From England's Glorious Revolution to the unification of Germany — two centuries in which kings lost power and nations were born.
Stop 01 · November 1688
The Glorious Revolution
James II, a Catholic, became king of England in 1685 with wide backing, but his policies soon alienated the Protestant majority. The birth of his son on 10 June 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, and opposition leaders invited the Dutch prince William of Orange, James's nephew and son-in-law, to intervene. William gathered some 260 transport ships and 15,000 men, landed in Devon on 5 November and advanced on London. James's army fell apart and he fled to France in December. Parliament made William and his wife Mary joint monarchs, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 limited royal power and guaranteed regular parliaments and free elections — a model of constitutional government for later revolutionaries.
William of Orange III and his Dutch army land in Brixham, 1688Johan Herman Isings · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
William's fleet from the Netherlands, November 1688 · Voyage
James II, a Catholic, became king of England in 1685 with wide backing, but his policies soon alienated the Protestant majority. The birth of his son on 10 June 1688 raised the prospect of a Catholic dynasty, and opposition leaders invited the Dutch prince William of Orange, James's nephew and son-in-law, to intervene. William gathered some 260 transport ships and 15,000 men, landed in Devon on 5 November and advanced on London. James's army fell apart and he fled to France in December. Parliament made William and his wife Mary joint monarchs, and the Bill of Rights of 1689 limited royal power and guaranteed regular parliaments and free elections — a model of constitutional government for later revolutionaries.
Thirteen British colonies objected to taxes imposed by a Parliament in which they had no seats; a congress against the Stamp Act in 1765 declared that taxation without representation violated their rights as Englishmen. Fighting began at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, and on 4 July 1776 the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Declaration of Independence, drafted chiefly by Thomas Jefferson. A British army surrendered at Saratoga in October 1777, and France, then Spain, joined the war. In 1781 Washington's army and French forces trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown, and Britain recognised independence in 1783. The constitution written in 1787 rested on popular sovereignty and the separation of powers — though it left slavery in place.
BattlesLexington and Concord, 19 April 1775 · Saratoga, October 1777 · Yorktown, September–October 1781
Bankrupt and paralysed, the French monarchy summoned the Estates-General, which met at Versailles on 5 May 1789. The commoners' deputies declared themselves a National Assembly and swore the Tennis Court Oath not to disperse until France had a constitution. On 14 July Parisians stormed the Bastille, and within weeks the Assembly abolished feudal privileges and proclaimed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. War with Austria from April 1792 and military defeats brought down the monarchy; a republic was declared in September and King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. In the Terror that followed, about 16,000 people were sentenced and executed. Napoleon's coup of 9 November 1799 ended the revolution.
On 21 August 1791 enslaved people in northern Saint-Domingue, France's most profitable colony and a leading producer of the world's sugar, rose in revolt. In 1793, needing allies against Spanish and British invaders, French commissioners proclaimed the end of slavery, and the formerly enslaved Toussaint Louverture became the colony's leading general. In 1802 Napoleon sent an army under Charles Leclerc to reassert French rule and ultimately restore slavery; Toussaint was seized and died in a French prison. Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the final war, and on 18 November 1803 his army defeated French forces, already ravaged by yellow fever, at Vertières. On 1 January 1804 he declared Haiti independent: the world's first post-colonial Black-led nation.
BattlesVertières, near Cap-Haïtien, 18 November 1803
When Napoleon occupied Spain in 1808, its American colonies began to govern themselves through local juntas, and the struggles grew into wars. In Mexico, the priest Miguel Hidalgo called for revolt at Dolores on 16 September 1810. In the south, José de San Martín led an army from Mendoza across the Andes in 21 days in January 1817 and beat the royalists at Chacabuco. In the north, Simón Bolívar won at Boyacá in August 1819. Antonio José de Sucre's victory at Ayacucho in December 1824 brought the surrender of Spain's army in Peru; Spain kept only Cuba and Puerto Rico. Brazil, where the Portuguese court had fled in 1808, declared independence in 1822 as an empire under Pedro I.
BattlesBoyacá, 7 August 1819 · Chacabuco, 12 February 1817 · Ayacucho, 9 December 1824
Greece had been under Ottoman rule since the 15th century. A secret society, the Filiki Eteria, founded in 1814, planned a revolt for 25 March 1821; its first rising, in the Danubian Principalities, was crushed, but in March the Peloponnese took up arms, and in September Theodoros Kolokotronis captured Tripolitsa. Both sides committed atrocities, and the Ottoman massacres on Chios in 1822 shocked European opinion. In 1825 an Egyptian army under Ibrahim Pasha landed and brought most of the Peloponnese under control. Then Britain, France and Russia intervened: in 1827 their squadrons destroyed the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet at Navarino. The London Protocol of February 1830 recognised Greece as an independent state, and Prince Otto of Bavaria became its first king.
BattlesTripolitsa, taken September 1821 · Navarino, 20 October 1827
In 1848 Europe saw the most widespread wave of revolution in its history, touching more than fifty countries. Hunger after the potato failures and harvest crises of 1845–47 fed demands for constitutions, civil rights and national self-rule. It began in Palermo in January. In Paris, three days of street fighting forced King Louis Philippe to abdicate on 24 February, and France became a republic. In March, after clashes in Vienna, the Austrian chancellor Metternich resigned and went into exile. A national assembly met in Frankfurt to unite Germany, but in 1849 Prussia's king refused the crown it offered him. Most risings were crushed — Hungary's only when Russia sent over 300,000 troops — yet serfdom ended in Austria and Hungary.
After the failed revolutions of 1848, nationalism succeeded through war and diplomacy. Piedmont-Sardinia's prime minister, Cavour, allied with Napoleon III's France, and together they defeated Austria in 1859. In May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from near Genoa with about a thousand volunteers, landed at Marsala and conquered the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, entering Naples on 7 September. The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed on 17 March 1861, and Rome became its capital in 1871. In Prussia, the minister-president Otto von Bismarck won three short wars, against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866 and France in 1870–71. On 18 January 1871 the Prussian king Wilhelm I was proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
BattlesSolferino, 24 June 1859 · Königgrätz, 3 July 1866 · Sedan, 1870