READ: Unit 5 Introduction – Revolutions, 1750-1900

Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.

Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

The era from 1750 to 1900, which is sometimes called “the long nineteenth century”, is also frequently called “an age of revolutions”. Revolution is a funny word. It can mean “to go around in a circle” indicating a cycle that never changes. But when used to describe events, revolution usually means “to turn something upside down.” That suggests radical change.

Now, you can’t really say the long nineteenth century brought dramatic change everywhere. Nor was there one place where you could say everything changed. But if you say this era saw enormous and enduring transformations in some regions that would spread and later shake the world, and then someone says to you, “Yeah? Prove it!”—you can tell them this era saw:

These bullet points are all changes related to revolutions that were mostly centered in Northwest Europe and the Atlantic world. However, they were only possible because of global trends from earlier eras. People in Northwest Europe, you may remember, had been unable to expand or compete commercially overland in Afro-Eurasia in the preceding era, and so they had turned to the sea. They gained knowledge and technologies from people they met in their sea voyages. They were enriched by the resources they took from their new overseas colonies, often by force. They colonized the Americas and profited from the labor of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans. Meanwhile, new naval technology made European ships more efficient and powerful. By 1750, huge European warships dominated oceanic trade worldwide. All of the profits from these global ventures helped to pay for and make possible the revolutions of this era.

What were the engines of change that created the modern world? In this unit, we will talk about them in three groups. First, we will look at liberal political revolutions. Then we will turn to the Industrial Revolution. Finally, we will focus on the economic and labor revolutions that produced capitalism and socialism.

Let’s briefly introduce each of these four revolutions in turn. 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 was catching on. This new way of looking at the world also led to different ideas about government, including the notion that free men should have a voice in governing themselves.${}^1$‍ 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, including Haiti, France, the United States, and many countries in Latin America. These revolutions generated new ideas that 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, transformed the way humans produced and distributed goods. The Industrial Revolution’s origins were in scientific experimentation that gave people new forms of energy for doing work. Up until the eighteenth century, all energy used by humans came from the muscles of humans and animals, from water and wind power, or by burning wood to generate heat. But around 1750, coal and steam changed the game. By the early nineteenth century, steam power could pump water from mines, as well as move boats and trains, all by burning coal far more efficiently than before. This discovery dramatically increased the amount of energy that humans could produce. Using these fossil fuels to power increasingly complex machines changed the way we live and work. Think about this—in 1500 CE, a single shirt required around 500 hours of human labor to produce. But steam engines automated the time-consuming aspects of weaving, sewing, and yarn-spinning. With these advances, the amount of human labor required to produce a shirt dramatically decreased. More shirts—and a ton of other goods—were available to more people, and at lower prices.

The Industrial Revolution transformed human networks. For the first time, large numbers of people could travel long distances on steam-powered trains and ships. This led to widespread migration. At the same time, a communication revolution made it much easier for information to travel quickly 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. Beginning around 1750, humans were mining and using about 10 million metric tons of coal per year. Then 100 years later it was 130 million tons. 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 percent of our energy. 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 Industrial Revolution gradually transformed the global economic system and saw the full development of industrial capitalism. Individuals or groups of people could now 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 the type of work most people did. 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 harder for many people. Workers—including children—labored on farms and plantations or in factories to increase profits. In response, many pushed for reforms. They called for an end to child labor, to bad working conditions, and to slavery. Reform movements also called for women’s rights. One type of reform proposed an alternate economic system called socialism, which promised to place more power in the hands of workers and distribute wealth more equally than capitalism ever could.

The 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 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 had the right to vote and could participate in liberal democratic politics. Others—women, the poor, the enslaved, people with disabilities, groups excluded because of their perceived race or identity—could not. These same variables could even affect a person’s life expectancy. 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 percent of children born in the United States died before the age of five. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the mortality rate of children had dropped to 17.6 percent.${}^2$‍ 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.

You’ll notice we sometimes use qualifiers like “in the wealthier parts of the world”. That’s because the improvements brought by these three revolutions were not equally shared. Like many disparities, it was particularly noticeable within the vast empires being built by the industrialized powers. 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 increased from 1800 to 1900. The question of how empire shaped the impact of these modern revolutions will be picked up in the next unit.

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor 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.