Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present

Zakaria tells the epic story of the upheavals, breakthroughs, backlashes, and transformations that marked the rise of Western liberalism and industrial modernity, looking for insights to explain today’s fraught global moment. Starting with the “liberal revolutions” of the sixteenth-century Dutch Republic and England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the book traces the tumultuous path of economic, technological, and political modernization through the eras of British and American industrial supremacy and post–Cold War globalization. Zakaria focuses on what he sees as the key dynamic at the heart of each of these revolutions of modernity: a struggle between forces seeking to harness economic and technological change for profit and progress, on the one hand, and groups seeking to hold on to their old identities and ways of life, on the other. In Zakaria’s account, societies that embrace liberal commitments to trade, openness, and free thinking, such as the United States in the postwar era, tend to be more innovative and powerful, but illiberal forces are never fully vanquished either at home or abroad. By grandly illuminating the great revolutions of the past, Zakaria holds a mirror to our own times.