Dancing Before Storms: Five Revolutions that Made Today’s World
Dancing Before Storms is thought provoking. It recounts the expression of discontent in the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as that of our current century, which again highlights widening gaps in equity and equality. Whether the current malaise will result in political revolution is yet to become clear; attempts to predict it based on the features of another time in history are fraught with difficulty.
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Dancing Before Storms: Five Revolutions that Made Today’s World
Robert T Harris | 2022
In Dancing Before Storms, Robert Harris has chosen an unusual way to analyse today’s society and its power structures. A brave and courageous work, the book summarises the events of five major revolutions in history, from the American Revolution of 1776 to France in 1789, Europe in 1848, China in 1911, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
While much has been written on each of these revolutions by specialised scholars, the point of this study is to understand the connections and common trends between the revolutions, as well as the effect of these events on 21st-century society and its structures. Using the biography of an individual from each of the five revolutions, including Benjamin Franklin, Harris has distilled an understanding of the anger within society that led to each of these historical events. (He includes a useful appendix simply entitled ‘The People’ to list key historical figures of each revolution.) One could argue that these revolutions alone did not change society; in my opinion, other events, such as two world wars, the Great Depression and the use of nuclear armaments, were more active catalysts in the evolution of modern society. Still, there is credence in the view that the revolutions were influential.
Each revolution had a unique set of events that prompted civil unrest but Harris does effectively demonstrate that the same underlying trends and forces existed behind each one, the primary common factor being that the populace was not only aggrieved but also ignored by the ruling power structures. Harris warns that we ignore such trends of grievance and unhappiness at our peril.
When looking at our current century, there are many elements of widening gulfs of power, both political and economic. The author chooses some clear examples of inequality and swelling tides of disenchantment – the Black Lives Matter movement, the Donald Trump mantra of the stolen election, and climate change inertia on the part of governments are just a few examples. People are protesting about all these issues and, with the assistance of the media, both mainstream and social, they have become more discussed and analysed than perhaps ever before. Will the grievances result in revolutions similar to those of earlier eras? While such discontent will lead to change and evolution of some kind, I am not convinced, as Harris is, that this will be in the style of the revolutions that materialised between 1776 and 1917.
Those revolutions were particular to an era in history, which, from around 1760, saw another revolution. Harris notes that the Industrial Revolution ‘altered the course of human affairs … with the unleashing of new technologies came dramatic expansion of trade across the oceans’ and, with this, growing prosperity for some segments of society, as well as altered roles and occupations for the working classes. He also makes an interesting observation about the influence of rising literacy and reading on the spread of radical ideas: ‘[N]ew thinking about the nature of power and governance was emerging. New ideas were debated, published and read by an increasingly literate population’.
In the 21st century, ideas and thinking are now spread by another new, even quicker, more instantaneous, and often emotive method – social media. What this heralds is not yet clear, especially given, as Harris observes, ‘Revolutions do not follow rational paths’.
Dancing Before Storms: Five Revolutions that Made Today’s World is published by Wakefield Press.
Reviewer: Christina Ealing-Godbold, PHA (Qld)