Nineteenth-century European casinos tapped into new transportation and communication networks, and they were flexible enough to take advantage of the changing political map of Europe. The casinos found success amid these large structural transformations affecting the continent. They projected a new type of sociability that exuded a sense of exclusivity and democracy at once. The casino was also an environment that embraced social mixture. The casino attracted a transnational and polyglot clientele. Nineteenth-century casinos were physical expressions of contemporary ideas about fate and agency. The nineteenth-century casino also occasioned a prolonged discussion of the body, feeling, and mind, and there is a wide recognition of culture’s impact on the body. Seeing the effect that gambling had on players, nineteenth-century observers could consider how the self, the environment, and behavior all related to one another.

The way social scientists think that others think about revolutions has been shaped primarily by Jack Goldstone. In his influential review essays, Goldstone (1982, 2001) presents the twentieth-century study of revolution as occurring in generations – from natural historians of the 1930s to general theorists of the mid-twentieth century, from state-centered scholars in the 1980s to a contemporary fourth generation basket of approaches. Because it is so familiar, his reading animates nearly all contemporary literature reviews in revolution studies.