Unit 5: Revolutions (1750–1900)
AP World History: 57 practice questions with detailed explanations.
Unit Study Guide
Executive Summary
Enlightenment ideas ignited Atlantic revolutions; the Industrial Revolution rewrote how humans produced and lived. Together they remade politics and economics worldwide.
The Enlightenment
Locke (natural rights), Montesquieu (separation of powers), Rousseau (social contract), and Adam Smith (free markets) supplied the intellectual ammunition. Thinkers applied reason to society, questioning absolutism and tradition.
Atlantic revolutions
The American (1776), French (1789), Haitian (1791), and Latin American revolutions (1810s–20s) overthrew colonial and monarchical orders. Haiti — the only successful enslaved people's revolution — terrified slaveholders everywhere. Nationalism became a mass identity.
The Industrial Revolution
Beginning in Britain (coal, iron, textiles), mechanization and the factory system spread to Europe, the US, and Japan. Railroads and steamships shrank the world. It created industrial capitalism, new social classes, and urbanization — and unprecedented wealth inequality.
Global economic development
Industrial states needed raw materials and markets, pulling the world into a single economy. Japan's Meiji Restoration (1868) industrialized deliberately; Egypt and the Ottomans attempted reforms with mixed results. Labor movements and socialism (Marx) arose as reactions.
Exam traps
The Industrial Revolution was a process, not an event — no single "industrial revolution date." Enlightenment ideas didn't cause revolutions by themselves; taxes, food prices, and war did the triggering. Japan industrialized by state-led borrowing, not pure free markets. Nationalism could unite AND fragment empires.