Russia & Austro-Hungary were pretty rotten inside - but it was WW I that did them in - the 1905 revolution ended up in a bloodbath (after all, even a rotten empire can amass greater military organization and firepower than a bunch of guys with sticks and guns). India was did in by the Brits, and so was the Ottoman Empire. Ditto for China - it was dismantled first by Europeans and latter by Japanese occupation, without which Mao would have never succeeded. Pre WWII Eastern European statelets were dismantled by Hitler's invasion that, thogether with the Red Army, cleared the way for getting rid of the landed gentry and bourgeoisie.
Not a single case of a successful revolution from below that was not preced by a frontal attack on the state by other states.
>However, that's government -- a noxious, parasitical, endemic
>social disease. What about the replacement of whole cultural
>systems, as with the success of Christianity and of capitalism?
>These did not take place as coups d'état; the coups, revolutions
>and wars occurred after they had pretty much succeeded on lower
>social levels.
>
Never happened. European capitalism was an evolutionary change that grew out of the feudal institutions and the challenges (populations surplus) they faced. It looks like a revolution only when we collapse a few hunder years into a dramatic histroical narrative. In England, the feudal gentry became bourgeoisie. In continental Europe, feudal gentry did not have as much power to begin with and the growth of the merchant class & bourgeoisie grew together with the state apparatus. The industrial "revolution" is a myth - its institutional foundations were build long before its outcomes came to the full view.
wojtek