The subject of this module is revolution and social change in British, European and colonial North American societies between 1688 and 1840, and the ways in which the processes of change were informed by and shaped relations between Western society and the wider world. The period witnessed an explosion of trade, warfare and the development of a commercial culture that had a profound impact upon both European and colonial cultures. How did all this impact upon changing lifestyles, political discourse, protest and the material world? Taking the political revolutions in America and France as its starting point, the module examines revolution as an interdiscursive event. It not only analyses the impact on British and Continental European societies of the American and French and Haitian revolutionary wars (financially, politically, socially) but also how these events were used to define competing models of statehood and society within and outside the sites of revolution, including contested notions of gender and race. The module will also analyse the ‘afterlife’ of these events and how they were used to define emerging national identities. We also examine changes in material life to which the term ‘revolution’ has been applied, and we assess and critique the ways in which those developments have been used to distinguish Western modernity from Eastern backwardness at the time and by historians.