Revolutions & Empires, 1750–1914: The Century That Rewrote the Rules

In 1820 a typical person in China, Mexico or Britain was poor by any modern standard, and the gap between the richest and the poorest of them was less than four to one. By 1950 the gap between Britain and China was almost fourteen to one. Something happened in between, and it did not happen to everyone at once.

That "something" is the subject of this course, and it is really five stories braided together: an economy that learned to grow, a set of revolutions that argued about rights, the idea of the nation, two very different answers to foreign pressure in China and Japan, and an imperialism that reached its peak in Africa. A graduate keeps the dates, but what lasts is a habit: when someone offers one cause for the modern world, ask what the other regions were doing.

The Industrial Revolution: the ceiling that broke

For most of history, a society could get richer only slowly, because nearly all energy came from muscle, wood, wind and water, and these were limited by land. Coal changed the arithmetic. A Newcomen engine at Dudley Castle in 1712 pumped water out of mines; James Watt's separate condenser (patented 1769) made steam far more efficient; George Stephenson's line from Liverpool to Manchester opened in 1830 and showed that stored sunlight could move people and goods faster than a horse. For the first time a society could make more per head without running out of land.

The size of the change is easy to miss because it looks small each year. In Britain, income per person in the Maddison Project data rose from about $2,400 in 1700 to about $3,300 in 1800 (in 2011 international dollars), about a third of one per cent a year. From 1820 to 1913 it rose from about $3,300 to about $8,200, close to one per cent a year. Try the calculator: the point of compounding is that a rate that sounds like nothing remakes a country in three generations.

Without JavaScript: Britain grew at about 0.3% a year in 1700–1800 and about 1.0% a year in 1820–1913, which multiplies income by about 2.5 in 93 years. China grew about 5.3% a year from 1973 to 2022, a factor of nearly thirteen.

The cost was real and visible. The Factory Act of 1833 banned work for children under nine in most textile mills, which tells you what had been normal. Robert Allen has argued that British workers' real wages stagnated for decades while output per worker grew, a stretch he calls "Engels' pause" after Friedrich Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Cotton for the mills came largely from plantations worked by enslaved people in the American South. Historians still argue how central that was: Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery, 1944) put slavery near the heart of British industrialisation, and later economic historians have given it a smaller share. There is also an argument about the word "revolution": estimates by Nicholas Crafts and C. Knick Harley in the 1980s and 1990s lowered measured growth before 1830, so some historians now describe it as a long acceleration.

The Great Divergence: who got rich, and why historians disagree

The "Great Divergence" is the name for the widening income gap between north-west Europe (and its offshoots) and much of Asia, which the data below show opening after about 1800. The argument is about why. Use the chart to see the numbers first, then the schools.

Without JavaScript: in 1850 the UK was at about $4,300 and China about $860 (5.0 to 1). By 1950 the UK was at $11,100 and China $800 (13.8 to 1). By 2022 the UK was at $38,400 and China $19,200 (2.0 to 1).

Pick a school and read it in its own words.

Without JavaScript: Kenneth Pomeranz (coal and colonies); Robert Allen (high wages and cheap energy); Joel Mokyr and David Landes (culture and knowledge); Acemoglu and Robinson (institutions); Prasannan Parthasarathi (protected Indian cotton and global competition); Broadberry and colleagues (income was already diverging before 1800).

The Atlantic revolutions: American, French and Latin American

Between 1775 and 1825 an unusual number of people announced that rulers governed with their consent. The American Revolution (Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776; Treaty of Paris, 1783) made thirteen colonies into a republic with a written constitution (1787–89). The French Revolution began with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789), abolished the monarchy in 1792, passed through the Terror (official records show 16,594 death sentences between mid-1793 and mid-1794, plus an estimated ten to twenty thousand people killed without trial or dead in prison), and ended in Napoleon's coup of November 1799. In Spanish America, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 left the empire without an agreed king; local juntas formed, wars of independence followed, and the last big royalist army was beaten at Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. Brazil separated from Portugal in 1822 as an empire under a Portuguese prince.

All of them used the language of equal rights, and all of them had to decide who was included. In 1790 the new United States had about 700,000 enslaved people. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in France and in 1793 she was guillotined. In much of Latin America the revolutions were led by creole elites, and Indigenous and African-descended majorities got legal equality on paper long before they got it in practice. The tool below lets you test how well you know when slavery actually ended in places that had revolutions.

Without JavaScript: French Saint-Domingue 1793–94; Chile 1823; Mexico 1829; the British Empire 1833 (in force 1834); French colonies 1848; the United States 1865; Cuba 1886; Brazil 1888.

How these fit together is a live argument. R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot proposed in the 1950s and 1960s a single "Atlantic revolution"; others, such as Alfred Cobban in 1964, attacked the older Marxist picture of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, and François Furet argued that the Revolution was best read through its politics and language. Recent global historians, for example Armitage and Subrahmanyam, widen the "Age of Revolutions" to include Haiti, the Spanish world and beyond the Atlantic.

Haiti: the revolution that took "all men" literally

In 1789 Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of Hispaniola, produced about 60% of the world's coffee and about 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. About 40,000 white colonists, 28,000 free people of colour and about 452,000 enslaved people lived there. In August 1791 the enslaved of the north rose. Over the next twelve years, as France, Spain and Britain intervened, the revolution turned into a war for emancipation. French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax proclaimed freedom in the north in August 1793, and the Convention in Paris extended abolition to all French colonies on 4 February 1794. Toussaint Louverture, himself formerly enslaved, became its most powerful leader.

Napoleon sent an expedition in 1802 to reassert control and restore slavery, captured Toussaint (who died in a French prison in April 1803), and lost. After the battle of Vertières (18 November 1803), Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent on 1 January 1804. It was the only successful revolt of enslaved people that founded a state. Many historians link the failure in Saint-Domingue to Napoleon's decision to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803.

The aftermath is part of the story. In 1825 France accepted recognition only against an indemnity of 150 million francs for lost property, cut to 90 million in 1838; payments of the debt and its interest are usually dated to 1947. The United States did not recognise Haiti until 1862. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Silencing the Past, 1995) argued that the Haitian Revolution was long treated by European and American writers as "unthinkable", and so left out of the standard story of the age. C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) is the classic account from the other side.

Nationalism: a map made of an idea

In 1750 hardly anyone thought the natural unit of politics was a people who share a language and a past. By 1914 almost everyone in Europe did. Italy was proclaimed a kingdom on 17 March 1861, and the German Empire on 18 January 1871. Ernest Renan said in a Paris lecture in 1882 that a nation is "a daily plebiscite", a shared will to go on living together as well as a shared past.

The scholarly argument is about whether nations are old or made. In 1983 three books landed together: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (print and newspapers let strangers feel part of one community), Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (industrial societies need a common, literate culture) and Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition. These are "modernist" accounts. Anthony Smith answered that modern nations draw on older ethnic ties and memories, so they are not invented from nothing. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) argued that most rural French people only became "French" in language and habit between 1870 and 1914, which is a useful warning that the map came before the people did.

Without JavaScript: De Mauro put it at about 2.5% of the population and Castellani at about 10%. By 1951 De Mauro puts it at 87%.

Nationalism also reached beyond Europe: the Indian National Congress (1885), Latin American creole patriotisms, and Japan's state-building below all used it. And it had a darker side, since a nation defined by ancestry makes minorities into outsiders. The next piece, 35/90, picks that up with the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.

Taiping and Meiji: two answers to the same shock

The Opium War (1839–42) and the Treaty of Nanking showed Qing China that European gunboats could not be stopped. Commodore Perry's ships in Edo Bay in 1853–54 showed Japan the same. What each country did next is one of the standard comparisons in the course.

Without JavaScript: the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was a civil war led by Hong Xiuquan that killed tens of millions; the Meiji Restoration (from 3 January 1868) replaced the shogunate and rebuilt the state with a new constitution in 1889.

The comparison is tempting and easy to overdo. Japan was smaller, had a literate commercial economy under the Tokugawa and a samurai class that could be turned into officials; China was larger, more diverse and fought on several fronts. Many historians read the Meiji state as a revolution from above, others as a conservative restoration. The Taiping death toll is given as anywhere from about 20 million upwards because there was no census and whole regions were depopulated.

The New Imperialism and the scramble for Africa

European empires were not new in 1880; what changed was speed and reach. Britain had already ruled India for over a century and formally took over from the East India Company after the revolt of 1857. In Africa, Europeans held about ten per cent of the continent in the 1870s, mostly near the coast (Algeria, the Cape Colony, Angola and Mozambique). By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent. The Berlin Conference (November 1884 to February 1885) is often said to have "divided Africa", but it set rules of "effective occupation" and settled disputes over the Congo; the actual borders were drawn afterwards by treaties among the European powers and by war.

Without JavaScript: key dates were 1882 (British occupation of Egypt), 1884–85 (Berlin Conference), 1896 (Ethiopia defeats Italy at Adwa), 1898 (Omdurman and Fashoda), 1904–08 (Herero and Nama genocide), 1908 (Belgium takes over the Congo) and 1912 (Morocco and Libya).

Why did it happen? Four accounts. J. A. Hobson (Imperialism, 1902) and Lenin (1916) pointed to surplus capital hunting profit abroad. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (1953, 1961) argued that British officials acted mainly to protect routes to India, and that crises in Africa and Egypt, not plans in London, drove the expansion. Daniel Headrick stressed technology: quinine against malaria, steamships and the Maxim gun (invented 1884). P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins pointed to the City of London's financial interests. Most historians now combine these.

Africans were not passive. Ethiopia's victory over Italy at Adwa (1 March 1896), the Zulu victory at Isandlwana (1879) and the Maji Maji rising against German rule (1905–07) are the best-known examples. The costs of imperial rule were enormous and contested. The Congo Free State (1885–1908), Leopold II's personal possession, is the clearest case: there was no census, but several lines of evidence, cited by Adam Hochschild and Jan Vansina, point to a population loss of roughly half, or about ten million people, with other historians giving lower figures. In German South West Africa, the Herero and Nama war of 1904–08 is recognised by most scholars as a genocide, and Germany acknowledged it as one in 2015.

What a graduate just sees

• A rate like one per cent a year is invisible in a year and enormous in three generations.
• "The West got rich" has to be explained region by region, and the main schools differ on coal, wages, institutions, knowledge and empire.
• Every revolution of the age made a list of who counted, and the lists differed from the speeches.
• Haiti belongs in the centre of the story of rights, not in a footnote.
• Nations are made: languages, schools, newspapers, railways and armies make them as much as ancestry.
• Compare China and Japan before saying why one "failed": ask about size, institutions and timing.
• The Scramble was fast, armed, bargained over and resisted, and Berlin drew rules, not borders.
• Death tolls for this period are estimates with wide ranges, and a good historian says so.

Where it shows up next

• The Twentieth Century and After (35/90): the empires of this course collapse in 1914–18 and 1945–75, and the state borders drawn here survive.
• International Relations (35/14): the nineteenth-century state system is where much international relations theory comes from.
• Historiography (35/85): Marxist, revisionist, Atlantic and global histories are the schools of this piece.
• In the world: why Haiti is poor, why African borders cross peoples, why Japan industrialised early, why India and China were once the largest economies.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Blackwell, 2004), the standard global survey, and Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World (Princeton, 2014), a very large global history of the nineteenth century.
• 📘 Gentler. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938), Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998), and Eric Hobsbawm's trilogy The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire (a Marxist but readable guide).
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution (Fall 2013), and 21H.443 European Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Spring 2006).
• 🌐 Free text and data. OpenStax World History, Volume 2, and the Maddison Project Database 2023.