Historian Donald Sassoon, in his book “Revolutions... When People Change the Course of History,” provides an in-depth analysis of the pivotal moments in which people reshape history.
The book, which was translated by Giuseppe Maugeri and Sara Carafini, reviews how popular movements transform from spontaneous protests into forces capable of changing regimes, linking the lessons of the past with the political transformations of the present.The prominent British historian Donald Sassoon, a student of the famous historian Eric Hobsbawm, expands in his book published by Garzanti Publishing House, “Revolutions... When the People Change the Course of History,” in deconstructing the traditional concept of revolution. Sassoon refuses to reduce these major transformations to fleeting symbolic events such as the storming of the Bastille prison or the Winter Palace, stressing that real revolutions are an extended historical process and a structural process that takes decades to complete and bring about radical, irreversible change.The book takes the reader on a comparative and comprehensive historical journey that begins with the English Civil War and Cromwell's Revolution, and passes through the American War of Independence, which expelled colonialism but ignored the dilemma of slavery, all the way to the French Revolution and the human rights gains and instability it left behind. It also sheds light on the national revolutions that united Italy and Germany, extending its ten-year analysis to the Soviet Revolution from the beginnings of 1905 until the collapse of the Communist camp, and the Chinese Revolution from the fall of the Qing dynasty until the riseContemporary capitalism.
Spanning more than five hundred pages, this work represents a sober political and intellectual review that examines how peoples reshape power, borders, sovereignty, and citizenship, brilliantly linking violent historical precedents with the complex transformations taking place in our contemporary world.
