The Twilight of Ancient Empires

As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, a profound revolutionary ferment was sweeping across what Lenin would later call the “world political powder keg” – the vast belt of ancient empires stretching from China through the Ottoman domains to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. These creaking imperial structures, some dating back to antiquity, found themselves increasingly unable to withstand the dual pressures of internal decay and external imperialist encroachment.

The Chinese imperial examination system, which had selected scholar-gentry officials for over a millennium, was abolished in 1905 – a symbolic death knell for the Qing dynasty that would collapse just six years later. The Ottoman Empire, though younger than China’s civilization, represented the last in a line of nomadic conquerors stretching back to Attila the Hun. Persia’s imperial tradition reached even further into antiquity, outlasting both Rome and Byzantium. Yet within six remarkable years between 1908-1914, all three would transform into Western-style constitutional monarchies or republics, marking the definitive end of an epoch in world history.

The Roots of Revolutionary Ferment

The destabilization of these peripheral regions stemmed from two interconnected processes set in motion by the global expansion of capitalism. First, the gradual erosion of traditional economic structures and social balances created conditions ripe for explosive change. Second, and more visibly, the old regimes found their political survival mechanisms crumbling under modern pressures.

Nowhere was this dual crisis more apparent than in China. The Qing dynasty had barely survived the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), emerging with its authority fatally weakened. Foreign powers carved out spheres of influence, controlled customs revenues, and imposed humiliating treaties. The 1900 Boxer Rebellion and subsequent foreign occupation of Beijing laid bare the dynasty’s impotence. Three distinct revolutionary currents emerged: reformist Confucian officials who recognized the need for Western-style modernization yet feared its consequences; traditional peasant uprisings like the Boxers that combined anti-foreign sentiment with anti-modernism; and the modern nationalist movement coalescing around Sun Yat-sen in the more commercially developed south.

The Global Revolutionary Wave

The early 20th century witnessed a remarkable synchronization of revolutionary activity across continents. In Persia, the 1906 Constitutional Revolution drew inspiration from Russia’s 1905 uprising and Japan’s victory over Russia, seeing constitutionalism as a “mystical force” that could resist foreign domination. The revolution brought together an unlikely alliance of Western-educated intellectuals, bazaar merchants, and Shia clerics – foreshadowing the coalition that would triumph in 1979.

The Ottoman Empire’s 1908 Young Turk revolution initially promoted an Enlightenment-inspired Ottoman patriotism transcending ethnic and religious divisions. However, this vision quickly gave way to a more narrowly Turkish nationalism as the empire’s non-Turkish territories broke away. The revolution’s failure to sustain liberal institutions paved the way for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s later authoritarian modernization program.

Mexico’s 1910 revolution, often overlooked in European-centered narratives, represented the first major social upheaval in an agricultural dependent nation. The dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz had fostered economic growth that benefited foreign investors and domestic elites while dispossessing peasant communities. When economic crisis struck in 1907-08, the system unraveled, giving rise to Emiliano Zapata’s agrarian revolution in the south and Pancho Villa’s populist rebellion in the north.

The Russian Crucible

Of all the pre-1914 revolutions, Russia’s 1905 uprising carried the most profound global implications. As Jawaharlal Nehru noted at age 18, comparing Ireland’s Sinn Féin to Indian extremists, revolutionary movements were shifting from pleading for concessions to seizing them. Russia embodied all the contradictions of the imperial age – simultaneously a great power and semi-colony, industrializing yet agrarian, European yet Asiatic.

The 1905 revolution began as a typical bourgeois revolution demanding constitutional government but unfolded through distinctly proletarian methods – mass strikes and the spontaneous formation of workers’ councils (soviets). Its suppression led to half-hearted reforms that satisfied neither conservatives nor radicals. As Lenin analyzed, Russia’s bourgeoisie proved too weak to lead its own revolution, suggesting future upheavals would require different social alliances.

The Legacy of Prewar Revolutions

These pre-1914 revolutions established patterns that would dominate 20th century politics. They demonstrated how traditional peasant discontent could fuse with modern nationalist and socialist ideologies. They revealed the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes when faced with combined pressure from urban intellectuals, workers, and rural masses. Most significantly, they showed how revolutions in peripheral regions could have seismic effects on the global order.

The Mexican and Russian cases particularly foreshadowed the social revolutions that would transform the colonial and semi-colonial world after 1945. Atatürk’s later program in Turkey offered an early model of top-down modernization that many postcolonial states would emulate. Meanwhile, the failure of liberal constitutionalism in Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia suggested that Western political models might not transplant easily to different social soil.

As Europe marched toward war in 1914, the revolutionary tremors shaking its periphery received less attention than they deserved. Yet these upheavals signaled that the age of empires – both ancient and colonial – was ending. The Great War would accelerate their collapse, but as our survey shows, the foundations had already been crumbling for decades. When revolution returned to Russia in 1917, it drew upon organizational experiences and political lessons forged in the crucible of 1905.

The gathering storm of 1880-1914 thus marked not just the end of ancient political systems but the birth of modern revolutionary politics – a transformation whose consequences would shape our contemporary world. From Mexico to China, revolutionaries were discovering that in the age of imperialism, national liberation and social transformation would require not polite petitions but determined seizure of power. This fundamental insight, crystallized in the prewar decade, would echo through the century’s great revolutions to come.