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164 books match the query 'Revolution' and 4 start with u

cover of Undoing the Revolution: Comparing Elite Subversion of Peasant Rebellions

Undoing the Revolution

Comparing Elite Subversion of Peasant Rebellions

Vasabjit Banerjee

Temple University Press, 2019

Undoing the Revolution looks at the way rural underclasses ally with out-of-power elites to overthrow their governments—only to be shut out of power when the new regime assumes control. Vasabjit Banerjee first examines why peasants need to ally with dissenting elites in order to rebel. He then shows how conflict resolution and subsequent bargains to form new state institutions re-empower allied elites and re-marginalize peasants.  

Banerjee evaluates three different agrarian societies during distinct time periods spanning the twentieth century: revolutionary Mexico from 1910 to 1930; late-colonial India from 1920 until 1947; and White-dominated Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) from the mid-1960s to 1980. This comparative approach also allows examination of both the underclass need for elite participation and the variety of causes that elites use to incentivize peasant classes to participate, extending from religious-ethnic identity and common political targets to the peasants’ and elites’ own economic grievances. 

Undoing the Revolution demonstrates that both international and domestic investors in cash crops, natural resources, and finance can ally with peasant rebels; and, after threatened or actual state collapse, they can bargain with each other to select new state institutions.

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cover of Unintended Lessons of Revolution: Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Unintended Lessons of Revolution

Student Teachers and Political Radicalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Tanalís Padilla

Duke University Press, 2021

In the 1920s, Mexico established rural normales—boarding schools that trained teachers in a new nation-building project. Drawn from campesino ranks and meant to cultivate state allegiance, their graduates would facilitate land distribution, organize civic festivals, and promote hygiene campaigns. In Unintended Lessons of Revolution, Tanalís Padilla traces the history of the rural normales, showing how they became sites of radical politics. As Padilla demonstrates, the popular longings that drove the Mexican Revolution permeated these schools. By the 1930s, ideas about land reform, education for the poor, community leadership, and socialism shaped their institutional logic. Over the coming decades, the tensions between state consolidation and revolutionary justice produced a telling contradiction: the very schools meant to constitute a loyal citizenry became hubs of radicalization against a government that increasingly abandoned its commitment to social justice. Crafting a story of struggle and state repression, Padilla illuminates education's radical possibilities and the nature of political consciousness for youths whose changing identity—from campesinos, to students, to teachers—speaks to Mexico’s twentieth-century transformations.
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cover of Unite, Proletarian Brothers!: Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic

Unite, Proletarian Brothers!

Radicalism and Revolution in the Spanish Second Republic

Matthew Kerry

University of London Press, 2020

In October 1934, the northern Spanish region of Asturias was the scene of one of the most important outbursts of revolution in Europe. Thousands of left-wing militants took up arms and fought the Spanish army in the streets of Oviedo, while in the rear-guard committees proclaimed a revolutionary dawn. After two weeks, however, the insurrection was crushed, and the ensuing widespread repression was central to the polarization and fragmentation of Spanish politics prior to the Civil War (1936–39). Weaving together a range of everyday disputes and arenas of conflict, from tenant activism to strikes, boycotts to political violence, Unite, Proletarian Brothers! reveals how local cleavages and conflicts operating within the context of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–36) and interwar Europe explain the origins, development and consequences of the Asturian October. The book sheds new light on the long-debated process of “radicalization” during the Second Republic, as well as the wider questions of protest, revolutionary politics, and social and political conflict in inter-war Europe.
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cover of Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution

Utopia's Garden

French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution

E. C. Spary

University of Chicago Press, 2000

The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle.

E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Muséum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why natural history was important for French rulers. But the Muséum's success was also a consequence of its employees' Revolutionary rhetoric: by displaying the natural order, they suggested, the institution could assist in fashioning a self-educating, self-policing Republican people. Natural history was presented as an indispensable source of national prosperity and individual virtue.

Spary's fascinating account opens a new chapter in the history of France, science, and the Enlightenment.
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