CivStory

Industry and Empire

Steam and cotton, revolutions and emancipation, the Suez Canal and the conquest of Africa, and industrial power as it was felt in Canton and Tehran.

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Part 1

From about the 1760s Britain's textile industry was transformed by spinning machines, mills driven first by water and then by steam, and the factory system. It drew on coal, colonial markets and raw cotton grown largely by enslaved people in the Americas. Early factory and mine work meant long hours, child labour and crowded towns such as Manchester, and cheap machine-made cloth undercut handloom weavers in places such as India.

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Part 2

British merchants paid for Chinese tea with opium grown in British India. When the Qing government seized and destroyed opium at Canton in 1839, Britain went to war; the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 ceded Hong Kong and opened five ports to foreign trade. Later Chinese historiography counts it as the first of the 'unequal treaties' and the start of a 'century of humiliation'.

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Part 3

In February 1848 a revolution in Paris overthrew King Louis-Philippe and proclaimed a republic with universal male suffrage; within weeks risings broke out in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Milan and many other cities. Driven by economic crisis, demands for constitutions and national movements, they were put down by 1849. France abolished slavery in its colonies in April 1848, and that February Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto in London.

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Part 4

After Abraham Lincoln's election, eleven slaveholding states left the Union, several of them naming the defence of slavery in their declarations, and war began in 1861. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 declared enslaved people in rebel-held areas free, some 180,000 Black men served in the Union army, and enslaved people fled to Union lines in large numbers. The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 abolished slavery throughout the United States, freeing about four million people.

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Part 5

The Suez Canal opened on 17 November 1869, linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea after ten years of work by the French-led Suez Canal Company. An earlier canal from the Nile to the Red Sea had been completed under the Persian king Darius I. Until 1864 much of the digging was done by tens of thousands of Egyptian peasants conscripted as unpaid or poorly paid labour, and how many died is disputed. Egypt's debts led it to sell its shares to Britain in 1875, and Britain occupied Egypt in 1882.

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Part 6

From November 1884 to February 1885 representatives of fourteen states met in Berlin to set rules for claiming African territory; no African ruler was invited. The conference recognised King Leopold II's Congo Free State, and in the following decades European powers conquered most of Africa through wars, coerced treaties and forced labour. The violence included the atrocities of Leopold's rubber regime and the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in 1904–08.

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Part 7

In Paris in 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie, studying the uranium rays that Henri Becquerel had found in 1896, announced two new elements, polonium and radium; Marie Curie coined the word 'radioactivity'. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Becquerel, and won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Their work helped open the study of the structure of the atom.

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Part 8

On 31 August 1907, in St Petersburg, Britain and Russia settled their rivalry in Asia, drawing lines across Iran that created a Russian sphere in the north and a British one in the south-east, with a neutral zone between. In more than a year of negotiations neither power informed Iran, where the Constitutional Revolution had just opened a parliament. The convention aroused great bitterness among Iranians, and Russia repeatedly violated it until the Soviet government repudiated it in 1918.

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