Revolutions (1750-1900)

Enlightenment thinkers applied reason to human society and government. John Locke argued that people possess natural rights and that legitimate authority rests on consent, while Rousseau developed the social contract and Montesquieu proposed separating government powers. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) defended free markets, and Mary Wollstonecraft extended the argument to women's education and rights. Salons, coffeehouses, and cheap print spread these ideas across the Atlantic world.

Enlightenment ideas and growing national feeling fueled revolutions across the Atlantic world. The French Revolution began in 1789 and produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. In Saint-Domingue, enslaved people rose in 1791; Toussaint Louverture sought autonomy within the French empire and died in 1803, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haitian independence in 1804. Simon Bolivar led campaigns that freed much of South America from Spain, and nationalism later unified Italy and Germany.

Industrialization began in Britain, which had coal, iron ore, navigable rivers, Atlantic trade profits, and a large supply of wage laborers. Innovations in textiles, including the spinning jenny and the water frame, moved production from households into factories, and James Watt's improved steam engine freed mills from waterpower. Cities such as Manchester grew rapidly around cotton mills, creating crowded working-class districts. The factory system imposed machine-paced discipline and fixed hours on labor.

Industrialization spread from Britain to Belgium, France, the German states, and the United States. Railroads and steel mills in the Ruhr valley made Germany a manufacturing power, while Russia's state-financed Trans-Siberian Railroad linked distant territories to markets. After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan built shipyards, arsenals, and rail lines and became the first industrial power in Asia. As mechanized output expanded, handicraft centers such as Indian cotton textiles declined.

New technologies deepened and widened industrial production after 1850. The Bessemer process made cheap steel available for rails, bridges, and ships, while interchangeable parts and assembly techniques standardized manufacturing. Telegraph lines, including a lasting transatlantic cable completed in 1866, carried messages in minutes, and steamships combined with the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, cut travel times across oceans. Chemicals and electricity became major industries in Germany and the United States.

Governments took very different roles in industrial growth. Britain leaned toward the laissez-faire principles of Adam Smith and repealed the Corn Laws in 1846, while the United States and Germany used protective tariffs to shelter new industries. Meiji Japan built model factories, railways, and arsenals with state funds and later sold many to firms such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi. Muhammad Ali promoted cotton and textile manufacturing in Egypt, and Russian ministers financed railroads to force development.

Industrial capitalism reorganized how business was financed. Joint-stock companies and limited liability laws let investors pool capital for railroads and factories, and stock exchanges in London and New York channeled savings into industry. Banks such as HSBC, founded in 1865, financed trade across Asia, while the gold standard made long-distance commerce more predictable. Large transnational firms, including the United Fruit Company, coordinated production and shipping across several continents.

Industrial conditions provoked organized resistance and new political theories. Luddites in England smashed textile machinery in 1811 and 1812, and workers later formed unions to bargain over wages and hours. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, arguing that class struggle would end in workers' revolution, while utopian reformers such as Robert Owen built planned communities like New Lanark. Governments responded with factory legislation and eventually tolerated labor parties. States outside western Europe also reacted to industrial powers by reforming from above: the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839 to 1876) promised legal equality and built new schools and a conscript army, and Qing China's Self-Strengthening Movement (1860s to 1890s) adopted Western arms and factories while keeping Confucian rule. Both met resistance from established elites and fell short of their aims.

Industrial society reshaped families, cities, and class structures. Factory and mine labor brought long hours and dangerous conditions, and children worked alongside adults until the British Factory Act of 1833 began to limit their employment. Middle-class ideals of separate spheres cast women as managers of the home, even as working-class women labored in mills. A growing middle class of professionals and managers built suburbs, while crowded tenements in Manchester spurred public health reform.

Between 1750 and 1900 industrial capitalism transformed where people lived and how they worked, yet older patterns persisted. Mechanized factories, railroads, and steamships integrated a global economy that concentrated manufacturing in Britain, Europe, Japan, and the United States while other regions supplied raw materials. Cities grew, literacy spread, and unions and reform laws gradually improved conditions. Still, agricultural labor and rigid hierarchies of class and gender continued in much of the world.