Chapter 4 starts with a discussion of imperialism constructed as a fact and as theory. It highlights the major disruptions in East Asian and world history. The prevailing realist, liberal institutionalist, and constructivist theories are not scaled to explain such dramatic transformations of East Asia by Western imperialism. Rather, a historical sociological approach anchored on evolutionary theory is a better fit. Western domination based on the rise of the West in terms of economic, technological, and military power took several centuries to complete. Some East Asian empires were also expanding after 1500. A turning point was Britain’s defeat of China in the Opium War of 1839–1842. After that, East Asian nations engaged earnestly in reform. Some, like Japan, succeeded, while others, like China, failed, resulting in a great divergence among Asian countries. To some extent, much of East Asia still lives in the shadow of that imperialist past.

That the industrial innovations which ushered in the modern economy made their appearance first in Britain has often been understood in relation to economic “factors” such as wage rates, size of work force, and cost of labor and materials, capable of being compared over a variety of situations. But the historiographical field created by this literature is a jumble of opposing claims. While it may be possible to show that certain of these factors contributed to economic growth in particular situations, the transformation that began in Britain in the 1760s was a unique historical event. Any of these factors that may have contributed to it only did so by operating in that specific time and place. We need therefore an account that focuses on what made Britain a fertile site for such a transformation and then on the actors who effected it. The chapter stresses two such determinants, first the overall economic development that gave Britain an unparalleled national market and connections to international ones, and second, a “culture of science” within which technical innovation was encouraged. Both these domains developed a high degree of autonomy by the eighteenth century, and James Watt emerged at the intersection of them.

This chapter details the circumstances and techniques behind the colonial acquisitions and conquests of Nigeria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It details two broad categories of methods used by colonial forces: forceful acquisitions and acquisitions achieved through diplomacy. While broad categorizations of colonial techniques are made, this chapter outlines that different techniques could and were used for every Indigenous polity involved. The strategy behind every colonial conquest depended on numerous factors such as the size, “sophistication,” geography, and local political landscape of the polity in question. However, while the techniques behind the colonial acquisitions could drastically differ, this chapter outlines the common goals behind each strategy: to drive a set of processes that weakened the power and authority of indigenous power structures. This would create a power void that, through gradual or rapid action, would be filled by colonial forces or actors aligned with colonial interests. The reactions and independent actions taken by indigenous polities are equally crucial to the history in question. Like their European counterparts, the indigenous states of Nigeria reacted to colonial meddling and the actions of their fellow polities in many different ways, with varying degrees of success.

While reaction ruled, Germany was in the midst of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and overall modernization, and the Jews were often considered as prime agents of this development. However, a close look discloses Jewish communities living mainly in small towns, working in local commerce and in traditional branches of industry. Still, it seems that they were moving forward more quickly than others, more easily accepting change, enjoying more favorable demographic trends, and quickly improving their educational level. As a typical example, the chapter presents a sketch of one family history, that of the Liebermanns, who held on to their commercial interests in cotton and silk, but then slowly expanded to become larger-scale industrial entrepreneurs, centered in Berlin and later in Silesia too, gradually moving to more modern and more large-scale production sectors. On the whole, the Jewish way of modernization added one more route to the multiple varieties of such routes in Germany. Through their unique perspective, the various possibilities of moving towards modernity are more easily perceived, enriching the overall picture of this process as a whole, especially in Germany.

The chapter focuses on the influence of French cuisine in Britain. The innovations of French courtly cuisine were frequently mocked in Britain which had its own tradition of sound and economical country house cooking. The Industrial Revolution brought a loss of cooking skills among the urban poor. The affluent benefitted from the flight of French chefs after the French Revolution, leading to the culinary pretensions of the (equally mocked) Regency period. French chefs set up French restaurants and cooking schools, popularising French cuisine, thus influencing the tastes of the middle classes and stimulating a range of gastronomical writings. Examples from Antony Trollope’s Vanity Fair, Virgina Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Mike Leigh’s Life is Sweet, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover and Elizabeth David’s postwar books serve to gauge the extent of French infuence and help define what makes British food, British.

Chapter 2 focuses on the emergence of the modern concept of the reasonable person in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that this development resulted from the legal and economic needs of the industrial revolution and was informed by the metaphysics of the Scottish sentimental Enlightenment. The chapter’s point of departure is the case known as Blyth v The Company of Proprietors of the Birmingham Waterworks, one of the first cases to discuss explicitly modern law’s reasonable person. Distinguishing between a rational Enlightenment and a sentimental Enlightenment, the chapter then shows that the underlying rationale of the reasonable person relies heavily on the sentimental Enlightenment, namely on David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s thought on the importance of empathy, judgement making in relation to the feelings of others, the incomplete understanding of morality that can be gained from objective reason, and the importance of a human common sense. The third section explains how the industrial revolution and the sentimental Enlightenment influenced the life of Baron Alderson, the judge who oversaw Mr Blyth’s case against the Birmingham Waterworks.

After the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was also in full swing as a new form of capitalism took hold and the American economy leaped forward. The country also experienced sudden urbanization as immigrants from Europe and Americans flocked to the cities from the farms in search of better employment. At the same time, large corporations, with sophisticated Wall Street financing, were able to amass great wealth, often by using anti-completive means to eliminate competitors. Finance capitalism also brought a rash of social ills including slums, dangerous foods and drugs, dangerous workplaces, and increasing poverty as workers were forced to yield to the low wages offered by corporate employers. In response to the concentrated power held by private corporations, Progressive reforms urged countervailing power that was needed in the form of the federal government. Federal legislation was passed to control monopolies, monitor unfair railroad rates, and regulate tainted foods and meats among other forms of new regulation, as the federal government took on a new role of policing markets in addition to supporting economic prosperity.

When Wagner was born in 1813, Germany did not exist. Saxony was part of Napoleon’s ‘Confederation of the Rhine’, a collection of puppet-states. By the time he died, the German Empire was the most powerful and prosperous state in continental Europe. This sensational transformation was marked by periodic domestic upheaval (the revolutions of 1830 and 1848–9), a demographic explosion, an industrial revolution and three victorious wars for Prussia (against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870). The accompanying political, social, and cultural changes were on a commensurate scale. Nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and political Catholicism all emerged as mass movements, responding to radical changes in the public sphere driven by urbanisation, mass literacy and a communications revolution. By the time Wagner died in 1883, Germany had changed more than during the previous millennium.

Called “the rock that burns” by Aristotle, coal was the first major industrial fuel, created about 300 million years ago as heat and pressure compressed pools of decaying plant matter. Burned to generate heat to boil water and make steam to move a piston in a Watt “fire engine” or a giant turbine in a modern power station, the industrialization of manufacturing, transportation, and electric power is examined from beginnings in the United Kingdom to today’s increased use of coal combustion in developing countries despite the limited thermal efficiency and harmful combustion by-products.

A transition simplifies or improves the efficiency of old ways, turning intellect into industry with increased capital – when both transpire, change becomes unstoppable. The transition to a more efficient combustion fuel changed the global economy when coal replaced wood (twice as efficient) and oil replaced coal (roughly twice as efficient again). The history of the Industrial Revolution is explained through the energy content of different fuels (wood, peat, coal) from the 1800s, early steam engines that produced power for manufacturing and propulsion, and the political, economic, and social consequences of industrialization (wealth, health, and globalization), culminating in Thomas Edison’s 1882, coal-fired, electricity-generating, power station in Lower Manhattan.

There is much to do to create a modern energy paradigm, one that is clean, sustainable, and economically viable, but the changes are coming as overall efficiencies improve and manufacturing costs decrease for today’s renewable technologies. In 2000, 0.6% of total global energy production was generated either by wind or solar, a 50% increase in a decade; by 2010, the amount had doubled.1 By 2013, Spain had achieved a global first as wind-generated power became its main source of energy (21% of total demand, enough to run 7 million homes2), while both Portugal and Denmark now regularly produce days powered 100% by wind.

Historically cloudy England scored a first, as solar became the largest source of grid energy during an especially sunny 2018 spring bank-holiday weekend,3 while in the midst of high winds from Storm Bella on Boxing Day in 2020, the UK was more than half powered by wind, a new record.

This chapter covers: historical theorizing about what role the state ought to play in an economy; from the mercantilist to the market role; historical fear of a Leviathan government role; government role in France and the origin of the term “laissez faire”; Adam Smith’s alternative view of the “wealth of nations”; the role of the “invisible hand”; Weber’s view of mercantilism and of its role in the growth of the capitalist system; advent of the Industrial Revolution and its need for energy, and also for better use of time; Adam Smith’s view of the role of the state in regulations and also in some redistribution; and the importance of empathy in communities.

The Industrial revolution was producing many new and cheaper goods. The Bismarck’s reforms spread and started to impact other countries. Tax levels started to rise. Adolf Wagner’s writing was having some impact on economists and policymakers. The Papal Encyclical Letter, Rerum Novarum, that called for better treatment of workers, while accepting that incomes could not be equal in a marker economy, also had some impact. These and other developments started to change the world that had existed in the nineteenth century, leading to policy changes, such as control of monopolies, more use of income taxes, more controls of money supply, and some creation of basic safety nets. The United States had become much more important by this time and it would play a growing role in the world. Governments would play larger economic roles in the twentieth century.

This chapter covers: strong belief among economists in the merit of laissez faire, during the nineteenth century; intolerance for government interference; countries’ unification and its impact on the government’s economic role; use of import duties during laissez faire; the impact of the Industrial Revolution on government policies; the growth of urbanization and fall in rural societies; workers become more organized and more unionized; the growth of negative externalities and need for regulations and for taxes to deal with them; the growth of equity concerns while a new rich bourgeoisie comes into existence with the Industrial Revolution, the new rich form a new class and replace the old nobles; the rise of large monopolies and of some very rich individuals while workers’ wages remain low, and working conditions remain poor; socialist views become more popular and strikes more frequent; they also become more violent; and the decline of extended rural-based families creates the need for alternative safety nets.

The Great Depression introduced doubts in the minds of many about the virtue of a free market economy. The absence of safety nets, at a time when unemployment had reached 25–30 percent, created major difficulties. The need for redistribution and stabilization was felt by many. The changes in the structure of the economies had facilitated tax collection. The new environment led to welfare states with high and growing progressive taxes, high levels of social spending and growing power by labor unions. For a while harmony between the roles of government and state seemed to grow. Then difficulties would begin to appear and to grow over time and this would set the stage for a counterrevolution in later years. Slow growth and growing inflation starting in the late 1960s and continuing in the 1970s would increase the reaction to the welfare policies and to the great power that labor unions had acquired. There would be increasing calls for a return to a growing role by the free market.

Chapter 1 explores the development of Sheffield, the ’Steel City’, and its steel-making, cutlery and flatware and coal-mining industries. Its character as a town and surrounding conurbation whose culture was dominated by the working classes rather than by the middle classes or industrialists is also examined. Sheffield, a town formerly renowned as the world’s foremost centre of steel production, had notoriety as a hotbed of working-class radicalism. This is discussed, as are its cultural insularity (largely through geography) and relative isolation from other major economic centres. The chapter discusses the crucial role of immigration in Sheffield’s remarkable rate of population growth during the nineteenth century. It provides context for an emerging non-white immigration within a period of rapid demographic change. Immigration – first from the rural hinterland, then from further afield and abroad – was particularly apparent in the growth of Sheffield’s East End steelworking district. The chapter’s aim is to provide a social, economic and cultural context for close analysis of the arrival and successful settlement of non-elite South Asians from the later years of the First World War until Indian Partition in 1947, the British Nationality Act of 1948 and the Windrush era of mass non-white immigration.

This chapter analyzes the redistribution of the Romantic sublime in Victorian culture. Contrary to the assumption that the Victorians seem to have neglected the sublime, it shows how the concept was unpacked into a busy metonymy, first by Thomas Carlyle when he speaks of inverse sublimity. A fit for the world disassembled by the Industrial Revolution and for Charles Lyell’s geology of ongoing planetary transformation, Carlyle’s metonymy heralds the Victorian chthonic sublime, a structure of feeling where affect, once bound in awe, terror and rupture, is reclaimed for melancholia and tasked with the work of mourning. It is a work that finds an emphatic articulation in John Ruskin’s aesthetics and art history, notably in his theory of pathetic fallacy, and in Matthew Arnold’s poetry and criticism, especially in the concept of touchstone, with important critical footholds in the Victorian industrial novel, evolutionary theory and Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry.

The conservation status of the taxa in this book is measured using the criteria of the Red List of Threatened Species™. The Red List is overseen by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and categorises species according to extinction risk. This chapter summarises the history of the Red List and explains the criteria used to assess species’ extinction risk, as well as the quality control procedures in place today. This chapter also introduces a new part of the Red List, formalised in 2021: The Green Status of Species, a set of metrics which assess species’ progress towards functional recovery across its range and the impact of conservation actions.