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Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World
Goldstone's 1991 landmark introducing demographic-structural theory — the framework that demonstrated population pressure, elite overproduction, and fiscal strain recur as preconditions for state collapse across centuries and civilizations.
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World is the 1991 University of California Press monograph that established Jack Goldstone's reputation as one of the leading historical sociologists of his generation and introduced the demographic-structural theory of political crisis that has shaped three decades of subsequent scholarship. The book's empirical strategy was comparative analysis across early modern state breakdowns: the English Revolution of the 1640s, the French Fronde of 1648–1653, the Ottoman crises of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and the Ming dynasty collapse of the 1640s. Goldstone demonstrated that these apparently disparate crises shared structural preconditions — population growth, elite competition for fixed positions, fiscal strain on states, and accumulating mass grievances — and that when these pressures exceeded institutional capacity to absorb them, the system broke. The book won the American Sociological Association's Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award and remains a reference point in comparative historical sociology.
