An Age of Revolutions: Framing the World, 1789–1900

Welcome to the nineteenth century

In 1789, most people on Earth lived under kings, emperors or chiefs. Most were farmers. Most never travelled faster than a horse could run. By 1900, people in many countries voted in elections, worked in factories, read daily newspapers and rode trains. A telegraph message could cross an ocean in minutes.

The same century also saw some of the largest empires in history. By 1900, a handful of industrial powers ruled or dominated most of Africa and much of Asia and the Pacific. Change was fast, but it was not equally shared. This unit asks: who gained, who lost, and how did people everywhere respond?

Why start in 1789 and stop in 1900?

The year 1789 is the start of the French Revolution. Historians use it as a turning point because the Revolution spread new ideas: that power comes from the people, that citizens have rights, and that a nation belongs to its citizens rather than to a king. You met the ideas behind it in the unit The World, 1650–1789 (the Enlightenment and the American Revolution).

The historian Eric Hobsbawm called this period the age of the dual revolution. One revolution was political (France and the other Atlantic revolutions). The other was economic (the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain). Together they created a new kind of power: industrial nation-states that could build railways, steamships and modern weapons.

The year 1900 is a convenient stopping point, not a wall. Many historians prefer a long nineteenth century from 1789 to 1914. The unit The World since 1900 picks up the story.

Five big themes in every region

The curriculum's three overall expectations for this strand (D1, D2, D3) ask you to look at social, economic and political change; at war, revolution and reform; and at new ideas and identity. In practice that means five themes:

1. Revolution and independence. France (1789), Haiti (1791–1804), and Spanish and Portuguese America (1810s–1820s).
2. Industrialization. Britain first, then Western Europe, the United States, Japan and Russia; and the effects on places that supplied raw materials, such as India, Egypt and the cotton-growing US South.
3. New ideologies and nationalism. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism and nationalism; the unification of Italy and Germany.
4. Empire, resistance and reform. The Scramble for Africa; British India; the Opium Wars in China; and reform movements in Qing China, Meiji Japan and the Ottoman Empire.
5. Rights and freedom. The abolition of slavery and serfdom; women's rights; and the experiences of Indigenous peoples facing settler colonialism in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina.

Thinking like a historian: questions first

At university, history begins with a question, not a topic. A topic ("the Industrial Revolution") is too big to study. A good question tells you what evidence to look for. Historians use four main types:

• Factual: What happened? When did Haiti become independent?
• Causal: Why did it happen? What did it lead to? Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain?
• Comparative: How were two cases alike or different? How did Japan's response to Western pressure differ from China's?
• Evaluative: How much did it matter? Was it good, for whom? To what extent did industrialization improve the lives of workers by 1900?

Evaluative questions are the kind you will answer in essays. They have no single correct answer, but some answers are much better supported than others.

Primary and secondary sources

A primary source was made at the time: a newspaper, a law, a diary, a photograph, a treaty, a factory wage list, a song. A secondary source was made later by someone who studied primary sources: a textbook, a historian's book, a documentary.

Whether a source is primary depends on your question. A history of the French Revolution written in 1850 is a secondary source about 1789, but a primary source if you are asking how people in 1850 remembered the Revolution.