Colby, have you ever wondered why we both speak English

even though we're from

completely different hemispheres?

And nowhere near England?

It's weird, right?

It is weird.

It's also imperialism.

Um, Kim?

Can I borrow your shoe?

What for?

I'll tell you later.

(music playing)

Hi, I'm Kim Lochner and along with Colby Burnett,

we're introducing Era 6, the long 19th century.

In our story, or stories, of human history so far,

the world of 1750 CE seems a long way

from the first eras that came before.

But life for people in 1750 wasn't really all that different

from the lives of their great-grandparents,

or great-great-grandparents, or even more distant ancestors.

Most of the things that we think of as modern

didn't yet exist.

Most people were still farmers, fishers, or herders.

Few had paying jobs as we would think of them today.

People interacted with only members of their own town

or village or some neighboring communities

for almost their entire lives.

Those who wanted to travel

had to embark on camels, or horses, or sailing ships.

More often, they traveled by foot.

Mail service was limited to a privileged few.

The idea of a democratic government--

or even of a nation of citizens--

did not yet exist.

By 1914, however,

many features of the modern, connected world

had come to exist.

The telephone and telegraph had been invented.

People could communicate rapidly across vast distances

for the first time.

There were early types of airplanes,

and plenty of trains and even--

in some places-- cars to move people and goods.

Many people were still farmers,

but others worked in factories or in business offices

like they do today.

They earned a wage for their work,

and they used that money to buy their food

from grocery stores and market sellers.

And while there were many kings and shahs and emperors,

people increasingly believed themselves

to be citizens of a nation,

and that that nation should have a state,

and that that state should be independent and ruled

at least somewhat democratically.

For these reasons,

many historians view the long 19th century--

a period from about 1750 to 1914--

But what really changed between 1750 and 1914?

How did the world we live in come into being?

What engines of change created our modern world?

To answer these questions, we must look

at long 19th century revolutionary change

from the varied perspectives of people who lived in big cities,

small towns, and farms around the world.

Let's start with the French colony of Senegal,

in West Africa.

Often ignored by world histories,

this African colony participated in, and was affected by,

some of the momentous events and trends of the day.

It was a colony that formed around one major trade--

in enslaved people.

After abolition, the main trade was gum arabic,

used in the industrial cloth industry.

As the locals involved in this trade scrambled for profit,

they participated in revolutions in France.

They found opportunity in the 1789 and 1848 uprisings

against French aristocrats as an opportunity

to take on French companies that dominated the gum trade.

They also fought for political representation,

eventually winning the right to elect one member

of the French Parliament.

But they also increasingly came under the authoritarian rule

of French imperialism.

So while the Senegalese are not found

in the stories of revolutionary change,

they were in fact participating in the making

The origins of modernity,

or the coming of the modern world,

was a series of revolutions that occurred

between 1750 and 1914.

These transformations arguably began

with a shifting sense of what a community is,

who is a member, and how it should be run.

Communities, in this era,

were changing in two contradictory ways.

The first was the rise of vast empires

made up of lots of smaller states.

The inhabitants of one state became a ruling class,

and all the others became subjects of the empire.

Subjects had fewer rights and less voice

in how they were governed.

These empires promoted inequalities

that still exist today.

They led to modern categories like "race" and "ethnicity."

But the other, and in many ways even more significant,

transformation in how people began to organize themselves

was the idea of a nation that emerged at this time.

Nations are different than empires

because they are made up of a great majority of people

that are aware of having a common identity

as members of that nation.

As members of the nation, they begin to think

that they should have certain rights

to help govern the nation,

Because of this, two ideas about community--

a slightly evolved view of empire

and a new view of nation--

grew and competed during the long 19th century.

Changes in how communities organize themselves

may not have been the most dramatic revolution of the era.

Changes in technology also began to transform

how people lived in most places around the world.

The Industrial Revolution may have been

the single most dramatic transformation

in production and distribution in the history of the world,

certainly since humans learned how to farm.

Using fossil fuels as energy,

people put machines to work in factories and on farms

producing vast amounts of food and finished products.

Many people, displaced by machines,

moved from farms to cities to work in new factories

making goods to sell to others.

With new industrial machines and the use of fossil fuels,

farms and factories could produce

far more goods and products.

More and more, adults, and sometimes children,

went to work for businesses that paid them wages--

wages they could use to buy and then consume

the goods and products from factories and industrial farms.

Workers and business owners alike became participants

in the capitalist economic system

that dominates the world today.

Industrial technology also allowed people and things

New inventions such as the train and the steamship,

and later the car and the airplane,

let people travel as tourists, ship goods long distances,

and even migrate to new nation-states.

Other technologies allowed them to communicate rapidly as well,

via phone and telegraph.

These technologies together, in this era,

helped to create the modern, global network

that characterizes our era.

The developments of the long 19th century

also encouraged communities across the world

to adopt some common practices or ways of doing things.

We call bringing a common and established

size, weight, quality, or criteria to something

"standardization."

Standardization increased

as both industrialization and empires expanded.

Consider the example of shoe size.

Once upon a time, a cobbler would measure your foot

to make a shoe that fit that foot.

With industrialization, shoes sizes became standard.

The foot now had to fit a common shoe size.

The demand to create common standards

put pressure on people's common or local ways of doing things.

We continue to see standardization today.

In fact, I'll bet you took a standardized test this year.

We find evidence for the transformations

of the long 19th century

In constitutions and declarations,

in patent letters for new inventions,

and in advertisements for an increasing range

of consumer goods,

and in the standardization of things that impact daily life.

We also find evidence in quantitative data.

Industrialization and standardization,

for example, is extremely measurable.

For instance, if we look at the CO2 emissions

from 1750 to today,

we can see that they have gone

from 280 to over 400 parts per million.

That's the highest level in the last two million years.

While CO2 can actually be cycled out of the atmosphere

relatively quickly, as it absorbs

into vegetation and the soil, the impact of human activities

can last for hundreds of years.

This chart gives us one picture of how the Industrial Revolution

changed the environment in which we live,

as viewed through the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere.

Your daily life is affected by many of these changes.

Your cell phone, the lights in your house,

and pretty much everything you own were only made possible

by the Industrial Revolution.

Most of them, along with your daily food,

were probably bought with wages

earned in a capitalist economic system.

You are probably a citizen of a nation-state

with a government that both guarantees and limits

These are all products of the long 19th century,

an era of great change,

an era in which the modern world was forged.

Thinking about all the changes that occurred

during this time period, ask yourself--

were these changes shared equally across the world?

Who did these changes happen to?

And when?

How were they experienced differently by different people?

Did everyone benefit from these equally?

Did some bear the burden of change more than others?

Historians use evidence to answer these questions.

Their answers are not all the same.

We hope you'll weigh some of these questions and answers

and perhaps create your own to help you think

about the world in which we live.

Wow, that's...

It's a lot.

I mean, like, what if they decide

industrialization was the wrong way to go?

It's not like they can turn it off.

Colby, remember, we talked about this.

End on a high note.

Uh, what about if I just give you your shoe back?

Well, that works, yeah.

(music playing)