When the atrocities of the French Revolution led Romantic authors to test the viability of anti-imperial imaginaries in their poetry, many of them relocated revolution from Europe to so-called Oriental geographies. The cultural and aesthetic distance of exoticized topographies generated a spectacle of revolutionary violence that could be consumed safely in Britain. In the poetic works of Thomas Moore (Lalla Rookh), Felicia Hemans (The Abencerrage), Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and The Giaour), Percy Shelley (Laon and Cythna), Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer), and Thomas Love Peacock (Ahrimanes), revolutionary struggle is envisaged as an enterprise marked by a cyclical logic that anticipates the return of empire: It is redefined as an inevitable failure to undo oppressive power structures. An ethnoracially demarcated space of fantasy, the Orient allows these poets to experiment with revolutionary narratives in a way that affectively neutralizes the lived trauma of revolution by reducing it to a dehistoricized and yet universalizable configuration. In the Orientalist poetry of Romantics, then, revolution becomes imaginable as an anti-imperial event with the caveat that its present unrealizability is affirmed in its consumption as a culturally and ethnoracially distanced spectacle.

Chapter 6 looks at how money acts both as an element in the moral concretion of the revolution’s moral project – one that here takes the form also of a ‘moral economy’ – but also a prime catalyst for its deterioration in the face of the pervasive condition of moral-cum-material decline Cubans call necesidad, intimating a sense of destitution that is felt to exert itself as an uncontrollable force. The relation between the revolution and what lies beyond it, then, is seen here through the prism of the duality of money as both a qualitative token of value and quantitative scale for commensuration. The former is central to the way pesos (Cuba’s national currency, issued by the revolutionary state) operate as moral concretions of the revolution, marking out the scope of its moral economy. The latter, however, comes into its own with the use of US dollars and locally issued currencies pegged to it, which have become increasingly pervasive in everyday consumption since the 1990s. In its capacity to commensurate all values quantitatively, the dollar rubs out the distinction between the state’s moral economy and the variously licit and informal realms of transaction that have grown alongside it in Cuba. Crucially, in this way, it tends to trump the revolution’s effort to position itself as transcendental condition of possibility for life, encompassing it with its own transcendental scope.

This chapter lays out the central idea of revolution as a world-making, cosmogonic project, charting out the areas of social life in which this can be seen in the experience of revolutionary transformation in Cuba. It sets the coordinates of the relational analysis that the book as a whole proposes as a major intellectual dividend of its anthropological approach to the study of revolutionary politics. Placing its argument in the context of the longstanding debate about the role of social relations as at once the empirical focus and prime heuristic device of anthropological research, including the current literature on ‘relationism’ to which this debate has given rise, the chapter explains how a focus on the shapes of relations can unpack the inner dynamics of revolution as a totalizing social transformation.

This chapter develops a model of the relationship between revolution and person with detailed reference to the life and family histories collected in Havana in the late 1960s by the American anthropologists Oscar and Ruth Lewis and the team of researchers they trained in Cuba. The focus here is on ethnographic material from the Lewis’ volumes pertaining to people’s revolutionary ‘integration’ through participation in state-coordinated mass organizations, and particularly the so-called Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs). Tracking ethnographically the ways and degrees to which the Lewis’ respondents got involved in these neighbourhood level structures, the chapter develops a model of revolutionary personhood that emphasises the duality between ‘role’ and ‘person’. Due to the totalizing way it ensconces itself in every aspect of everyday life, this duality marks out the coordinates for people’s continual acts of comparison and calibration between the two, which becomes the prime format of daily social life in revolutionary Cuba. By the same token, the duality of role and person marks out the limits of the revolution’s transcendentalizing project, whose containing force reaches only as far as its designation of roles via the state’s structures can take it, leaving the remainders of people beyond its scope.

Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.

This chapter explores the ways in which hunger in World War I altered existing political structures. Civilian populations engaged in a complex politics of provisioning by contesting state and local authorities and governments’ management of food. In the face of hunger and starvation, civilians across Europe and the Middle East gradually and to various degrees called their governments’ legitimacy into question. Civilians gave voice to their demands through petitions, food riots, and, in some instances, rebellion and revolution. Women, in particular, appealed collectively to officials, evoking the urgent need to feed and care for their children. Food became central to politics as political parties competed in demonstrating their ability to bring food to hungry populations. Recognizing the crucial role of hunger to salvaging any popular support for continuing the war, governments responded by regulating food and suppressing, even violently, public protests demanding provisioning. The ability to supply food became an avenue to political success. The chapter introduces the Ottoman experience and provides a comparative discussion of the politicization of hunger. We explore how that process varied across and within the warscapes of Ottoman and European societies, and how hunger, as a catalyst, altered existing political structures and gave rise to new forms of political organization in response to demands by both elite and non-elite groups. Finally, we ask how political parties and organizations used food procurement and provisioning of civilians amidst hunger as an avenue to achieve, expand, or preserve political significance.

Chapter 5 focuses on the state system of food provision, which continues to supply Cuban families with essential food and other household goods in heavily subsidised prices. State goods operate as concretions of the revolution’s moral project, embodying its frugal ethos metonymically, and taking it deep into people’s homes and ultimately, through ingestion, their bodies. Here too, however, the duplex personhood elaborated earlier comes into play, this time due to the fact that people gain access to these goods only by virtue of their bureaucratic designation as ‘citizens’ of the revolution. While this appears to be a version of the role/person model developed in Chapter 3, it also turns the model on its head since here the role of citizen is associated with what is deemed as the deepest level of people’s existence, namely their ‘basic needs’ as biological organisms. This puts a paradox into the heart of the state rationing system, which can be parsed out morphologically as the constitutive mismatch between a state system that purports to cater to people as whole, flesh-and-blood people, but only actually meets a small part of the needs they feel they have. The chapter builds a model of this part/whole paradox with reference to the ethnography of the system’s operation at neighbourhood level.

Prefaced by an extended ethnographic account of Fidel Castro’s charisma as it emerged in the days of national mourning that followed his death in 2016, Chapter 9 concludes the book’s morphological argument by drawing out its implications for two forms of comparison that contribute to its development. The first concerns the analogies and contrasts between political and religious concepts and practices, which feature throughout the development of the book’s morphological analysis and are viewed here in relation to the broader discussion about ‘political theology’. The second returns to the comparative anthropological framework with which the book begins, namely the varied ways in which the distinction between nature and culture can be made, locating revolutions in this comparative frame.

This chapter furthers the book’s morphological analysis of the revolution’s relationship to people by examining it as a relationship of care. The ethnographic context here is housing, focusing on the way in which the revolutionary state’s all-embracing involvement in the infrastructure of people’s lives acts as another prime avatar of its moral concretion. The chapter recounts the story of Clarita, for whom her state-built house embodies her own sense of being a revolutionary, though, as she says, ‘in her own way’. Getting an analytical handle on Clarita’s sense of commitment to the revolution involves showing the ways in which the state’s transcendental project of care is supplemented by relationships that are intimate and personal. This happens through the myriad ways in which personal relationships – with family, neighbours and workmates – are enlisted in order to bring to fruition the state-sponsored scheme that provided her with the means to build a new house. The revolutionary state is credited with providing houses as habitable wholes, and in this way is able to incorporate under its aegis of care the myriad ways in which nonstate resources and relationships are necessary in order for this to happen. Crucially, this centripetal dynamic renders the intimate ambit of personalized sociality a constitutive (albeit unacknowledged) feature of the revolutionary state’s project of care, traversing the distance that separates its institutional structures and procedures from the day-to-day sociality of people’s lives.

This chapter focuses on the two Russian revolutions in 1917 and US responses to them. The Wilson administration enthusiastically welcomed the overthrow of the tsarist autocracy in March, quickly recognized the new Provisional Government, and extended large loans in the hope that a democratic Russia would stay in the war against Germany. But after radical, antiwar socialists seized power in November, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet regime, provided covert aid to anti-Bolshevik (“White”) armies, and sent small military expeditions to Archangel and Vladivostok. Contrary to earlier studies, the chapter shows that the United States sought to speed the demise of the Bolshevik regime. US forces fought directly against the Red Army in northern Russia and battled Red partisans in the Far East, while the American Relief Administration, American Red Cross, and Young Men’s Christian Association all aided White armies. Despite the interventions by the United States and its allies, the Bolsheviks prevailed. The legacies of these events included the US rejection of diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia until 1933 and Soviet conceptions of Russia as a “besieged fortress.”

Chapter 8 tells the story of Lázaro, whose home collapsed and is now stuck in a long-term struggle to get the state authorities to assist him in rebuilding it. Here the focus is on the dire failures of the revolutionary state apparatus, though the twist is that, rather than cynically lamenting them, Lázaro maintains a steadfast conviction that the state will solve his problem. The reason for this, as we shall see, upends the whole framework of the revolutionary state’s relationship with people, since the source of Lázaro’s conviction in the state’s powers is not the revolutionary state itself, but rather certain spirits with which Lázaro has developed deep and abiding relationships, and who guide him through life, including in his interactions with the state authorities a propos his collapsed home. The chapter shows that the spirits’ mediation does not merely supplement Lázaro’s relationship with the revolutionary state, but rather upends its overall coordinates, drastically changing its shape. The signature ontological constitution of spirits is that they collapse dualist separations between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, ought and is – precisely the distinctions that mark out the coordinates within which the revolutionary project takes its shape. In so doing, the spirits present an altogether startling political possibility: a revolution able to deploy the transcendental structures and processes of the state in a way that somehow, per impossible, relates with people immanently in the intimate key of personal care.

This Epilogue documents the colonial coal regime’s struggle for survival during the twilight of French colonialism in Indochina. It also examines the closure and decolonization of large-scale coal mining enterprises and discusses the legacy of coal mining in postcolonial Vietnam.

This chapter develops a theory to explain why counterrevolutions emerge and succeed. This movement-centric theory emphasizes the strategies movement leaders embrace, which, more than anything else, define the capacities and interests of the old and new regimes during the post-revolutionary transition. All revolutionary governments enjoy an initial power advantage over the old regime. Whether a counterrevolution emerges depends on how much capacity these old regime forces have left and how much their interests are threatened by revolutionary rule. And whether their counterrevolutions succeed depends on how effectively revolutionaries can preserve their initial capacity through the tumultuous transition. Specifically, the chapter lays out a post-revolutionary “governance trilemma,” which requires new leaders to simultaneously manage the concerns of lingering old regime forces, elites in their coalition, and popular groups who supported the revolution. The chapter then explains how these dynamics differ following two ideal-typical forms of revolution: radical-violent movements and moderate-unarmed movements. Counterrevolutions are less likely to emerge following extreme versions of both movements – because the former lowers counterrevolutionary capacities and the latter lowers their interests in restoration. However, counterrevolutions are more likely to succeed against moderate-unarmed movements, because they establish governments that lack key tools for effectively navigating the governance trilemma.

This chapter summarizes the main findings, arguments, and contributions of the book. It reviews the theoretical arguments and discusses promising avenues for further research on revolution and counterrevolution. Then it explains how the book’s findings speak to a number of scholarly and public debates. First, for scholars of violence and nonviolence, who have argued that unarmed civil resistance is more effective at toppling autocrats than armed conflict, the book raises questions about the tenacity of the regimes established through these nonviolent movements. Second, it speaks to scholarship on democratization, highlighting the important differences between transitions effected through elite pacts versus those brought about through revolutionary mobilization. Third, it offers lessons about how foreign powers can help or hinder the consolidation of new democracies. Next, the chapter discusses implications for Egypt and the broader Middle East, including the possibility that future revolutions might avoid the disappointing fates of the 2011 revolutions. The chapter ends by reflecting on what the book has to say about our current historical moment, when rising rates of counterrevolution appear to be only one manifestation of a broader resurgence of authoritarian populism and reactionary politics worldwide.

What is a counterrevolution? And how often do they occur? Chapter 2 is devoted to answering these foundational questions. According to this book, a counterrevolution is an irregular effort in the aftermath of a successful revolution to restore a version of the pre-revolutionary political regime. The chapter begins by explaining and contextualizing this definition. It reviews the various alternative understandings of counterrevolution that have been invoked by both scholars and activists. It then explains the decision to adopt a definition of counterrevolution as restoration and shows how this definition was operationalized in building the original dataset. The second half of the chapter lays out the main high-level findings from this dataset. About half of all revolutionary governments have faced a counterrevolutionary challenge of some type, and roughly one in five of these governments was successfully overturned. Moreover, these counterrevolutions have been distributed unevenly: the vast majority have toppled democratic revolutions, rather than ethnic or leftist ones. And counterrevolutions had for years been declining in frequency, until the last decade when this trend reversed. These descriptive findings provide the motivation for the theory developed in Chapter 3.