remained intact, women lacked fundamental rights, and the colonists expelled the Native American population from areas they desired. But America’s true revolution came when President Abraham Lincoln invested heavily in infrastructure and a transcontinental railroad. In the 135 years from the American Revolution to World War I, the US economy grew by an average rate of 3.9% a year. In 1870, one-quarter of Americans lived in urban areas; by 1920, half the population did.

Laissez-faire regulations put immense wealth in the hands of a few. The 1930s Great Depression prompted voters to elect a president who promised more government involvement in economic life. Franklin D. Roosevelt ushered in a series of reforms that created the American welfare state.

Populism

After World War II, much of the globe embraced democracy, social safety nets, and regulated capitalism, leading to an age of prosperity. By 1964, Western Europe had emerged from the ashes of war with a doubled per capita output. Engineering feats triggered economic revolutions. For example, the arrival of the shipping container in 1956 allowed businesses to quickly load goods on ships, trains, or trucks, and to swiftly unload them on arrival. Yet in the 1980s, US president Ronald Reagan and UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher sought to turn back the regulatory clock to the era before the New Deal.

The information age, which proves almost impossible to regulate, is reshaping the world, expanding human knowledge and analytical capabilities while transcending government policies and borders.

Whatever the quantitative impact of the information revolution we are living through, this qualitative impact on the human psyche is vast and ongoing.
Fareed Zakaria

Today, new products and services spread at lightning speed. Facebook needed four years to reach 100 million users; ChatGPT took two months. Those are today’s revolutions.

Identity politics have long been a part of the United States. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for example, demands for racial equality sparked reactions among those who felt threatened by social change. Just before his death, three-quarters of Americans held a negative view of Reverend Martin Luther King, and one-third believed he was at fault for his own murder. By the early 1970s, racial identity had overtaken economic issues in America in ways not seen since the Reconstruction era. Similar race-based resentments, exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, came roaring back after Barack Obama became president in 2009.

Review

Fareed Zakaria, in this historical analysis that travels a linear road, still manages to draw compelling, out-of-the-box conclusions. He holds, for example, that the American Revolution was significant only because of the economic transformation that began a century later. Zakaria’s novel insights make this study worth reading, even if the historical facts and economic trends he cites won’t be new to most readers. Zakaria connects the dots across centuries to illuminate the power of trends that you may have regarded as simply local or meaningful in only one period of time, but which Zakaria convincingly reveals to be universal and everlasting in impact.