Revolutions (1750–1900)
What you must know
Between 1750 and 1900, three revolutions interacted: intellectual, political and industrial. Enlightenment thinkers - Locke on consent, Montesquieu on separated powers, Rousseau on popular sovereignty, Wollstonecraft on women's reason - supplied arguments that American colonists, French revolutionaries, Haitian insurgents under Louverture and Latin American leaders such as Bolívar and San Martín put into practice unevenly. The Haitian Revolution was the most radical, ending slavery and colonial rule; the French Revolution moved from constitutional monarchy to republic to Napoleon's empire; Latin American independence produced caudillos and persistent inequality. Industrialization began in Britain because of coal, capital, colonies, agricultural productivity, legal protection of property and a culture of practical innovation, then spread to Belgium, France, Germany, the United States and Japan. The first industrial revolution ran on cotton, iron and steam; the second on steel, chemicals, electricity and the internal combustion engine. Consequences included urbanization, the factory system, a wage-earning working class, child labor, new social classes and ideologies - classical liberalism, socialism and Marx's critique, anarchism, and later feminism and abolitionism. States responded with reform: the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, self-strengthening in China.
Traps
Do not say industrialization began in France or the United States. Keep the first and second industrial revolutions distinct. Enlightenment ideals did not immediately extend to women, the poor or colonized peoples - that gap is often the point of a question. Meiji Japan was a selective, state-led response, not simple imitation. And revolutions rarely have a single cause.
Worked example
For any revolution, separate long-term structural causes (fiscal crisis, class tension, new ideas) from triggering events, then assess outcomes by asking who actually gained rights. That structure prevents one-cause answers.