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The 1750s was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that saw waves of settlers in the New World, electricity inventions, and scientific discoveries. It also witnessed the end of the Baroque period, the Treaty of Madrid, the Lisbon earthquake, and the French and Indian War.
- Overview
- First read: preview and skimming for gist
- Second read: key ideas and understanding content
- Third read: evaluating and corroborating
- Unit 5 Introduction – Revolution 1750 to 1900
- What revolution?
- Political revolutions
- The Industrial Revolution
- Social and economic transformations
- Whose revolution?
The period from 1750 to 1900 is often called an age of revolution. New political systems, industrialization, and societal changes all shaped our modern world.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
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:
1.What evidence does the author provide to support the claim that 1750 to 1900 was an age of revolution?
2.What new ideas helped create the political revolutions at the start of this period?
3.What innovation started off the Industrial Revolution? Why was this change so revolutionary?
4.According to the article, what are the effects of capitalism?
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:
1.Which of the revolutions described in this introduction seems the most “revolutionary”? Why?
2.In Unit 4 you encountered the Columbian Exchange. Did the Columbian Exchange lead to the Industrial Revolution? Why or why not?
By Trevor Getz
The period from 1750 to 1900 is often called an age of revolution. New political systems, industrialization, and societal changes all shaped our modern world.
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:
•the use of fossil fuels as energy
•widespread new political systems with democratic features
•the economic systems of capitalism and socialism
•the massive growth of factories and cities and the pollution and consumer culture that accompanied them
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 h...
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.
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...
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.
[Notes]
Author bio
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.
[Sources and attributions]
Learn about the European empires, resources, and resistance in the Americas in 1750. Read the article with close reading strategies and questions to understand the global context and patterns of this period.
Learn about the world in 1750 through three frames: communities, networks, and transformations. Explore the diversity, complexity, and change of human societies across the globe in this course.
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Introduction to Revolutions and the Emergence of Nation-States (1750–1914) The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries prepared the way for major developments in philosophy and political theory in the eighteenth century, an era that historians call the Enlightenment. New ideas of liberty and human rights promoted by ...
