Abstract

Historical memory shapes our perceptions of the past, but how do our present circumstances shape our historical memories, and how does that affect our ideas of the past? This paper explores this question as it pertains to the concept of revolution, rebellion and uprising. This paper introduces collective memory and posits that both collective memory and antagonistic memory are significant driving forces in historical memory and the later labelling of past events. Furthermore, this antagonistic mode of memory creates a narrative of moral necessity that results in the labelling of past uprisings. The first case study in the paper is the Haitian Revolution. This was able to successfully brand itself as a revolution on the international stage. The paper shows that contemporaries of the Haitian Revolution tried to create an antagonistic model of it, but that the eventual dominance of the Haitian narrative secured its status as a revolution in historical memory. The second case study in this paper explores the opposite end of the spectrum. The Arab Revolt serves as an example of an uprising that successfully dismantled existing power structures yet is not considered a revolution. The paper shows that this stems from Western narratives, which essentially establish a Eurocentric and antagonistic narrative which strips the Arab Revolt of any perceived moral necessity, which has caused it to be remembered as a revolt rather than a revolution. These two case studies demonstrate the necessity of a narrative of righteous necessity for an uprising to be remembered as a revolution.

Introduction

History is far from objective. Nowhere else is the principle more evident than in the phenomenon of the revolution. One would be hard-pressed to recall a failed revolution that is remembered as a revolution or a successful rebellion that is remembered only as a rebellion. This suggests that these terms carry a power that exceeds their descriptive utility.

This paper explores these questions through an in-depth study of two historic uprisings: the so-called Arab Revolt and the Haitian Revolution. Through these case studies, this paper argues that a revolution becomes labelled as a revolution in historical memory only after subsequent generations retroject a narrative of righteousness and moral necessity onto it. This paper will introduce the antagonistic mode of memory as a notable motivating force in the emotional shaping of memory. This phenomenon describes a tendency to narrativise history and to establish key figures as villainous or heroic. This process can make uprising narratives more emotionally charged than they otherwise would be.

The value in such an observation can be found in the charged value of the terms “revolt”, “rebellion” and “revolution”. To label an event as a rebellion or a revolt is implicitly a moral judgement, though the content of this judgement may vary. Similarly, to dub any given uprising a revolution entails much that may not be stated explicitly. Since the age of revolutions, the term has become loaded with connotations. A revolution, as opposed to a revolt or rebellion, connotes a true and complete upheaval of some established order. While there is, of course, some truth in such assumptions, historical reality is rarely so straightforward. The distinction between a revolt and a revolution stretches beyond the scale, violence or even success of any given event. Rather, as this paper will argue, the true distinction between revolt and revolution emerges after the event has been remembered, misremembered and narrativised by later generations. A conflict damned by its contemporaries, rightfully or wrongfully, may one day become integrated into an overarching narrative of progress. Terminology, therefore, rather than necessarily reflecting authentic historic fact, can be interpreted as indicating the emotions and narratives spun by succeeding generations. Using this framework, this paper will examine how the Arab and the Haitian Revolutions have been framed and narrativised by later historians, popular memory and government action. Although these events differ drastically in their causes, participants and outcomes, each offers a lesson about human modes of memory and how emotion shapes them. This paper will not seek to establish the semantic difference between terms or judge the emotional validity of memory; instead, it will investigate how emotion changes the historical memory of uprisings and its effect on history.

To begin, this paper will establish the definitions utilised in our research. This will include the terminology relevant to our subject matter. The paper will then proceed to analyse two case studies, as mentioned above.

Definitions

To delve into our research question, it is necessary to understand and differentiate the terms we are analysing. To be able to comprehend how the terms “revolution”, “rebellion”, “revolt” and “uprising” acquire different political, historical and popular narratives, we have to examine their standard and conventional dictionary definitions. To do this, we are going to use the Cambridge online dictionary definitions. The online Cambridge dictionary defines a “revolution” as “a change in the way a country is governed, usually to a different political system, and often using violence or war” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2019). The word “revolt” is “an attempt to get rid of a government by using violence” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2022). The word “uprising” is “an act of opposition, sometimes using violence, by many people in one area of a country against those who are in power” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.a). Finally, the word “rebellion” is “a violent action organised by a group of people who are trying to change the political system in their country” (Cambridge Dictionary, n.d.b). Albeit the definitions for these terms overlap, they each carry different implications concerning different systems of government, legitimacy, popular opinion and historical memory. Hence, defining an event as a revolution rather than a revolt is not a neutral decision. The terminology applied to these events can influence how they are remembered or understood.

These distinctions become significant when we start taking into account collective memory. These historical events do not retain one specific way of remembering or identifying them across time, but rather different groups will reinterpret the same event differently than the group before or after them. How the event is reinterpreted depends on the current group’s political, social and cultural position. Consequently, how an event is remembered can become a site of struggle and opposition, in which groups can fight to establish which interpretation of certain past events is accepted and deemed correct. This process can be comprehended using the concept of antagonistic memory, developed by Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (Cento Bull & Hansen, 2016). This type of memory is part of a broader framework that also encompasses agonistic memory and cosmopolitan memory. Antagonistic memory is a mode of collective memory in which different groups of people construct different narratives of the past and proceed to compete with each other over which is the “right” narrative. The existence of antagonistic memory for a certain event does not allow for different perspectives to coexist and promotes divisions amongst groups, where narratives of heroes vs villains, legitimate resistance vs criminal violence, and victim vs perpetrator are created. This does not allow for any grey area to exist, which in turn fosters hate, violence and misunderstandings.

Cento Bull and Hansen’s distinctions between agonistic, antagonistic and cosmopolitan memory are an important factor in demonstrating that not all disputed memories operate on the same plane. Agonistic memory allows for competing interpretations of a past event to coexist in the same space. Cosmopolitan memory creates the opportunity to move beyond national frameworks and to be able to take into account historical experiences amid transnational or universal experiences. This paper focuses on antagonistic memory because the events that we examine, such as the Haitian Revolution and the Arab Revolt of 1916–1918, involved competing groups who attempted to mutually establish an exclusive narrative of these events. The classification of an event to be deemed as a “revolution” or a “revolt” becomes a part of a wider fight for political and historical legitimacy.

This fight for legitimacy is also affected by mnemonic actors, or mnemonic warriors. Memories are not created from the passage of time but by individuals, governments, historians and communities who each promote interpretations of memories. Mnemonic warriors can be perceived as actors who will take on the role of defending a certain narrative and deliberately try to reshape a collective memory for this certain narrative. They demonstrate how historical memory can become a tool or even a weapon for political power and legitimacy. For example, C.L.R. James advocated and argued that the Haitian Revolution should be remembered as a revolution (James, 1938), while French colonial writers tried to paint the event as “criminal savagery” due to the violent nature of this revolution. Both sides participated in opposing memory narratives — in the creation of an antagonistic memory to be branded on this. They were not both just describing a historical event but were competing for their narrative to be remembered as the righteous one: one the victim and the other the perpetrator.

Another factor that can affect how an event is remembered and labelled is the emotions that created or influenced the event. The History of Emotions (2017) by Rob Boddice provides a way of understanding the extent to which emotions interact and intersect with historical events and how humans respond to certain emotionally charged events or actions (Boddice, 2017). The book establishes just how much more crucial it is to understand emotions in a historical context than to assume that people of all periods felt and expressed themselves the same way all the time. Correspondingly, The History of Emotions: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Dixon puts emphasis on the value of comprehending how people in the past experienced or expressed emotions (Oxford Academic, 2023). Being able to understand the importance of emotion in history is pertinent to popular memory, as these events will be affected by powerful emotions such as grief, anger, fear, pride and resentment. Emotions cannot exist separately from historical events, as they are a part of what makes us human and how these events come to life and are remembered. Research into emotion and how they play into forming memories helps indicate why emotionally charged interpretations become tenacious and constant over time. Emotional information can attract further attention and be remembered more distinctly than information that is emotionally neutral (Tyng et al., 2017). However, this does not mean that biology will dominantly determine historical events and memory, but it does help explain why more emotionally prominent narratives can become more influential. For example, antagonistic memory often relies on these precise emotional categories, such as the hero vs villain, the victim and the oppressor. The emotional intensity attached to these categories can make narratives more memorable across generations. This is quite notable in societies, countries and cultures that have endured oppression, persecution and torture.

Later generations will not only inherit the historical timeline that their ancestors had to go through but also the emotions attached to these events, depending on which side they were on. Suffering can become a part of collective identity, in which heroic stories of resistance against an oppressor survive and are passed on, which become sources of pride and legitimacy to certain groups. Simultaneously, political leaders and institutions can reinterpret events for their own political agendas and/or profit. An event that used to be presented in a negative light can later on be reinterpreted to fit a new and current objective. The moral narrative that determines how an event is remembered can change if it does not fit the needs of institutions or political objectives anymore. All of this establishes why the precise distinctions between a revolution, a revolt, an uprising and a rebellion applied to an event are more than just their dictionary definitions. Each term can be applied to fit a certain narrative needed at a precise time or for a precise objective. Calling an event one term compared to another can discredit its legitimacy and power in memory or make it a transformative political change for the greater good. These competing labels can create antagonistic narratives as they establish that one group will gain legitimacy and the other will be remembered as the clear perpetrator.

Thus, collective memory is not just a simple record of what happened but rather an ongoing process through which societies continuously reinterpret, negotiate and contest the past narratives installed. Mnemonic warriors contribute to promoting certain accounts of the past, while emotional attachments can help those accounts become embedded into history and collective memories. Antagonistic memory is especially important because it alters historical events into opposing narratives that transform people into heroes or villains. Being able to comprehend this process allows us to examine how events are transformed through memory and why the same event can be remembered as a powerful revolution, a revolt that is determined to change the bad by another group, or a failed and devastating uprising by a third group. Ultimately, how an event is remembered and labelled by different groups is not only determined by the past historical timeline but also by the continuing struggle over how the past should be remembered and go down in history.

Earning the Name: How Haiti Became a Revolution

“I was broken in body, soul, and spirit,” Frederick Douglass wrote of his enslavement in Maryland (Douglass, 1845). It could have been written about any of the 450,000 enslaved Africans living in Saint-Domingue, France’s most lucrative colony, in the years leading up to 1791. It was this, this shattered spirit, multiplied amongst tens of thousands of people, that eventually exploded into 13 years of war and birthed the only nation in world history founded by a successful slave revolt.

The Haitian Revolution was never simply a battle between enslaved people and their enslavers. There were enslaved Africans who made up about 90% of the population and wanted to abolish slavery outright. Then there were the affranchis, or free people of colour, many of whom had bought their own freedom out of those same bonds. There were white plantation owners who would do anything to maintain the plantation system,and the appearance of other powers: France, Spain and Britain watching Saint-Domingue like a prize to be seized, a trophy from their European conflict, waiting to take whatever they could.

Historically, after analysis over a wide variety of cases, we have come to the understanding that with different interests come different opinions. French and other European observers described the uprising in the language of criminal savagery and disorder, refusing to grant it the status of a legitimate political struggle. Only Haiti’s own leadership called it what they believed it to be — which was a righteous act of liberation. Each account depended on refusing the other: for the French to admit the revolution was a just act was to admit that slavery was a crime, that it was a problem that needed to be resolved — which the colonial economy could not survive. For Haiti’s leadership to grant any acceptance to the French account was to accept their own subjugation as reasonable. Neither side could concede an inch without collapsing. This is what memory studies call “antagonistic memory” — a way of remembering the past, in which the roles of hero and villain are fixed (Cento Bull & Hansen, 2016). It is why, for centuries afterwards, French accounts continued to frame Haitian independence as chaos and debt rather than triumph, and why Haiti’s own memory has held tightly to the language of liberation.

But what, specifically, was so tempting about the Haitians and their successful rebellion that earned them the title of a revolution? The answer comes not necessarily from the event itself, but the shockwaves that followed — where, for roughly a century and a half, the wider world refused to call it what it was. Haiti had been creating their own story of moral urgency and just liberation since day one. But that wasn’t enough for them to get the title. It took until we witnessed works such as C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (James, 1938), published at a period where broader decolonisation-era shifts were taking place — around the time we saw the height of Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial movements, for society to rename “The Haitian War of Independence” to what it is today. The phrase of a revolution soon went into our textbooks and lesson plans, and into popular historical lexicon.

This is the heart of the matter: the emotional and moral narrative behind the Haitian Revolution existed from its very first days, spoken by the people who lived it, but it took over a century for that narrative to be believed by an audience with the power to make the label stick. Which begs the question — when given a similar scenario, if you were to take away the emotional justice campaigns that followed for years on end, would we be left with a revolution or a mere revolt?

Revolution vs Revolt

The Haitian Revolution demonstrates how subsequent generations can retrospectively impose moral necessity onto a violent conflict to elevate it to a world-altering “revolution”. The Arab Revolt of 1916 reveals the exact opposite mechanism of historical memory. Despite accomplishing the structural overthrow of an empire, the movement was deliberately denied the title of a revolution. Instead, dominant European powers applied an antagonistic mode of memory to reduce an ambitious national liberation project to a romanticised, subordinate “revolt”.

In June 1916, Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, fired a rifle shot from his balcony to signal a total break from Constantinople. His objective possessed all the hallmarks of a classic revolution: the complete dismantling of four centuries of Ottoman imperial hegemony and the creation of an independent, unified Arab state (Antonius, 1938). Militarily, the Hashemite campaigns achieved revolutionary outcomes. Operating across vast desert corridors, Arab forces severed the critical Hejaz Railway, captured the strategic port of Aqaba and entered Damascus in October 1918, effectively breaking Ottoman administrative control over the Levant (Fromkin, 1989).

If revolutionary status were determined purely by scale, violence or systematic upheaval, the 1916 movement would comfortably sit alongside the great modern revolutions. Yet it was denied that designation because granting it would disrupt the geopolitical interests of the victors (Rogan, 2015). Under the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent 1920 League of Nations mandates, Britain and France partitioned the former Ottoman territories into imperial spheres of influence (Karsh & Karsh, 1997). To legitimise this partition, European administrators framed the campaign not as a unified, righteous revolution, but as a fractured, tribal revolt. This semantic downgrade carried profound political power: labelling the actors as primitive insurgents rather than revolutionary statesmen allowed imperial powers to deny them the moral standing and political legitimacy required for post-war self-determination.

Furthermore, this institutional containment was reinforced by hijacking the emotional narrative of the conflict in popular memory. Global public attention was redirected away from Arab political interiority and toward the myth of T.E. Lawrence, heavily sensationalised through Lowell Thomas’s 1919 lecture tours and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence, 1926). In this Western narrative, the Arab cause was reduced to an exotic theatrical backdrop for individual European heroism (Said, 1978). While regional historiography remembered the struggle as al-Thawra al-Arabiyya (The Great Arab Revolution), mainstream international memory permanently categorised it as a mere regional sideshow for the First World War. The Arab Revolt of 1916 demonstrates that whether an uprising is remembered as a revolution or a revolt depends not on its material impact, but on which power holds the authority to manufacture its enduring emotional memory.

Conclusion

This research paper has comprehensively demonstrated that the semantic distinction between a “revolution” and a “revolt” is fundamentally rooted in retroactive narrative framing rather than objective historical criteria. History is far from an objective chronicle of facts; rather, as this study has illustrated, the linguistic labels assigned to past conflicts carry a profound ideological weight that exceeds their basic descriptive utility. By examining the historical trajectories of both the Haitian Revolution and the Arab Revolt, this paper has argued that an uprising is only truly immortalised as a revolution within collective memory when subsequent generations successfully retroject a powerful narrative of righteousness and moral necessity onto the event. This process reveals that historical terminology does not only reflect authentic past actions. Instead, it serves as a clear indicator of the shifting political, social and cultural landscapes of succeeding generations who actively reconstruct historical narratives to align with contemporary values and systemic goals.

The contrast between the two chosen case studies effectively highlights how dominant global power dynamics dictate long-term historical memory. In the case of the Haitian Revolution, despite aggressive resistance from contemporary colonial powers who sought to establish an antagonistic framework to delegitimise the uprising, the eventual dominance of the Haitian narrative secured its enduring status as a revolution on the international stage. This successful branding allowed the event to be integrated into an overarching international narrative of human progress, liberty and legitimate resistance against oppression. Conversely, the Arab Revolt serves as an example of the opposite end of this narrative spectrum. Although this uprising successfully dismantled existing power structures, it is remembered by historians as a mere “revolt” rather than a “revolution”. This paper has shown that this major semantic disparity stems directly from dominant Western, Eurocentric narratives. These perspectives imposed an antagonistic model that stripped the Arab Revolt of its perceived moral necessity, framing it through a lens that restricted its historical memory to a localised disruption rather than a foundational systemic transformation.

Central to understanding these divergent trajectories is the practical application of collective and antagonistic memory frameworks. As established by Cento Bull and Hansen (2016), antagonistic memory operates as a powerful force in the emotional shaping of history, aggressively enforcing a rigid binary interpretation of the past that pits heroes against villains and legitimate resistance against criminal violence. This restrictive mode of collective memory leaves no room for distinction, transforming historical interpretation into a highly contested site of ongoing socio-political struggle. In both analysed historical case studies, the pervasive presence of antagonistic memory motivated competing groups to fight fiercely for narrative dominance. For any given uprising to achieve the highly esteemed status of a revolution, it must successfully navigate this hostile arena and emerge with an internationally recognised narrative of righteous necessity.

Ultimately, this investigation emphasises that the terminology used to define past conflicts is a direct reflection of institutional power dynamics and emotional narrativisation by later societies. The terms “revolt”, “rebellion” and “revolution” function as deeply latent moral judgements that reveal far more about the current emotions and biases of those looking back than the authentic, objective facts of the historical events themselves. Future research should continue to deconstruct these pervasive Eurocentric biases and explore how alternative cosmopolitan or agonistic memory frameworks might allow for more balanced, multi-perspective global understandings of historic uprisings. By recognising that memory is continuously reshaped by our present circumstances, historians can better appreciate how deeply our contemporary world influences our structural interpretation of the past.

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