First published in 1979.

Introduction: Explaining social revolutions : alternatives to existing theories. A structural perspective ; International and world-historical contexts ; The potential autonomy of the state ; A comparative historical method ; Why France, Russia, and China? -- Part I: Causes of social revolutions in France, Russia, and China. Old-regime states in crisis. Old regime France : the contradictions of Bourbon absolutism ; Manchu China : from the Celestial Empire to the fall of the imperial system ; Imperial Russia : an underdeveloped great power ; Japan and Prussia as contrasts -- Agrarian structures and peasant insurrections. Peasants against seigneurs in the French Revolution ; The revolution of the Obshchinas : peasant radicalism in Russia ; Two counterpoints : the absence of peasant revolts in the English and German revolutions ; Peasant incapacity and gentry vulnerability in China -- Part II: Outcomes of social revolutions in France, Russia, and China. What changed and how : a focus on state building. Political leaderships ; The role of revolutionary ideologies -- The birth of a "modern state edifice" in France. A bourgeois revolution? ; The effects of the social-revolutionary crisis of 1789 ; War, the Jacobins, and Napoleon ; The new regime -- The emergence of a dictatorial party-state in Russia. The effects of the social-revolutionary crisis of 1917 ; The Bolshevik struggle to rule ; The Stalinist "revolution from above" ; The new regime -- The rise of a mass-mobilizing party-state in China. The social-revolutionary situation after 1911 ; The rise and decline of the urban-based Kuomintang ; The communists and the peasants ; The new regime.

Theda Skocpol shows how all three combine to explain the origins and accomplishments of social-revolutionary transformations.