Unit 16 · Revolutions and the Modern World

In 1763 Britain won a war against France that had been fought on four continents. Winning was expensive. The British government had borrowed heavily and now had to pay for troops in North America. Parliament decided the colonists should help, and passed new taxes on sugar, paper and tea. Colonists who had never been allowed to send anyone to Parliament objected. Their slogan was simple: no taxation without representation. A world war had started the quarrel that became the American Revolution.

In July 1776 the thirteen colonies declared independence. The Declaration of Independence made a claim that reached far beyond America. It said that all men are created equal, that they have rights that no one can take away, and that a government gets its power from the consent of the people it governs. Consent means agreement. If a government destroys people’s rights, the Declaration said, the people may change or replace it. Kings across Europe ruled by birth and by claims that God had chosen them. This was a direct challenge to that idea.

The colonists could not have won alone. France, still angry about losing in 1763, sent money, weapons, ships and thousands of soldiers. Spain and the Dutch joined against Britain. In 1781 a French fleet blocked the sea and a combined American and French army trapped the British at Yorktown, Virginia. The British surrendered. The peace treaty of 1783 recognized the United States. France had helped create a republic, a country with no king, and had gone deep into debt to do it. That debt would soon help bring down the French king himself.

The new United States wrote a Constitution in 1787 that set up elected lawmakers, a president chosen for a term instead of for life, and courts to check them both. People in Europe and Latin America read it closely. Yet the same Constitution protected slavery, and about one in five people in the new country was enslaved. Women could not vote. The revolution had announced a principle bigger than the people who wrote it. Much of the next century would be a fight over how far that principle reached.

By 1788 the French government was close to broke. Wars, including the one that helped America, had piled up debt. Bread prices rose after bad harvests. Yet the people who could best afford taxes paid the least. French society was divided by law into three groups called estates. The First Estate was the clergy, the Second Estate the nobles. Together they were perhaps two percent of the population and owned much of the land, and they paid few taxes. The Third Estate was everyone else, from rich merchants and lawyers to city workers and peasants, about ninety-seven percent of France.

King Louis the Sixteenth needed new taxes, and to get them he called a meeting that had not been held since 1614: the Estates-General. It opened at Versailles on May 5, 1789. At once a fight broke out over voting. By the old rule each estate had one vote, so the clergy and nobles could always outvote the Third Estate two to one. The Third Estate demanded that every deputy get one vote. It had as many deputies as the other two combined, and many priests and some nobles agreed with it.

On June 17 the Third Estate declared itself the National Assembly, claiming to speak for the whole nation. Three days later the deputies found their meeting hall locked. They moved to an indoor tennis court nearby and swore an oath not to leave until France had a constitution, a written set of rules that would limit the king’s power. The king backed down and told the other estates to join them. But he also began moving soldiers toward Paris, and people in the city feared an attack.

On July 14 crowds in Paris looking for gunpowder stormed the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison. It held only seven prisoners, but it stood for the king’s power to lock people up without trial. The crowd killed the governor. News of the Bastille spread across the country and set off the peasant risings that frightened the nobles on the night of August 4. In less than three months, a meeting called to fix the budget had become a revolution. The word sovereignty, the final power to rule, had moved from the king to the nation.

On August 26, 1789, the National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was short, seventeen articles, and meant to be read aloud. Men are born free and equal in rights, it began. Those rights included liberty, property and safety. Law should be the same for everyone. No one could be arrested without cause. People could speak and print their opinions. Taxes should be shared according to ability to pay. The document borrowed from the American Declaration but went further, since it was written as law for a whole nation rather than as a break from a king.

The word in the title was man, and the Assembly meant it. Women could not vote, hold office or serve on juries. Olympe de Gouges, a playwright and pamphlet writer from the south of France, noticed. In 1791 she published her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. It copied the Assembly’s document article by article and added women to each one. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights, she wrote. If a woman can be sent to the scaffold, she argued, she should also be able to stand at the speaker’s platform.

Women had already shown their power in the streets. On October 5, 1789, thousands of Paris market women, angry about the price of bread, marched twelve miles in the rain to Versailles. The next day they forced the king and his family to move to Paris, where the people could watch them. Women filled the public galleries of the Assembly and formed political clubs. Yet in 1793 the government shut the women’s clubs, and that November Olympe de Gouges was executed by guillotine, the new beheading machine, for her writings against the men in power.

The Assembly also left out the enslaved. France’s Caribbean colonies held hundreds of thousands of people in slavery, and colonial planters sat in the Assembly. For two years the deputies argued and delayed. Meanwhile free people of color in the colonies, some of them wealthy, demanded the citizenship the Declaration seemed to promise. The documents of 1789 and 1791 set a standard that their own authors did not meet. That gap gave everyone left out a text to point to, and they used it.

In June 1791 King Louis the Sixteenth tried to flee France in disguise. He was caught near the border and brought back to Paris under guard. Many people who had trusted him now saw him as a traitor. The next year France went to war with Austria and Prussia, whose rulers wanted to crush the revolution before it spread. The war went badly at first. Enemy armies crossed the border. In August 1792 a Paris crowd stormed the king’s palace, and the Assembly suspended the monarchy. In September a new assembly, the Convention, declared France a republic.

The Convention put the king on trial for treason and found him guilty. On January 21, 1793, he was beheaded in a public square before a huge crowd. His wife, Marie Antoinette, followed in October. Now every king in Europe had reason to fight France. Britain, Spain and the Netherlands joined the war. Inside France, some regions rose in revolt against Paris. Prices soared. The Convention responded with a draft that called up hundreds of thousands of men, the largest army Europe had ever seen, and with emergency powers.

Those powers went to a small group called the Committee of Public Safety, led by a lawyer named Maximilien Robespierre. From 1793 to 1794 the committee ran what became known as the Terror. Special courts tried suspected enemies of the revolution quickly and sent them to the guillotine. About seventeen thousand people were executed after trials, and many more died in prison or in fighting in rebel regions. Victims included nobles and priests, but most were ordinary people. Robespierre argued that terror was needed to protect liberty from its enemies. In July 1794 his fellow deputies turned on him, and he too was executed.

Why did a revolution that began with a declaration of rights end up killing so many? Historians point to war, which made every disagreement look like treason. They point to fear of counter-revolution, which was real. And they point to leaders who came to believe that anyone against them was against the people. The Terror ended, but the questions stayed. Can a government suspend rights to save a revolution? The republic that survived was tired, and it would soon hand power to a general.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a young artillery officer from the island of Corsica who rose fast in the revolutionary army. He won battles in Italy and became famous. In 1799 he joined a coup, a sudden seizure of power, and made himself the leading man in France. In 1804 he crowned himself emperor in a cathedral in Paris, taking the crown from the pope’s hands and placing it on his own head. The republic was over. But Napoleon kept many of the revolution’s gains. Careers were open to talent, not birth. Feudal dues did not come back.

His most lasting work was a law code, completed in 1804 and known as the Napoleonic Code. It gave France one clear set of laws in place of hundreds of local customs. It protected property and made all men equal before the law. It also put wives under their husbands’ authority and restored slavery in the colonies that France still held. As Napoleon’s armies conquered Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and much of Germany, he set up the Code and his relatives as rulers. Old borders and old privileges disappeared. People in conquered lands got modern laws and heavy taxes and a draft for Napoleon’s wars.

The conquests carried the seeds of his defeat. Spaniards fought a guerrilla war against French occupation. Germans who had welcomed French ideas came to hate French rule and began to think of themselves as one people. In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia with about six hundred thousand men. The Russians retreated, burned Moscow, and let winter do the rest. Only a small fraction of the army came home. Europe’s rulers joined together, entered Paris in 1814, and sent Napoleon to a small island. He escaped, ruled for a hundred days, and lost for good at Waterloo in June 1815.

The winners met in Vienna to redraw the map. Led by the Austrian minister Metternich, they put kings back on thrones and tried to make revolution impossible. The French king’s brother took the throne, but even he had to accept a constitution and the Code. The Congress of Vienna gave Europe almost forty years without a major war. It also left millions of people, Poles, Italians, Germans, ruled by foreign courts. The idea that a people should rule itself, which Napoleon had spread without meaning to, would drive the next round of revolutions.

In 1789 the French colony of Saint-Domingue, on the western part of the island of Hispaniola, was the richest colony in the world. Its sugar and coffee plantations produced a large share of the sugar Europeans ate. That wealth came from about five hundred thousand enslaved Africans. Most were born in Africa. Planters worked them so hard that they expected to replace them within years. About thirty thousand white colonists lived among them. So did a similar number of free people of color, some of whom owned land and slaves themselves.

News of the Declaration of the Rights of Man reached the colony quickly. Free people of color asked for citizenship and were refused. Then, in August 1791, enslaved people in the northern plain rose in a planned revolt. They burned plantations and killed masters. Within weeks tens of thousands were in arms. A former coachman named Toussaint Louverture, about fifty years old and free for some years before the revolt, became the rebels’ greatest general. He drilled his soldiers, made alliances with Spain and then with France, and outmaneuvered everyone.

In 1794 the French Convention, at war and needing the rebels’ help against Britain and Spain, abolished slavery in all French colonies. Toussaint took the French side and by 1801 governed the whole island under a constitution he wrote himself. Then Napoleon took power in France and decided to bring back slavery. In 1802 he sent a large army. Toussaint was tricked into a meeting, arrested, and shipped to a cold mountain prison in France, where he died in April 1803. His last words to his captors, as reported, were that in overthrowing him the French had cut only the trunk of the tree of liberty; its roots were many and deep.

He was right. His generals, led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fought on. Yellow fever killed French soldiers by the thousands. In November 1803 the French gave up. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared the independent nation of Haiti, using the name the island’s first people had given it. It was the only successful revolution by enslaved people in history and the second independent nation in the Americas. The world’s slaveholding powers refused to recognize it. In 1825 France demanded a huge payment, at first one hundred fifty million francs, for the loss of its property, meaning its former slaves, and Haiti paid for generations.

Spain had ruled most of South and Central America for three hundred years. At the top sat officials born in Spain. Below them were creoles, people of Spanish descent born in the Americas. Creoles owned the ranches and mines and had read the American and French declarations, but Spain kept the best jobs for its own. Below the creoles were mixed-race people, Native Americans and enslaved Africans, who made up most of the population and had the fewest rights. Creoles wanted power for themselves; they were less eager to share it with those below.

In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain and put his brother on the throne. Suddenly no one knew who the legitimate ruler of the colonies was. Town councils across Spanish America set up their own governments, at first in the name of the imprisoned Spanish king, then in their own name. In Caracas a wealthy creole named Simón Bolívar, born in 1783 and educated in Europe, helped declare Venezuela independent in 1811. Spain fought back hard. Bolívar lost, went into exile in Jamaica and Haiti, and came back with help from Haiti’s president in return for a promise to free the enslaved.

Bolívar’s great gamble came in 1819. He marched an army of a few thousand, including cattlemen from the plains and British volunteers, through flooded lowlands and over the freezing Andes mountains into what is now Colombia. Many died on the way. The survivors surprised the Spanish at Boyacá and won. Bolívar joined Venezuela, Colombia and later Ecuador into one republic, Gran Colombia. Meanwhile José de San Martín led an army from Argentina over the Andes into Chile and then Peru. The last Spanish army on the continent surrendered at Ayacucho, Peru, in 1824.

Bolívar wanted a united South America. He got a dozen separate countries, often ruled by generals. He abolished slavery where he could, though slavery lasted for decades in some new nations. He wrote constitutions and watched them fail. Gran Colombia broke apart in 1830, the year he died at forty-seven. Yet the independence he won was real. Spain’s American empire, the largest in the world for three centuries, had ended. Historians still debate whether independence changed much for the Native and mixed-race majority, who mostly exchanged Spanish masters for creole ones.

Before dawn on September 16, 1810, in the small town of Dolores in central Mexico, a parish priest named Miguel Hidalgo rang his church bell. Hidalgo was almost sixty, read banned French books, and had spent years teaching local people to make pottery and raise silkworms so they could earn a living. He had planned a revolt with a few creole officers, but the plan was discovered. Rather than be arrested, he called the townspeople together and told them to rise against bad government. The call became known as the Grito de Dolores, the cry of Dolores.

What happened next surprised everyone, including Hidalgo. Tens of thousands of Native and mixed-race farmers and miners joined him, armed with machetes, clubs and farm tools. This was not the creole revolution of Bolívar. It was the poor against three centuries of tribute, forced labor and hunger. Hidalgo’s army took the city of Guanajuato and killed hundreds of Spaniards and creoles who had taken shelter in the granary. That violence terrified wealthy creoles, who might have wanted independence but did not want this. Hidalgo declared an end to slavery and to tribute, but his untrained followers could not beat regular troops.

Within months the army defeated him. Hidalgo was captured, stripped of his priesthood, and shot in 1811. His head was hung in a cage on the granary wall in Guanajuato for ten years as a warning. Another priest, José María Morelos, took up the fight with a better organized army and a written program: independence, equality for all races, and an end to slavery. Morelos was captured and shot in 1815. The revolt shrank to small bands in the hills.

Then events in Spain changed everything. In 1820 Spanish liberals forced their king to accept a constitution that limited the church and the army. Mexico’s conservative creoles, who had fought Hidalgo, now feared a liberal Spain more than independence. A royalist officer, Agustín de Iturbide, made a deal with the remaining rebels, and in 1821 Mexico became independent with almost no fighting. Iturbide made himself emperor for less than two years. Mexico today celebrates September 16, Hidalgo’s cry, as its Independence Day, not the deal of 1821. The date choice is an argument about whose revolution it was.

After 1815 Europe’s rulers tried to freeze the map. Underneath, two ideas were growing. One was liberalism: the belief that governments should have written constitutions, elected assemblies, and protected rights such as free speech. The other was nationalism: the belief that a people who share a language and history should have a country of their own. Italians lived under Austrian and other rulers. Germans lived in dozens of small states. Hungarians, Czechs and Poles lived inside empires that spoke other languages. Bad harvests in 1846 and 1847 and rising prices added hunger to frustration.

In February 1848 Paris rose again. King Louis-Philippe fled, and France became a republic that soon gave every adult man the vote. Within weeks the news set off risings in Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest and Prague. In Vienna, Metternich himself, the man who had built the order of 1815, fled the city. Kings promised constitutions. In Frankfurt, elected delegates from across the German states met to write a constitution for a united Germany. For a few months it looked as if Europe had changed forever.

Then the revolutions came apart. The people who had fought together wanted different things. Middle-class liberals wanted a constitution and orderly elections. Workers in Paris wanted jobs and bread, and when the government closed its work program in June, the army crushed a workers’ rising with thousands killed. Nationalists in one place opposed nationalists next door: Hungarians wanted freedom from Austria but not for the Croats and Romanians under them. Armies stayed loyal to their rulers. By 1849 Austrian and Russian troops had crushed Hungary, the Frankfurt parliament had been dissolved, and the French republic had elected Napoleon’s nephew, who would soon make himself emperor.

Yet 1848 left marks. Serfdom, which tied peasants to a lord’s land, ended in Austria and Hungary for good. Some constitutions survived in weakened form. And tens of thousands of defeated revolutionaries fled, many to the United States. These Forty-Eighters, as they were called, settled in cities like Chicago and towns in southern Illinois, brought newspapers and political clubs with them, and became strong voices against slavery in the 1850s. Ideas that lost in Europe took root in Illinois.

In 1750 slavery was legal in nearly every society on earth, and few people questioned it. By 1850 the slave trade across the Atlantic had been outlawed by most nations and slavery itself had ended in Haiti, the British Empire, most of Spanish America and the northern United States. That change took a movement. Its first voices were enslaved and formerly enslaved people themselves. Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped as a boy in West Africa, bought his freedom and in 1789 published his life story in London. Readers who had never seen a slave ship learned what the crossing was like from a man who had survived it.

In Britain, Quakers and other Christians organized. They collected signatures on petitions, printed a famous diagram of a slave ship packed with bodies, and asked shoppers to boycott sugar grown by enslaved people. William Wilberforce brought bills before Parliament year after year. In 1807 Parliament banned the slave trade, and in 1833 it voted to abolish slavery across the British Empire, paying slave owners a large sum and freeing about eight hundred thousand people. The United States banned the import of enslaved people in 1808, the earliest date its Constitution allowed. France, which had abolished slavery in 1794 and restored it under Napoleon, abolished it for good in 1848.

Every step was fought. Planters argued that slavery was property protected by law, that colonies would go bankrupt, and that Africans were better off enslaved. Abolitionists answered with the enslaved’s own testimony and with the words of 1776 and 1789. They pointed to Haiti as proof that freed people could rule themselves. A revolt in Jamaica in 1831, led by an enslaved preacher named Samuel Sharpe, helped convince Parliament that slavery could not last. In the United States, Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery in 1838, asked white audiences what the Fourth of July could mean to a slave.

Illinois shows how slow and partial the change could be. The state’s 1818 constitution said slavery would not be introduced, yet it allowed existing indentures, and hundreds of Black people were still held in near-slavery in southern Illinois in the 1820s. In 1824 voters narrowly rejected a plan to rewrite the constitution to allow slavery. Free Black residents faced harsh laws limiting where they could live and work. Abolition in one place did not mean equality, and the fight over slavery in the United States would end only with a civil war.

Look back over the century from 1750 to 1850 and a pattern appears. A group of men writes that all men are born free and equal. They mean, at first, men like themselves: property owners, white, Christian or at least European. Then someone outside the group reads the words and takes them literally. Olympe de Gouges took them literally for women. The rebels of Saint-Domingue took them literally for the enslaved. Hidalgo’s farmers took them literally for the Native poor of Mexico. Each time, the people in power said the words did not mean that. Each time, the people outside kept the text and pushed.

This is why historians call these documents universal even though their authors were not. The claim itself, that rights belong to people simply because they are people, did not stop at any border once it was written down. Thomas Paine, an Englishman who wrote for the American cause in 1776, argued that America’s fight was in large part the cause of all humanity. He later sat in the French Convention. Ideas moved with people, letters and newspapers in ways kings could not control.

The pattern also shows the limits. Each revolution was also a struggle over who would rule afterward, and the winners often narrowed the circle again. The American Constitution protected slavery. The French Assembly shut the women’s clubs. Bolívar’s republics kept the Native majority poor. Napoleon restored slavery, and Haiti’s own leaders sometimes forced freed people back onto plantations to save the economy. Declaring a right and living by it were different things, and hypocrisy, saying one thing while doing another, was everywhere.

Students sometimes ask whether the declarations meant anything, given how many people they left out. One answer is to look at what the excluded did with them. They did not throw the documents away. They quoted them. A text that says all people have rights becomes a tool in the hands of anyone who can read it, or hear it read. That is why the same argument continued into the 1900s over votes for women, civil rights and the end of empires. The revolutions of this chapter did not finish the job. They wrote the job description.

Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain, an island with a smaller population than France, rather than somewhere else? Historians point to a set of advantages that came together around 1750. The first was coal. Britain had large coalfields close to the surface and near rivers and the sea. Wood was running out as forests were cleared, and coal burned hotter. Cheap coal meant cheap heat for iron furnaces, and later cheap power for steam engines. A country that had to burn wood or import fuel could not have run thousands of factories.

The second advantage was money. Britain had grown rich from trade across the Atlantic, including the trade in enslaved people and the sugar and tobacco they produced. Merchants, landowners and bankers had capital, money saved up and available to invest. Britain had a national bank, a stock market and a system of country banks that could lend a mill owner money to build. Interest rates were low. Someone with a good idea and a friend at the bank could try it.

The third was transport. Coal and iron are heavy, and a horse on a muddy road can pull only so much. In 1761 the Duke of Bridgewater opened a canal that carried coal from his mines into Manchester and cut the price of coal in the city by about half. Others copied him. Within fifty years Britain had a network of canals linking mines, factories, rivers and ports. A single horse walking a towpath could pull a barge carrying many tons. Later, railroads would do the same job faster.

Finally, Britain’s laws helped. Parliament, not the king, controlled taxes, and Parliament was full of landowners and merchants who protected property. Courts enforced contracts. Patents let inventors profit from their ideas for a set number of years. Britain also had a large market with no internal tolls, unlike France or the German states, and colonies that bought its goods. None of these alone caused the revolution. Together they made Britain the place where a new idea could become a business.

Before 1760 most cloth in Britain was made at home. A farm family bought raw wool or cotton, the women and children spun it into thread on a spinning wheel, and the man wove the thread into cloth on a hand loom. A merchant collected the cloth and paid by the piece. This cottage industry was slow. One weaver needed the thread of several spinners, and spinners could not keep up. Meanwhile buyers wanted more cotton cloth, which was light, easy to wash and cheaper than linen or wool. Cotton itself came from India, the Caribbean and, increasingly, the slave plantations of the American South.

Inventors attacked the bottleneck. Around 1764 James Hargreaves, a weaver in Lancashire, built the spinning jenny, a hand-powered frame that let one worker spin eight threads at once, and later far more. In 1769 Richard Arkwright patented the water frame, which used a water wheel to drive rollers that spun stronger thread. Because a water frame needed a river and was too big for a cottage, Arkwright built a mill at Cromford in 1771 and brought workers to the machines. Samuel Crompton’s spinning mule of 1779 combined both ideas and became the standard machine of the cotton mill.

Now the problem flipped: spinners made more thread than hand weavers could use. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom. It took decades to perfect, but by the 1820s and 1830s power looms were driving hand weavers out of work. A hand-loom weaver who had earned a decent living in 1800 could barely feed a family by 1830. Some weavers, called Luddites, smashed machines in 1811 and 1812. Parliament made machine-breaking a crime punishable by death. Cheap cotton cloth was a triumph for buyers and a disaster for the people the machines replaced.

The numbers show the scale. Britain imported a few million pounds of raw cotton a year in the 1760s and hundreds of millions of pounds by the 1830s. Cotton cloth became Britain’s largest export, sold in India, Latin America and Africa. The city of Manchester, where much of it was made, was nicknamed Cottonopolis. And because the raw cotton came mainly from the American South, the mills of Lancashire and the slave plantations of Mississippi were linked in one system. The machines were new; some of the labor behind them was as old as slavery.

Water wheels had a problem: a mill had to sit by a fast river, and in a dry summer or a hard frost the wheel stopped. Early steam engines, used since the early 1700s to pump water out of coal mines, were huge, slow and burned enormous amounts of fuel. In the 1760s a Scottish instrument maker named James Watt, repairing one of these pumps at the University of Glasgow, saw why it wasted so much coal. The cylinder was heated and cooled with every stroke. Watt added a separate condenser so the cylinder stayed hot. His engine used about a quarter of the fuel.

Watt had the idea but not the money. He partnered with Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer with capital and factory experience. Their engines, sold from 1776, at first pumped mines. Then Watt worked out how to turn the engine’s up-and-down motion into a turning wheel, and by the 1780s steam could drive the spinning machines in a cotton mill. Now a mill could be built anywhere coal could be delivered, including in the middle of a city near workers and markets. Manchester, on a slow river, became a steam city.

Steam power was not sudden. In 1800 most British factories still used water, and many stayed with it for decades. But the trend was clear. Each engine did the work of dozens of horses without tiring. Engineers kept improving them; by the 1800s high-pressure engines were small and strong enough to move themselves. In 1825 the first public steam railway opened in the north of England, and in 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway carried passengers and cotton between the port and the mills at speeds no one had ever traveled on land.

The steam engine changed how people thought about power itself. For all of history, work had been done by muscle, wind, water or fire in a hearth. Now heat from buried rock could be turned into motion on demand. The word horsepower, which Watt invented to sell his engines by comparing them to horses, is still on engines today. Steam also tied industry to coal for good. Every mill chimney in Manchester, and the smoke that blackened its sky, was a Watt engine at work.

A factory is a building where many workers use power-driven machines under one owner’s control. That definition sounds simple, but it changed daily life more than any invention. On a farm or in a cottage, people worked hard but set their own pace: fast before a harvest, slow on a rainy day, with a break when the baby cried. A machine does not care about rain or babies. It runs at one speed, and the workers must match it. Mill owners posted rules, rang bells and fined workers for lateness, talking, opening a window or leaving a machine unattended.

The clock became a tool of control. Many workers in 1800 did not own a watch, so the factory bell told them the time. Some owners were accused of setting mill clocks forward in the morning and back at night. Work that used to follow the sun now followed the shift. Historians call this the new discipline of industrial time. It is why we still talk about being on the clock. Children were valued in early mills partly because they were small enough to crawl under machines. They were also valued because they could be trained to obey before they learned any other way to work.

Machines also broke skilled trades into simple tasks. A hand weaver knew a whole craft. A power-loom minder watched several machines and tied broken threads. This division of labor made goods cheaper and let owners hire people with no training, including women and children, at lower wages. Adam Smith, a Scottish thinker, described in 1776 how splitting pin-making into eighteen separate steps let ten workers make tens of thousands of pins a day instead of a handful each. The gain in output was real. So was the loss of the pride and independence a craft had given.

Wages in the mills were often higher than in farm work, which is why people came. But work was dangerous. Unfenced gears and belts caught hair, hands and clothing. Cotton dust filled lungs. Hours ran twelve to fourteen a day before the Factory Acts, and a worker who was injured or too old was simply let go. Owners argued that they were competing with other mills and could not afford to be generous. Workers argued that the wealth of Manchester was built from their bodies. Both were describing the same system from different ends.

On September 15, 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened with a parade of trains, bands and the prime minister on board. It also produced the first famous railway death. A member of Parliament stepped onto the track to greet the prime minister and was hit by a locomotive. The engine was Stephenson’s Rocket. It had won a contest the year before by running about thirty miles an hour. The railway carried cotton, coal and, to everyone’s surprise, huge numbers of passengers. People who had never traveled thirty miles from home could now go to the next city and be back by dinner.

Railways spread with astonishing speed. Britain had about one hundred miles of track in 1830 and about six thousand miles by 1850. Building them took armies of laborers, called navvies, who dug cuttings and tunnels with picks and shovels and moved into the next valley when they finished. Railways were the biggest customers for iron and coal, so they fed the very industries that built them. They also needed money on a scale no single owner had, so investors bought shares in railway companies, and a mania for railway stock in the 1840s made some rich and ruined others.

The railway changed the map of time. Before trains, every town kept its own clock by the sun, so noon in Bristol came about ten minutes after noon in London. Timetables could not work that way. In the 1840s British railways adopted a single time, Greenwich time, and towns followed. The United States divided itself into standard time zones in 1883 for the same reason. Fresh milk and fish reached cities overnight. Newspapers printed in London were read in the north the same day. The infrastructure, the basic network a society runs on, had changed, and so had people’s sense of how big the world was.

Railroads also reshaped the countryside and the city. Lines cut through farms and old neighborhoods; in London, working-class districts were cleared to build stations, pushing families into more crowded streets nearby. Country markets that the railway skipped withered. Towns at junctions boomed. In Illinois the same story unfolded a generation later: Chicago, with a few thousand people in 1840, became the railway hub of the continent by the 1850s, and grain, lumber and cattle from a thousand miles around flowed through it. A railway map is a map of where the money went.

Manchester had about seventy-five thousand people in 1801 and more than three hundred thousand by 1851. No city had ever grown that fast. Visitors came from across Europe to see it, and many were horrified. Streets ran with waste. Families crowded into cellars with no windows and no drains. Rows of back-to-back houses shared a single privy, an outdoor toilet, among dozens of people. Rivers that powered the first mills became open sewers. The German writer Friedrich Engels, whose father owned a Manchester cotton business, walked the worst districts in 1842 and 1843 and wrote a book about what he saw.

Nobody designed this. Urbanization, the movement of people into cities, happened because that was where the jobs were, and builders threw up cheap housing as fast as they could. No law required drains or clean water. City governments were weak and often run by the same men who owned the mills. The result was disease. Cholera, spread by water polluted with sewage, killed tens of thousands in Britain in 1832 and again in 1848 and 1849. Typhus and tuberculosis were constant. In the poorest parts of Manchester and Liverpool in the 1840s, a large share of children died before their fifth birthday.

Reformers gathered evidence. Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 report on the health of the working population used tables of deaths by district. They showed that the poor in cities died years earlier than the rich. Filth, not bad character, was the cause. John Snow, a London doctor, mapped cholera deaths in 1854 around a single water pump. He showed the disease came from the water, not from bad air as most people believed. Such reports pushed Parliament toward public health laws in 1848 and 1875 that required sewers, clean water and inspectors.

The industrial city was also a place of energy and hope. It had libraries, newspapers, chapels, music halls, political meetings and the chance to rise. A country girl who came to Manchester to work found wages, friends and a life her mother never had. Immigrants from Ireland, fleeing famine in the late 1840s, filled the poorest streets and kept the mills running. Chicago in the 1880s repeated the pattern with newcomers from Germany, Poland, Italy and the American South, and with the same crowded blocks and the same fights over water and sewers. The shock city was cruel and alive at once.

For decades mill owners and many members of Parliament argued that the government had no business inside a factory. A contract between an owner and a worker, they said, was private. If a parent chose to send a child to a mill, that was the family’s affair. Besides, Britain competed with other countries, and shorter hours would mean higher prices and lost sales. These arguments came from a belief called laissez-faire, a French phrase meaning leave it alone: the economy works best when the government keeps out.

What changed minds was evidence. In 1832 a committee led by Michael Sadler took testimony from workers who had grown up in the mills. Witnesses described starting work at six years old, shifts of fourteen hours or more during busy seasons, beatings to keep them awake, and bodies bent from years of standing. Some could not stand straight when they testified. Newspapers printed the testimony. Owners complained that the witnesses were picked to shock, and a second inquiry the next year gave a more careful picture, but it agreed that children were being worked far beyond what their bodies could bear.

The Factory Act of 1833 was the result. It banned children under nine from textile mills, limited those under thirteen to nine hours a day, and for the first time paid inspectors to check. Four inspectors for the whole country could not visit every mill, and owners lied about ages and hid children when the inspector came. But the principle was set. In 1842 a Mines Act barred women and children under ten from working underground after a report with pictures of children hauling coal carts on hands and knees. In 1847 a Ten Hours Act limited women and young people in textile mills to ten hours a day, which in practice shortened men’s hours too.

Illinois followed the same path decades later. In 1893 the state passed a law limiting factory work for children and hired Florence Kelley, who lived at Hull House in Chicago, as its first chief factory inspector. Her team walked into sweatshops and documented children as young as four sewing garments. The Illinois Supreme Court struck down part of the law two years later, and the fight continued for a generation. The pattern was the same as in Britain: private suffering became public evidence, evidence became law, and law was then tested, resisted and slowly enforced.

A single worker who asked for higher pay could be fired and replaced by the next person at the gate. A thousand workers who stopped at once could stop the mill. This simple arithmetic is the idea behind a union, an organization of workers who bargain with an employer together. Britain outlawed unions in 1799 and 1800, fearing revolution like France’s, and workers met in secret. Parliament lifted the ban in 1824, though for decades the courts still punished strikes in various ways. Skilled workers such as engineers and printers organized first, since they were hardest to replace.

A strike, when workers refuse to work until a demand is met, was the union’s main weapon and a risky one. Strikers earned nothing, and owners could bring in replacements or simply wait. In 1834 six farm laborers in the village of Tolpuddle were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia for swearing a secret oath to form a union. Hundreds of thousands of people signed petitions and marched in London, and the government gave in and pardoned them. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, as they were called, showed that public opinion could shift.

Workers also turned to politics. In 1838 a movement called Chartism demanded the vote for every adult man, secret ballots, and pay for members of Parliament so that working men could serve. Chartists gathered millions of signatures on petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Parliament rejected all three. Yet within seventy years every one of the Charter’s main demands had become law. In the United States, workers marched in Chicago on May 1, 1886, for an eight-hour day. Days later a bomb at a rally in Haymarket Square killed police and civilians, and the trial and executions that followed became a symbol for workers around the world. May Day, the international workers’ holiday, comes from Chicago.

Unions did not win everything, and they often excluded women, immigrants and Black workers from their ranks. Owners fought them with lockouts, blacklists and private guards. But over the 1800s wages in Britain rose, hours fell, and a worker’s voice in the workplace became normal in a way it had not been in 1800. Economists still debate how much of that came from unions and how much from growth itself. What is not in doubt is that workers who could not vote, and who were told the economy was none of their business, made it their business anyway.

The Industrial Revolution created a new kind of economy that people began calling capitalism. Private owners put up capital, hire workers for wages, and sell goods for profit in competitive markets. Adam Smith had argued in 1776 that when each person pursues his own gain, competition tends to produce more goods at lower prices. It was as if an invisible hand guided the whole. Smith also warned that owners would try to fix prices and that repetitive work dulled the mind. Later thinkers who took his name, though, often kept only the first idea.

Others looked at Manchester and saw not an invisible hand but a fist. Robert Owen, a mill owner in Scotland, shortened hours, built schools and decent housing at his mill in New Lanark, and made a profit doing it. He argued that owners could be humane. Reformers in Parliament pushed factory and health laws. And Friedrich Engels, after his walks through Manchester, teamed up with a German philosopher named Karl Marx. In 1848 they published a short pamphlet, the Communist Manifesto, in London.

Marx argued that history was a struggle between classes. In the industrial age there were two great classes. The bourgeoisie owned the factories and capital. The proletariat were the workers who owned nothing but their ability to work. Owners grew rich, he said, from the difference between what workers produced and what they were paid. Competition would push wages down and concentrate wealth. Then the workers, who were the great majority, would rise up, take the factories and run them in common. The Manifesto ended by telling the workers of all countries to unite; they had nothing to lose but their chains.

Marx’s predictions did not come true in the way he expected. Wages in industrial countries rose over the long run, and the revolutions that later claimed his name took place in poor farming countries, not in Britain. Critics said he ignored how markets and reforms could improve life without revolution. But his questions did not go away: who owns what, who gets the gain from new machines, and whether workers have a say. Every debate today about automation, wages and inequality is, in part, a debate that Smith, Owen and Marx started.

Britain tried to keep its lead. For years it was illegal to export textile machinery or for skilled mechanics to leave the country. It did not work. Samuel Slater memorized the design of Arkwright’s machines, sailed to America in 1789, and built a cotton mill in Rhode Island. Belgium, with coal and iron near French and Dutch markets, industrialized in the 1820s and 1830s. France grew more slowly, keeping many small workshops. The German states, once they linked their markets and built railways in the 1840s and 1850s, moved fast, and by 1900 Germany led Europe in steel and chemicals.

The United States had what Britain lacked: endless land, rivers for power, and immigrants for labor. Mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1820s hired young farm women and housed them in supervised boardinghouses. After the Civil War the country built railroads across a continent and drew iron ore, coal and oil from the interior. By the 1890s the United States made more steel than Britain. The Midwest became the workshop of the country. In Chicago, Cyrus McCormick built a factory in 1847 to make reaping machines that cut wheat, and by the 1880s the city’s stockyards turned cattle into packaged meat on moving assembly lines that would inspire Henry Ford.

Japan is the most remarkable case, because it industrialized on purpose. American warships forced Japan to open its ports in the 1850s. A new government under the Meiji emperor decided in 1868 that the only way to avoid being colonized was to become as strong as the colonizers. It sent students and officials abroad to study factories, banks and armies. It built the first railway in 1872. The same year it opened a model silk mill with French machines and French instructors, and later it sold state factories to private companies. Within forty years Japan had a modern army and navy and a growing textile industry. In 1905 it defeated Russia in war.

Two lessons stand out. First, later industrializers did not have to invent; they copied, and they could skip Britain’s slow early steps. Second, governments mattered more the later a country started. Britain’s revolution grew from private business with little state help. Germany’s used banks and tariffs, taxes on imports that protected new factories. Japan’s was planned from the top. The spread of industry was not automatic. It went where resources, capital and political will came together, and it left much of the world, including the colonies that supplied cotton and other raw materials, on the outside.

The first Industrial Revolution ran on iron, coal and steam. The second, starting around 1850, ran on steel, electricity, chemicals and oil. Steel is iron with a small, controlled amount of carbon; it is stronger and more flexible than iron but had always been slow and expensive to make. In 1856 Henry Bessemer in England announced a process that blew air through molten iron to burn out impurities, turning tons of iron into steel in minutes. Prices fell sharply. Steel rails lasted many times longer than iron ones. Steel beams let architects in Chicago build the first skyscrapers in the 1880s.

Electricity changed communication first. In 1844 Samuel Morse sent a message by telegraph from Washington to Baltimore over a wire, using a code of dots and dashes. Within a decade wires ran beside every railway. In 1866 a cable across the Atlantic seabed linked Britain and North America, and a message that had taken ten days by ship took minutes. Prices, news and orders now moved faster than any goods, and a merchant in Chicago could know the price of wheat in Liverpool the same morning. The telephone followed in 1876.

Then electricity became power and light. In 1879 Thomas Edison’s team produced a practical light bulb, and in 1882 his company opened a generating station in New York that lit a few blocks of offices. Electric streetcars appeared in the late 1880s and let cities spread outward. Electric motors could be put anywhere a wire reached, so a factory no longer needed a single giant steam engine with belts running to every machine. By 1900 the second revolution had also given the world cheap chemical dyes, the internal combustion engine, and the first automobiles.

This wave belonged as much to Germany and the United States as to Britain. It depended on science in a new way. Bessemer was a tinkerer, but the chemists who built Germany’s dye industry had university degrees, and companies began to run research laboratories. The scale of business grew too. Steel mills and electric companies needed millions in capital, so corporations selling shares to thousands of investors replaced family firms. Andrew Carnegie’s steel company and Standard Oil were larger than many governments. The question of who would check that kind of power was new.

Stand on a hill above an industrial city in 1880 and you would not see it. Smoke from thousands of chimneys hung over Manchester, Pittsburgh and Chicago so thick that trees died and white shirts turned gray by noon. Rivers ran orange with dye or black with oil. Coal ash coated everything. In 1900 people accepted this as the price of jobs; a smoking chimney meant a working mill. Only much later would scientists link that smoke to disease and to the warming of the planet. The Industrial Revolution began humanity’s large-scale burning of fossil fuels, and the air has carried the record ever since.

The land changed too. Forests fell for railway ties and mine timbers. Wheat from Illinois and Argentina, moved by rail and steamship, fed European cities and pushed local farmers off the land. Whole regions were dug up for coal and ore. Yet the same forces made goods cheap. In 1800 a working family in England owned a few garments and mended them for years. By 1900 that family could buy machine-made cotton clothes, factory shoes, tinned food, cheap newspapers and a railway ticket to the seaside. Consumption, the buying and using of goods, became part of ordinary life.

Time itself felt different. The clock ruled work, and it now ruled leisure: the Saturday half-day, the annual holiday, the timetable. Gas and then electric light stretched the day into the night. Literacy rose as governments built schools, partly to produce workers who could read instructions. Women’s lives shifted in contradictory ways. Factory wages gave some young women independence their mothers never had, while middle-class women were increasingly expected to stay home. Families grew smaller as children became a cost rather than a set of hands.

Was it worth it? People in 1900 lived longer on average than in 1800, in Britain by more than a decade, largely because of clean water, cheaper food and later medicine. They also worked to a bell, breathed smoke and lived in cities where a lost job meant hunger. The gains and losses did not fall on the same people. A mill owner’s grandson and a mill child’s grandson experienced different revolutions. Any honest judgment has to hold both in view, and to notice that many of the questions, about pollution, machines and who benefits, are still open.

In 1850 Italy was, as an Austrian minister once said, only a geographical expression. The peninsula was divided into about ten states. Austria ruled the rich north around Milan and Venice. The pope ruled the middle from Rome. A Spanish-descended king ruled Naples and Sicily. Only one Italian state had a constitution and an elected parliament: the small kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in the northwest. After the failure of 1848, Italian nationalists who wanted one country looked to Piedmont as the state that could lead.

Piedmont’s prime minister, Count Camillo di Cavour, was a practical man who distrusted romantic revolution. He built railways, modernized the army, and looked for a powerful friend. In 1858 he made a secret deal with the French emperor Napoleon the Third: France would help drive Austria out of northern Italy in exchange for territory. War came in 1859. French and Piedmontese troops won bloody battles, and Austria gave up Lombardy, the region around Milan. Small states in central Italy then voted to join Piedmont. Cavour had won half of Italy by diplomacy, the art of negotiating between states, and one carefully chosen war.

The south came differently. Giuseppe Garibaldi was a soldier and a revolutionary who had fought in South America and in 1848. In May 1860 he sailed from near Genoa with about a thousand volunteers in red shirts to Sicily, where a revolt had broken out against the king of Naples. Peasants joined him. Within months his growing army had taken Sicily and Naples. Garibaldi could have set up a republic; instead he met King Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont and handed over his conquests. In March 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed. Venice was added after a war in 1866, and Rome in 1870 when French troops guarding the pope left to fight Prussia.

Unity on the map was not unity in fact. Most Italians spoke regional dialects and could not read; the standard Italian of the new state was a foreign language to many. The south was poor and resented being ruled from the north; for years the army fought what it called brigands there. The pope refused to recognize the kingdom and told Catholics not to take part in its politics. A leader of the movement is often quoted as saying that having made Italy, they now had to make Italians. That task, of turning people who shared a peninsula into a nation, took schools, railways, the draft and decades.

In 1860 the German-speaking lands were still a loose league of about thirty-nine states. Two rivals dominated them. Austria was a sprawling empire of many peoples. Prussia was a disciplined kingdom in the north with the best-drilled army in Europe. Liberals in 1848 had tried to unite Germany by a parliament and failed. In 1862 the Prussian king appointed Otto von Bismarck as his chief minister. Bismarck was a conservative landowner who despised parliaments. He believed the great questions of the day would be decided not by speeches and majority votes but by iron and blood.

He meant it. Bismarck ignored the Prussian parliament’s refusal to fund the army and expanded it anyway. Then he used it three times. In 1864 Prussia and Austria together took two provinces from Denmark. In 1866 Bismarck picked a quarrel with Austria over those provinces, and Prussia’s army, using railways and new breech-loading rifles, crushed the Austrians in seven weeks. Prussia annexed several northern states and formed a North German Confederation without Austria. Bismarck made the peace deliberately mild, so Austria would not seek revenge.

France was the last obstacle. Bismarck knew the southern German states, Catholic and suspicious of Prussia, would only join if they faced a common enemy. In 1870 he edited a diplomatic telegram to make it sound as if the French ambassador and the Prussian king had insulted each other. France, under Napoleon the Third, declared war. The southern states joined Prussia, and the German armies trapped the French at Sedan in September and captured the emperor. On January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at the French palace of Versailles, the German princes proclaimed the Prussian king Kaiser, emperor, of a united Germany.

The new German Empire took the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, a wound France never forgot. It had the largest population in Europe west of Russia and the fastest-growing industry. Its constitution gave the Kaiser and his chancellor most of the power. Bismarck now called Germany a satisfied state. He spent twenty years building alliances to keep France isolated and the peace intact. The map of Europe had been redrawn by realpolitik, politics based on power and results rather than ideals. Nationalism, which liberals had hoped would free peoples, had been harnessed by a conservative to build a military empire.

In July 1853 four American warships under Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Edo Bay, near the city now called Tokyo. Two were steam-powered and belched black smoke. Japan had shut itself off from most foreign contact for over two centuries under the shogun, the military ruler who governed in the emperor’s name. Perry carried a letter demanding that Japan open its ports. He returned the next year with more ships, and the shogun’s government, knowing it could not fight, signed a treaty. Soon Britain, Russia and others forced similar unequal treaties that let foreigners trade and be tried by their own courts.

Many Japanese saw the treaties as humiliation and blamed the shogun. In 1868 a group of young samurai from outlying domains overthrew the shogunate and declared that they were restoring power to the fifteen-year-old emperor, who took the reign name Meiji, meaning enlightened rule. The Meiji Restoration was a revolution from above. The new leaders abolished the old domains and the privileges of the samurai class, including their right to wear swords. They created a draft army of commoners, a national school system, and a modern tax on land. Their slogan was rich country, strong army.

They studied the West with a purpose. The Iwakura mission of 1871 to 1873 sent about fifty leaders around the United States and Europe to see how modern states worked. Japan hired foreign experts, then replaced them with Japanese once the skills were learned. It adopted a written constitution in 1889 modeled partly on Germany’s, with an elected lower house but power concentrated in the emperor’s ministers. Railways, telegraphs, shipyards and textile mills followed. Japanese leaders adopted Western clothes, calendars and law codes while insisting on Japanese loyalty to the emperor.

The test came in war. In 1894 and 1895 Japan defeated China and took Taiwan. In 1904 and 1905 it fought Russia over control of Korea and Manchuria, destroyed the Russian fleet in a single battle, and won. It was the first time in modern history that an Asian state had defeated a European great power, and nationalists from India to Egypt took notice. Japan renegotiated the unequal treaties and in 1910 annexed Korea outright. The country that had been forced open in 1853 was, half a century later, an imperial power itself, ruling other peoples as Europeans did.

In 1870 European rule in Africa was mostly a fringe of coastal forts and trading posts, plus French Algeria in the north and British and Dutch settlers in the south. Inside the continent, hundreds of African states, kingdoms and peoples governed themselves. Then, in less than thirty years, Europeans claimed almost everything. Historians call it the scramble for Africa, because that is how it looked: a rush, each power grabbing land before a rival could. By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.

Several things made the scramble possible. Quinine, a medicine from a South American tree bark, let Europeans survive malaria in the interior. Steamboats went up rivers that sailing ships could not. The telegraph carried orders from Europe in hours. Above all, new rifles and the Maxim machine gun, which could fire hundreds of rounds a minute, gave small European forces an overwhelming advantage over larger African armies armed with older guns or spears. At the battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, British forces with machine guns killed about ten thousand Sudanese soldiers while losing fewer than fifty of their own.

The rush created quarrels among the Europeans, and in 1884 Bismarck invited the powers to Berlin to set rules. The Berlin Conference met from November 1884 to February 1885. Fourteen states attended; not one African ruler or representative was invited. The delegates agreed that a power claiming a coast had to actually occupy it to keep it, and they recognized King Leopold the Second of Belgium’s personal claim to the vast Congo basin. Then they went home and sent soldiers to sign treaties, often in languages the African signers could not read, that turned trade agreements into surrenders of sovereignty.

The borders drawn in these years were lines on maps made by men who had mostly never been to Africa. Rivers, straight lines and lines of latitude split peoples in two and forced rivals into one colony. Those borders largely survive today as the borders of African nations, and many of the continent’s later conflicts run along them. The scramble was quick, and it was not in any sense agreed to by the people whose land it divided. That fact, more than any other, shaped what came after.

Ask why a country would spend money and lives to rule people thousands of miles away, and you get several answers, all partly true. The first is economic. Factories needed raw materials such as cotton, rubber, palm oil and copper, and they needed markets to sell to. Investors wanted places to put their capital. Yet the numbers are mixed: most European trade was with other industrial countries, not colonies, and many colonies cost more to run than they returned. Empire made some companies and individuals very rich while taxpayers paid the bills.

The second answer is power and pride. After 1871 Germany, Italy and a Britain worried about German growth all measured themselves by territory on the map. A coaling station for warships, a port on a strategic strait, a colony to deny a rival: strategy drove much of the scramble. Newspapers sold papers with stories of explorers and battles, and voters cheered flags on maps. A politician who lost a colonial contest could lose an election. Nationalism, which had built Italy and Germany, now demanded that every real nation have an empire.

The third answer is the set of ideas Europeans used to explain themselves. Missionaries wanted to spread Christianity and often built schools and hospitals. Others spoke of a duty to bring civilization, meaning European law, medicine and trade, to people they considered backward. The English writer Rudyard Kipling called this the white man’s burden in an 1899 poem urging the United States to rule the Philippines. Some thinkers twisted Darwin’s science into a claim that races competed like species and that Europeans had proved themselves fittest. Scientists today reject this entirely, and many people rejected it then.

Critics spoke up in Europe and America. The economist J. A. Hobson argued in 1902 that empire benefited a few investors at everyone else’s expense. Mark Twain and other members of the Anti-Imperialist League attacked the American war in the Philippines. Missionaries and a British consul named Roger Casement exposed the horrors of Leopold’s Congo. And colonized people themselves answered most sharply: an Indian lawyer, an Egyptian journalist or an Ethiopian emperor could point out that if civilization meant law and consent, empire by conquest was its opposite. The justifications did not convince everyone even in their own day.

The Congo Free State showed empire at its worst. King Leopold the Second of Belgium held it as his personal property from 1885 to 1908, and he wanted profit from wild rubber. His agents set quotas for villages. Men were sent into the forest to tap rubber vines; if a village fell short, soldiers took women and children hostage, burned homes, or cut off hands as proof of punishment. Missionaries photographed the victims. The British consul Roger Casement’s 1904 report and a campaign led by the journalist E. D. Morel forced Belgium’s parliament to take the colony from the king in 1908. The population of the region fell by millions in those years, from killing, famine and disease.

Most colonies were not the Congo, but all rested on force. Britain often used indirect rule, governing through existing chiefs and kings who kept their titles but took orders. France tried to make Africans in some colonies into French citizens, a promise kept for very few. Everywhere, colonial governments demanded taxes paid in cash, which pushed Africans to work for wages in mines and on plantations, and they took the best land for European settlers in places like Kenya and Algeria. Railways ran from mines to ports, not between African cities. The economy was built to serve the ruling country.

Africans fought back from the beginning. Samori Touré built an empire in West Africa and fought the French for more than fifteen years before his capture in 1898. The Zulu army destroyed a British force at Isandlwana in 1879 before being crushed months later. In German East Africa, the Maji Maji rising of 1905 to 1907 united many peoples against forced cotton growing; German troops answered with a famine campaign that killed tens of thousands. In Southwest Africa the German army drove the Herero people into the desert to die, an act now recognized as genocide. Armed resistance mostly lost against machine guns, but it was everywhere.

Ethiopia was the exception, and its victory at Adwa in 1896 explains why. Menelik the Second had done what Japan did: he used the rivalry of the European powers to buy modern weapons, unified rival lords, and met the invader with an army that was larger, better led and better armed than the Italians expected. Resistance also took new forms as colonial rule settled in. Mission-educated Africans founded newspapers, formed associations and petitioned for rights in the language of the rulers. In 1912 a group in South Africa founded the organization that became the African National Congress. The struggle that would end European rule in the 1950s and 1960s had begun.

For a century before 1857, much of India was ruled not by the British government but by a business: the East India Company. The company had come to trade in cloth, spices and tea. It built forts and hired Indian soldiers called sepoys. Step by step it took over provinces as the Mughal Empire weakened. By the 1850s the company governed most of the subcontinent. Its army had about two hundred thousand sepoys commanded by a few thousand British officers. It collected taxes, ran courts and annexed states whose rulers died without an heir it recognized.

In 1857 the sepoys rose. The spark was a new rifle cartridge said to be greased with cow and pig fat, which soldiers had to bite open; cow fat was forbidden to Hindus and pig fat to Muslims. The deeper causes were years of annexations, high taxes, disrespect for Indian religion and custom, and fear that the British meant to convert everyone to Christianity. Sepoys at Meerut killed their officers in May 1857 and marched to Delhi, where they proclaimed the elderly Mughal emperor their leader. Peasants, landlords and the rulers of some states joined. For over a year northern India was at war.

The fighting was savage on both sides. Rebels killed British men, women and children at Kanpur. When British and loyal Indian troops retook cities, they hanged and shot thousands, sometimes whole villages, and blew captured rebels from the mouths of cannons. The British called it the Mutiny; many Indians later called it the First War of Independence. Neither name captures everything: it was a soldiers’ revolt, a peasant rising and a last stand of old rulers at once, and it never spread to the south or won over the Sikh and Gurkha troops the British relied on. By 1858 it was over.

The consequences lasted. Parliament abolished the East India Company and the British Crown took over; in 1877 Queen Victoria was named Empress of India. The period is called the Raj, from a Hindi word for rule. The British rebuilt the army with more British troops and units drawn from groups they considered loyal. They stopped pushing religious change but also stopped trusting Indians with power. Railways, telegraphs, canals and English-language schools followed, built for British needs and used by Indians for their own. In 1885 educated Indians founded the Indian National Congress to ask, politely at first, for a share in governing their own country.

In 1800 China under the Qing dynasty was the largest and one of the richest states on earth. It sold tea, silk and porcelain to Europe and wanted little in return except silver. British merchants found something the Chinese would buy: opium, an addictive drug grown in British India. By the 1830s millions of Chinese were addicted, silver was flowing out, and the emperor ordered the trade stopped. In 1839 an official named Lin Zexu seized and destroyed about twenty thousand chests of British opium at Canton. Britain sent warships.

The Opium War of 1839 to 1842 showed the gap in military technology. British steam gunboats and disciplined troops defeated Chinese forces at will. The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 forced China to open five ports to foreign trade, pay a large sum, and hand the island of Hong Kong to Britain. It was the first of what Chinese call the unequal treaties. Later treaties gave foreigners the right to be tried by their own courts, opened more ports, legalized opium, and allowed missionaries anywhere. France, Russia, Germany, the United States and Japan all demanded and received similar rights.

China’s troubles were also internal. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 was led by a man who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. It built a rival state in southern China. Crushing it took years of war that killed, by standard estimates, twenty million people or more. The Qing court was divided. Reformers wanted Western arms and factories; conservatives saw such things as corruption. In 1895 Japan, which had reformed, defeated China in a short war and took Taiwan. European powers then carved out spheres of influence, regions where each claimed special rights. Chinese cartoons showed the country as a melon being sliced.

In 1899 and 1900 a secret society whose members practiced martial arts, called Boxers by foreigners, rose in northern China against missionaries, Chinese Christians and everything foreign. The empress dowager Cixi backed them, and Boxers besieged the foreign legations in Beijing for fifty-five days. An army from eight nations, including the United States and Japan, marched in, relieved the siege, looted the capital and imposed a huge payment. The dynasty was finished in all but name. In 1911 a revolution ended it, and in 1912 China became a republic, weak and divided but no longer an empire. Chinese today still call the years from 1839 to 1949 the century of humiliation.

What did empire feel like to the people ruled? Start with a farmer in India in the 1870s. He now paid taxes in cash on a fixed schedule, whatever the harvest. To get cash he grew cotton or indigo for export instead of food. When the rains failed, as they did in 1876 and again in the 1890s, grain was still shipped out by rail to pay debts, and millions starved in famines that officials recorded in detail but did little to stop. British economists at the time argued that relief would spoil the poor. Indian writers such as Dadabhai Naoroji argued that Britain was draining India’s wealth. Historians still debate the numbers, but the deaths are not in doubt.

Now start with a boy in a mission school in West Africa or Vietnam. He learns to read, in French or English, and he learns that his own history is savage and his rulers’ history is glorious. He may become a clerk, a teacher or a lawyer, better paid than his parents and barred from the top jobs, which are reserved for Europeans. He may be tried by different courts than a European, barred from certain clubs, made to step off the sidewalk. The color line, the rule that race decided rights, ran through every colony. It also ran through the United States of the same years, and Black American writers noticed the connection.

Empire brought railways, hospitals, vaccines and printed books, and defenders of empire point to them. Critics answer that these were built for the rulers’ needs and paid for by the ruled. The same decades saw famines and forced labor, and Japan built railways without being colonized. Both sides are describing real things. What is harder to argue with is consent. No colony voted to be ruled. In every colony the government answered to a capital thousands of miles away rather than to the people it taxed.

The clerk and the lawyer became the empire’s problem. Educated in the rulers’ language, they read the rulers’ own books about liberty and asked why the words did not apply to them. Gandhi, trained as a lawyer in London, began organizing Indians against racial laws in South Africa in the 1890s. Journalists in Cairo, Lagos and Hanoi printed newspapers. Students went abroad and met each other. When the next chapter of world history opened in 1914, the empires looked permanent on the map. The people who would take them apart were already at school.

After 1871 Bismarck’s goal was to keep France, which wanted Alsace and Lorraine back, without friends. He allied Germany with Austria-Hungary in 1879, added Italy in 1882 to form the Triple Alliance, and kept a separate understanding with Russia. It was a juggling act, and it depended on him. In 1890 a new young Kaiser, Wilhelm the Second, dismissed Bismarck and let the Russian agreement lapse. France saw its chance. By 1894 France and Russia were allies, and Germany faced potential enemies on two sides, exactly what Bismarck had worked to prevent.

Britain had stayed apart, protected by the sea and the largest navy in the world. Then Germany began building a battle fleet. Wilhelm wanted a navy to match Germany’s new industrial power and colonial ambitions; Britain saw it as a threat to its survival, since Britain imported most of its food by sea. The naval arms race took off. In 1906 Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, a battleship so fast and heavily armed that every older warship became outdated overnight, and both countries raced to build more. Britain settled its old colonial quarrels with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. Europe now had two blocs: the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.

Armies grew too. Every continental power except Britain drafted young men for two or three years of service, then kept them as reserves. Russia’s peacetime army was well over a million men. Germany and France each had hundreds of thousands and could call up millions. Generals drew detailed plans that depended on railway timetables. Germany’s plan aimed to knock out France in six weeks before Russia could fully mobilize. Mobilization, calling up reserves and moving them by rail to the frontier, was so complex that once begun it was hard to stop. Any country that started later might lose before fighting began.

Add the pressures of the earlier lessons. Nationalism made governments afraid to look weak. Empire gave the powers places to collide, in Morocco in 1905 and 1911, where Germany challenged France and backed down, leaving bitterness. Newspapers in every capital printed stories of enemy plots. None of this made war certain. The powers had backed away from several crises. But the system had become one in which a small war could not stay small, because each ally had promised to fight for the other, and each general staff had a plan that could not wait.

In 1914 a person could send a telegram from London to Bombay in minutes, buy Argentine beef in Manchester, and read in a Chicago newspaper about a riot in Cairo. Trade, investment and travel linked the world as never before. Some writers argued that war between the great powers had become impossible because it would ruin everyone’s economy. Nearly all of Africa and much of Asia was ruled from Europe, and European capital, rails and warships reached everywhere. The world of 1914 was, in a sense, one system, and Europe sat at its center.

The weakest point of that system was the Balkans, the mountainous region of southeastern Europe. The Ottoman Empire, which had ruled it for centuries, was losing territory year by year. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania had won independence and wanted more. Austria-Hungary, a patchwork empire of a dozen peoples, feared that Serbian nationalism would pull its own Serbs and Croats away. Russia saw itself as the protector of Serbia and other Slavic peoples. Two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 redrew borders and left everyone armed and angry.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, visited Sarajevo in Bosnia, a province Austria-Hungary had annexed in 1908 over Serbian objections. A nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip, part of a small group armed with help from inside Serbia, shot him and his wife dead in their open car. Austria-Hungary, with Germany’s backing, sent Serbia an ultimatum, a final demand with a deadline, designed to be refused. Serbia accepted most of it. Austria declared war anyway on July 28. Russia mobilized to protect Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1 and on France on August 3, invading through neutral Belgium. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4.

In five weeks a murder had become a war among all the great powers, and because those powers ruled the world, it was a world war. Soldiers from India, Senegal, Algeria, Australia, Canada and later the United States would fight in it. Historians still argue over blame: German ambition, Austrian recklessness, Russian mobilization, Serbian plotting, or a system that made everyone’s fears reasonable. This chapter began with nations being made and empires being seized. It ends with those nations and empires locked into a machine that no one, in the summer of 1914, proved able to stop.