READ: Era 6 Overview - The Long Nineteenth Century

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads Worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

The length of time covered in Era 6—174 years—is both surprisingly short and unusually long. How can that be?

It is surprisingly short because this era does in fact cover fewer years than any of the eras that came before. Look back, for example, to the first era of human history covered in this course (Era 2). It lasted for around 200,000 years, more than 500 times as long as Era 6! This decrease in length is partly because we know so much more about life in 1800 CE than life in 1800 BCE. But it's also because the pace of change had greatly accelerated by 1750 and so we have to bite off a shorter chunk of time to tell a big story.

Yet, Era 6 also seems unusually long for a period that says it covers "the Long Nineteenth Century." After all, a century is only 100 years, not 174!

You might ask, what's so special about this oddly specific period in time that it all gets lumped together as one era? Well, the answer is that historians generally agree that a specific set of changes happened during this period of time. These global changes involved the following:

We sometimes refer to these changes as "revolutions" because they were such great transformations that, together, they turned the world upside down and created the "modern" world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

What were these engines of change that created the modern world? In this era, we will talk about them in four groups. First, we will look at liberal political revolutions. Then we will turn to the Industrial Revolution. Third, we will look at modern imperialism as a different kind of revolutionary change. Finally, we will focus on the economic and labor revolutions that produced capitalism and socialism. Each of these changed the world in their own ways, and not everybody was affected equally or in the same ways by these revolutions.

Let's briefly introduce each of these four revolutions. First, we introduce the liberal revolution, a radical transformation that produced a new kind of political community: the nation-state. The word liberal emerged in this era from the Latin term liberalis, meaning "free man." By 1750, the idea that people (or at least some people) should have individual liberties (a word that also came from liberalis) was becoming increasingly popular. It was one result of a new way of looking at the world that also led to different ideas about government. One of these new political ideas held that free men should have a voice in governing themselves. Together, these ideas of individual liberty and participatory government led to political revolutions in which the power to govern changed hands—often from kings or emperors to a larger political class of citizens. These revolutions first occurred in areas around the Atlantic seaboard. These new ideas then spread and influenced other areas of the world.

The liberal revolutions were about changes in the ways people thought. But the second revolution covered in this era, the Industrial Revolution shifted the way humans produced and distributed goods. Its origins were in scientific experimentation that enabled people to access new forms of energy for doing work. Until the eighteenth century, humans created energy sources using the power of human and animal labor, water and wind power, and by burning wood to generate heat. But by 1750, new sources of energy were discovered using coal and steam power. By the early nineteenth century, steam power generated fuel from burning coal far more efficiently. This discovery dramatically increased the amount of energy that humans could produce. The use of these fossil fuels to power increasingly complex machines changed the way we live and work. In 1500 CE, a single shirt required around 500 hours of human labor to produce. But steam engines automated aspects of weaving, sewing, and the spinning of yarn. With these advances, the amount of human labor required to produce a shirt dramatically decreased. More shirts (and many other goods) were available to more people at lower prices.

The Industrial Revolution led to dramatic changes in human networks. For the first time, large numbers of people could travel long distances on steam-powered railroads and ships. This led to widespread migration. At the same time, a communication revolution made it much easier for information to travel over long distances. The invention of the telegraph allowed messages to travel nearly instantaneously across long distances. Finally, this revolution not only affected human life on Earth but also the Earth itself. At the start of Era 6, humans were mining and using about 10 million metric tons of coal. But 100 years later, worldwide production of coal increased to 130 million tons. And by the start of the twentieth century, humans were producing close to one billion tons. By this time, most of the world was using coal for 90% of its energy output. This expanded capacity to harness and utilize the Earth's resources led to better lives for many. But it also led to the pollution of air and water and decreased global biodiversity. It has altered the planet's climate in ways that will last for millions of years.

The third revolution we look at in this era was the birth of new empires and new types of colonialism. Despite ideas about individual freedom and political participation, this was an era that saw the birth of vast empires that were often highly un-participatory and restricted people's freedoms. These new empires often had colonies located quite far away from the nation that was exercising control over them, particularly in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, but also in the Americas. With very few exceptions, the empires used these colonies as places from which to draw labor and resources to feed their own industries and enrich themselves. This left many colonies comparatively poor. This legacy of imperialism continues to shape the global economy today.

The building of vast empires was also deeply tied to changes in the global economic system. This was a fourth revolution—an economic revolution. The Long Nineteenth Century saw the full development of industrial capitalism. Individuals or groups of people could own vast amounts of assets. They could invest their money in companies to make profits. This system tended to concentrate wealth in the hands of business owners and investors. It also changed how people worked. Increasingly, people worked for wages that were paid every week or month. Capitalism may have helped to increase overall productivity in the world, but it also made working conditions difficult for many people. People—even children—labored on farms and plantations or in factories to increase profits. In response, many people began to push for reforms. They called for an end to child labor, to bad working conditions, and to slavery. Reform movements also called for new rights for women. One type of reformism proposed an alternate economic system called socialism that would be more centrally planned and worker- controlled than capitalism.

The four revolutions described above were world-changing, but not everyone experienced these changes. Even those who did, experienced them in different ways. By 1800, the global population was 900 million. That's 900 million unique human stories to tell. Just a hundred years later, the world's population had nearly doubled to 1.75 billion people. Some of these people were factory workers, others were wealthy bankers. They lived in industrialized societies at the heart of empires. Still others labored on mines and plantations in colonies. They provided the raw materials to feed those factories. Some—particularly men—had the vote. They could participate in liberal democratic politics. Others could not. These groups included women, colonial subjects of large empires, people that did not own land, or groups that faced discrimination. Even the length of a life could be very different depending on these variables. In rich nations, the death rate among children began to decline. This was the first consistent decline in child mortality in human history. In 1800, 46% of children born in the United States died before the age of five. In 1914, the mortality rate of children had dropped to 17.6%${}^1$‍. Better understanding of infectious diseases and the discovery of vaccines dramatically improved human health in the wealthier parts of the world. Combined with more available food this meant that in wealthy nations, more people were living longer and healthier lives. But this change was not equally shared. In areas colonized by European nations, for instance, child mortality and life expectancy barely shifted. In the British colonies of West Africa child mortality actually worsened from 1800 to 1914. The question of who shared in these modern revolutions, and how, can help us to understand the shape of difference, as well as the unity of human experience, entering the last era of our course.

Trevor Getz is Professor of African and world History at San Francisco State University. He has written or edited eleven books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and co-produced several prize-winning documentaries. He is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.

Bridgette Byrd O’Connor holds a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford and has taught Big History, World History, and AP U.S. Government and Politics for the past ten years at the high school level. In addition, she has been a freelance writer and editor for the Big History Project and the Crash Course World History and U.S. History curriculums.