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(1898) A conflict between the United States and Spain in which the U.S. supported the Cubans' fight for independence against Spain.

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U.S. Imperialism in Latin America and the Pacific

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U.S. Imperialism in Latin America and the Pacific

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U.S. Imperialism in Latin America and the Pacific

The Trail of Tears is an example of how the U.S., like Europe, continued to take land from indigenous people.

The Monroe Doctrine implied that the U.S. wanted to become an imperial power, and they did after taking Mexican land post-Mexican-America War.

Expansion on Land:

The idea of a Manifest Destiny is what spurred westward expansion in the U.S. and the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

Expansion Overseas:

The Spanish-American War led to the U.S. gaining Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

The Roosevelt Corollary expanded U.S. influence overseas by sending troops to occupy Latin Americans lands that were facing “instability.”

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Australia and New Zealand

Initially, Britain used Australia as a penal colony, but after they discovered Australia was well-suited for fine wool production, Britain took over the whole continent and sent settlers there.

New Zealand was a part of New South Wales as a settler colony before the Treaty of Waitangi protected the Māori by making it a separate colony.

Despite the treaty, the British encroached on their land and used New Zealand as a base for grazing and dairy farming.

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South Africa and the Boer Wars:

The British, after replacing the Dutch in controlling Cape Colony, got into many land wars with Dutch-speaking Afrikaners (descendants of Dutch settlers).

These wars are known as Boer Wars, and the British placed Afrikaners and Africans into wretched, segregated concentration camps where many had perished.

In the end, Afrikaner and African farmers were displaced onto poor, infertile land and unable to make a good living.

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Leopold II: Belgium 'wakes up' to its bloody colonial past

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Inside the palatial walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand statues of Leopold II - each one a monument to the king whose rule killed as many as 10 million Africans.

Standing close by, one visitor said, "I didn't know anything about Leopold II until I heard about the statues defaced down town".

The museum is largely protected by heritage law but, in the streets outside, monuments to a monarch who seized a huge swathe of Central Africa in 1885 have no such security.

Last week a statue of Leopold II in the city of Antwerp was set on fire, before authorities took it down. Statues have been daubed with red paint in Ghent and Ostend and pulled down in Brussels.

Leopold II's rule in what is now Democratic Republic of Congo was so bloody it was eventually condemned by other European colonialists in 1908 - but it has taken far longer to come under scrutiny at home.

A renewed global focus on racism is highlighting a violent colonial history that generated riches for Belgians but death and misery for Congolese.

"Everyone is waking up from a sleep, it's a reckoning with the past," explains Debora Kayembe, a Congolese human rights lawyer who has lived in Belgium.

Statues defaced and removed

Joëlle Sambi Nzeba, a Belgian-Congolese poet and spokesperson for the Belgian Network for Black Lives, says the statues tell her she is "less than a regular Belgian".

"When I walk in a city that in every corner glorifies racism and colonialism, it tells me that me and my history are not valid," she explains from the capital.

For activists the holy grail is the giant statue of Leopold II on horseback at the gates of the Royal Palace in Brussels. A petition calling on the city for its removal has reached 74,000 signatures.

"I will dance if it comes down. I never imagined this happening in my lifetime," Ms Kayembe adds. It would be "really significant for Congolese people, especially those whose families perished," she explains.

Warning: This piece contains graphic pictures

One visitor to the Africa Museum, where an outdoor statue was defaced last week, disagreed with the idea of removing them - "they're part of history," he explained.

On Friday the younger brother of Belgium's King Philippe, Prince Laurent, defended his ancestor saying Leopold II was not responsible for atrocities in the colony "because he never went to Congo". The royal palace is yet to give its own response.

For many years Leopold II was widely known as a leader who defended Belgium's neutrality in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war and commissioned public works fit for a modern nation.

In 2010, former Belgian foreign minister Louis Michel and the father of future prime minister Charles Michel, called Leopold "a hero with ambitions for a small country like Belgium".

"Civilisation" was at the core of Leopold II's pitch to European leaders in 1885 when they sliced up and allocated territories in what became known as the Scramble for Africa.

He promised a humanitarian and philanthropic mission that would improve the lives of Africans.

In return European leaders, gathered at the Berlin Conference, granted him 2m sq km (770,000 sq miles) to forge a personal colony where he was free to do as he liked. He called it Congo Free State.

It quickly became a brutal, exploitative regime that relied on forced labour to cultivate and trade rubber, ivory and minerals.

Archive pictures from Congo Free State document its violence and brutality.

In one, a man sits on a low platform looking at a dismembered small foot and small hand. They belonged to his five-year-old daughter, who was later killed when her village did not produce sufficient rubber. She was not unique - chopping off the limbs of enslaved Congolese was a routine form of retribution when Leopold II's quotas were not met.

Colonial administrators also kidnapped orphaned children from communities and transported them to "child colonies" to work or train as soldiers. Estimates suggest more than 50% died there.

Killings, famine and disease combined to cause the deaths of perhaps 10 million people, though historians dispute the true number.

Leopold II may never have set foot there, but he poured the profits into Belgium and into his pockets.

He built the Africa Museum in the grounds of his palace at Tervuren, with a "human zoo" in the grounds featuring 267 Congolese people as exhibits.

But rumours of abuse began to circulate and missionaries and British journalist Edmund Dene Morel exposed the regime.

By 1908, Leopold II's rule was deemed so cruel that European leaders, themselves violently exploiting Africa, condemned it and the Belgian parliament forced him to relinquish control of his fiefdom.

Belgium took over the colony in 1908 and it was not until 1960 that the Republic of the Congo was established, after a fight for independence.

When Leopold II died in 1909, he was buried to the sound of Belgians booing.

But in the chaos of the early 20th Century when World War One threatened to destroy Belgium, Leopold II's nephew King Albert I erected statues to remember the successes of years gone by.

This makeover of Leopold's image produced an amnesia that persisted for decades.

Calls for apologies

The current protests are not the first time Belgium's ugly history in Congo has been contested in the streets.

In 2019, the cities of Kortrijk and Dendermonde renamed their Leopold II streets, with Kortrijk council describing the king as a "mass murderer".

And in 2018, Brussels named a public square in honour of Patrice Lumumba, a hero of African independence movements and the first prime minister of Congo, since renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo.

What next for the statues?

Statues of Leopold II should now be housed in museums to teach Belgian history, suggests Mireille-Tsheusi Robert, director of anti-racism NGO Bamko Cran. After all, destroying the iconography of Adolf Hitler did not mean the history of Nazi Germany was forgotten, she points out.

In Kinshasa, the capital of DR Congo, Leopold II's statues were moved to the National Museum.

"Leopold II certainly does not deserve a statue in the public domain," agrees Bambi Ceuppens, scientific commissioner at the Africa Museum. But taking the monument away does not solve the problem of racism, she believes, while creating one museum devoted to the statues would not be useful either.

In DR Congo itself, no-one has really noticed the Belgian protests, says Jules Mulamba, a lawyer in the south-eastern city of Lubambashi. He attributes colonial crimes to the king himself, rather than the Belgian people or state.

Beyond removal of statues, far more work is required to dismantle racism, protesters and black communities argue.

For decades, colonial history has been barely taught in Belgium. Many classrooms still have Hergé's famous cartoon book Tintin in the Congo, with its depictions of black people now commonly accepted as extremely racist.

Belgium's education minister announced this week that secondary schools would teach colonial history from next year.

"It's a good thing that everyone is waking up, looking around and thinking 'is this right?'" says Ms Kayembe.

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Leopold II: Belgium 'wakes up' to its bloody colonial past

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Inside the palatial walls of Belgium's Africa Museum stand statues of Leopold II - each one a monument to the king whose rule killed as many as 10 million Africans. Standing close by, one visitor said, "I didn't know anything about Leopold II until I heard about the statues defaced down town".

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Guano from Peru, the Andes, and other parts of Latin America will become an important fertilizer

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In yesterday's post, I crowned an Oxford geologist William Buckland as Most Daring Eater Ever. And he was. But I think he deserves one additional, albeit smaller, honor.

When William Buckland was a kid, an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1790s - around the time George Washington had just finished being president - he pulled a prank that was so rude, so smart and so biologically sophisticated for his day, I think he deserves a second crown, this one for Best Use of Grass Ever.

Here's what he did. William Buckland got himself - I don't know how - some buckets of bat guano. Guano, you should know, is animal poop, very rich in nutrients, excellent as a fertilizer. Back in the '90s (the 1790s), these fertilizers, mostly bird excrement from pelicans and seagulls, were new to British gardeners. They had fertilizers, of course, but guano on a grand scale was new, an idea imported from the Americas, from Cuba and the Andes, where farmers used poop extensively.

In Britain, pasting poop on a spring lawn was not "done." But that's what Buckland did.

He took bat poop and spread it across his Oxford College lawn, but not evenly. Instead he used the guano to spell, first a giant letter, G. Then a U. Then an A. Then an N. Then an O.

One imagines the Oxford authorities were aghast, wanted the poop removed immediately, so the lawn was scrubbed and order restored. But fertilizer is fertilizer. Once applied, it seeps into the soil and does what it's meant to do. The lawn must have looked normal for a while, but as the weather improved and the sun came out and the grass began to grow, a distinct pattern emerged. The college could mow and mow, but some tufts of grass stubbornly kept growing higher and thicker than the rest. And from a distance - say from a classroom window anywhere around the quad, you could see - all spring, all summer - like a graffito that can't be erased, the word GUANO, spelled out in grass. Oxford couldn't make it go away.

This happened more than 200 years ago, but as pranks go, it's a classic, because it was a) deeply irritating; b) sassy in execution; and c) disturbingly long-lasting. Plus, it advertised a new technology.

So good for you, William Buckland, for championing both ends of the gustatory experience: Eating and Pooping.

We salute you!

Thanks to Radiolab regular and his new book, The Violinist's Thumb, for finding this story, and to Benjamin Arthur, our artist, who is now our official College Prank Historian. Last year, he illustrated our "What's a Smoot?" blog post, the tale of a freshman at MIT who lies down on a bridge during a college prank and becomes a world-wide unit of measure.

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The Best College Prank Of The 1790s (With Bats, Poop & Grass)

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When William Buckland was a kid, an undergraduate at Oxford in the late 1790s, he pulled a prank that was so rude, so smart, and so biologically sophisticated for his day, he deserves a crown for The Best Use of Grass Ever.

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Chinatown San Francisco, Stockton Street Tunnel, San Francisco, CA

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Chinatown San Francisco, Stockton Street Tunnel, San Francisco, CA

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Chinatown San Francisco, Stockton Street Tunnel, San Francisco, CA

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This is an example of an ethic enclave. San Francisco's Chinatown is the oldest in the United States. NY also has a large Chinatown- in terms of geography and migration patterns, it makes sense that the oldest Chinatown is located on the west coast.

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The first sizable contract labor migration from Italy to Argentina took place during the closing decades of the 18th century when Argentine ranchers sought to take advantage of the opportunity created by an industrial Europe’s increasing inability to feed itself, by adding grains and other food crops to their livestock on their ranches in the rich soil of the pampa of central Argentina. These golondrinas—or swallows—were the first Italian migrants to grasp the opportunity created by this leap of globalization across the equator. They were called golondrinas, because like swallows they migrated with the seasons. In fact, they were probably the longest distance seasonal migrant laborers in history who took advantage of the difference in the seasons between the Northern and Southern hemispheres to harvest the crops in 27 South America: Land of Immigrants and Emigrants Italy and then take passage to Argentina literally in the steerage of the return passage of ships that transported live cattle from Argentina to Italy. Eventually, some of these Italian agricultural laborers chose to stay in Argentina, a land where food was plentiful and meat was cheap, a new nation with greater opportunities than hierarchical rural Italy, while others returned to Italy with tales of gold in the streets and jewels in the sand that motivated friends and relatives to cross the Atlantic. The dramatic increase in Italian immigration to Argentina during the second half of the nineteenth century—which rose from less than 100,000 during the 1860s to more than 640,000 during the 1880s—reflected both the agricultural depression in northern Italy and the economic boom of the 1880s in South America, when foreign investment multiplied and exports doubled in a region that was being incorporated into an increasingly global economy centered on an industrializing and urbanizing Europe that could no longer feed or clothe itself from its own rural production. The resultant need for labor in both rural agriculture and urban export processing drew large numbers of European immigrants to Argentina—2.5 million between 1880 and 1930, the largest share of Latin America’s seven–nine million immigrants during those decades—with Italians in the lead.

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Descendants Of Chinese Laborers Reclaim Railroad’s History

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America’s first transcontinental railroad was completed with a golden spike 145 years ago. Thousands of Chinese workers helped build it, but their faces were left out of photos from that historic day.

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1859 - Suez Canal opens

Connects Mediterranean and Red Seas

Built to provide a shorter route to Asia

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Meiji Restoration = state sponsored industrialization, modernization, westernization, militarism, end of the Shogunate.

Japan becomes a major military and imperial force in Asia after defeating China in the Sino-Japanese War and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War.

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The Chinese did not industrialize and were unable to compete with the industrial and military strength of industrialized nations.  Many conflicts with western nations resulted in the singing of unequal treaties, such as the Treaty of Nanjing (know the terms of the treaty as related to the cost of the Opium Wars, Hong Kong, and Spheres of Influence)
- Key question: how did the Chinese people respond to western imperialism?
- Know examples of direct resistance
- Be able to discuss why the Chinese government today might refer to the 19th C. as the "Century of Humiliation."

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Know +/- impact on India

Shipbuilding, textiles, traditional crafts, metalworks declines - British mismanagement stifled the industry

European industrialization decimated textile industries

India becomes the "jewel in the 👑 of the British Empire" because it was significant source of natural resources and raw materials for British industry (cotton, indigo, tea, opium, jewels)

India also provided finished goods, such as textiles, and human capital/labor.

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1. Czarist system was autocratic, restrictive, oppressive.

2. Remained a largely agricultural society with intense social stratification- majority of the population = peasants.

3. Traditional elites maintained power. (nobility, Tzarist/Czarist system)

4. Emancipation of the serfs to create a labor force needed for industrialization

5. Witte System

State sponsored industrialization, NOT based on Capitali$m.

Railroads, telegraph

steel, coal production increases

6. Significant discontent among workers leads to strikes and culminates with the 1905 revolution

7. Trans-Siberian Railway complete 1918

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France and Germany had many of the same factors that GB had (rivers, capital, resources)

France

Industrialization delayed due to sparsely populated cities (limited labor) and recovering from the aftermath of the French Revolution and working towards economic, political, social stability

Germany

Not unified until 1871, most of 19th C = Confederation

Post unification - quickly became a leader in steel and coal production

Will soon challenge GB for naval superiority

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Cotton industry thrives due to decline in availability of cotton from the US (Civil War) and ease of transport and trade related to the geographic proximity of Egypt to European factories.

Mohammad Ali taxed peasants = peasants gave land to gov't, gov't pushes cotton cultivation

State sponsored industrialization

Textile factories

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Australia = penal colony. A penal colony or exile colony is a settlement used to exile prisoners and separate them from the general population by placing them in a remote location.

As a penal colony, Australia went from complete dependency on ships’ provisions in the 1700s to being virtually self-sufficient in manufacturing by 1890.

White Australia policy, formally Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, in Australian history, fundamental legislation of the new Commonwealth of Australia that effectively stopped all non-European immigration into the country and that contributed to the development of a racially insulated white society. This policy remained in place until the 1970s.

The Australian colonies had passed restrictive legislation as early as the 1860s. This was directed specifically at Chinese immigrants, but later a popular cry was raised against the increasingly numerous Japanese—especially after Japan’s victory over China in the 1894–95 Sino-Japanese War—and against South Asians and Kanakas (South Pacific islanders) as well. Fear of military invasion by Japan, the threat to the standard of living that was thought to be presented by the cheap but efficient Asian laborers, and racism were the principal factors behind the White Australia movement.

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Read the information on the image. Source  https://www.britannica.com/place/Latin-America/The-new-order-1850-1910#ref60895

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Summary of the Porfiriato, the presidency of Porfirio Díaz. 

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First steam locomotive in US - 1830

Transcontinental Railway finished in 1869, connecting the East and West coast

By 1900, human capital was key to industrial success (massive work force- migrants)

Similarities with expansion of Canadian railroads = Violence, forced removal of indigenous populations, migration, Chinese laborers.

Impact = increased population and production, Chinese Exclusion Act (Diaz, leader of Mexico encouraged Chineses to go to Mexico as shopkeepers, farmers)

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Transcontinental Railroad ‑ Construction, Competition & Impact

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In 1862, the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad Companies began building a transcontinental railroad that would link the United States from east to west. Over the next seven years, the two companies raced toward each other from Sacramento, California on the one side to Omaha, Nebraska on the other, struggling against great risks before they met at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.

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Canada-Pacific Railway completed 1881

Violence, forced removal of indigenous populations, migration, Chinese laborers

The website has a nice, short, video. Notice the hint of nationalism! There are also maps and images to explore if you have time/would like the enriched experience.

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The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was formed to physically unite Canada and Canadians from coast to coast. Canada's confederation on July 1, 1867 brought four eastern provinces together to form a new country. As part of the deal, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were promised a railway to link them with the two Central Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

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* How did industrialization England lead to imperialism? Industrialization and innovation in communications/transportation drove the desire for new markets and sources of raw materials.  (if you need clarification/review on this topic click the Khan Academy link)

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Fossil Fuels, Steam Power, and the Rise of Manufacturing

Abundant fossil fuels, and the innovative machines they powered, launched an era of accelerated change that continues to transform human society.

The Transformation of the World

Try to imagine what your life would be like without any machines working for you. Make a list of the machines in your household and on your person; you may arrive at a surprising number.

Now imagine earlier generations during their childhood years. How did they move from place to place? How did they communicate? What foods did they eat?

At one time, humans, fueled by the animals and plants they ate and the wood they burned, or aided by their domesticated animals, provided most of the energy in use. Windmills and waterwheels captured some extra energy, but there was little in reserve. All life operated within the fairly immediate flow of energy from the Sun to Earth.

Everything changed during the Industrial Revolution, which began around 1750. People found an extra source of energy with an incredible capacity for work. That source was fossil fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas, though coal led the way - formed underground from the remains of plants and animals from much earlier geologic times. When these fuels were burned, they released energy, originally from the Sun, that had been stored for hundreds of millions of years.

Coal was formed when huge trees from the Carboniferous period (345- 280 million years ago) fell and were covered with water, so that oxygen and bacteria could not decay them. Instead, the pressure of the weight of materials above them compressed them into dark, carbonic, ignitable rock.

Most of the Earth's oil and gas formed over a hundred million years ago from tiny animal skeletons and plant matter that fell to the bottom of seas or were buried in sediment. This organic matter was compacted by the weight of water and soil. Coal, oil, and gas, despite their relative abundance, are not evenly distributed on Earth; some places have much more than others, due to geographic factors and the diverse ecosystems that existed long ago.

Early Steam Engines

The story of the Industrial Revolution begins on the small island of Great Britain. By the early 18th century, people there had used up most of their trees for building houses and ships and for cooking and heating. In their search for something else to burn, they turned to the hunks of black stone (coal) that they found near the surface of the earth. Soon they were digging deeper to mine it. Their coal mines filled with water that needed to be removed; horses pulling up bucketfuls proved slow going.

To the rescue came James Watt (1736-1819), a Scottish instrument-maker who in 1776 designed an engine in which burning coal produced steam, which drove a piston assisted by a partial vacuum. (There had been earlier steam engines in Britain, and also in China and in Turkey, where one was used to turn the spit that roasts a lamb over a fire.) Its first application was to more quickly and efficiently pump water out of coal mines, to better allow for extraction of the natural resource, but Watt's engine worked well enough to be put to other uses; he became a wealthy man. After his patent ran out in 1800, others improved upon his engine. By 1900 engines burned 10 times more efficiently than they had a hundred years before.

At the outset of the 19th century, British colonies in North America were producing lots of cotton, using machines to spin the cotton thread on spindles and to weave it into cloth on looms. When they attached a steam engine to these machines, they could easily outproduce India, up until then the world's leading producer of cotton cloth. One steam engine could power many spindles and looms. This meant that people had to leave their homes and work together in factories.

Early in the 19th century the British also invented steam locomotives and steamships, which revolutionized travel. In 1851 they held the first world's fair, at which they exhibited telegraphs, sewing machines, revolvers, reaping machines, and steam hammers to demonstrate they that were the world's leading manufacturer of machinery. By this time the characteristics of industrial society - smoke rising from factories, bigger cities and denser populations, railroads - could be seen in many places in Britain.

Why Britain?

Britain wasn't the only place that had deposits of coal. So why didn't the Industrial Revolution begin in China, or somewhere else that boasted this natural resource? Did it start in isolation in Britain, or were there global forces at work that shaped it? Was it geography or cultural institutions that mattered most? Historians have vigorously debated these questions, amassing as much evidence as possible for their answers.

Possible reasons why industrialization began in Britain include:

Shortage of wood and the abundance of convenient coal deposits

Commercial-minded aristocracy; limited monarchy

System of free enterprise; limited government involvement

Government support for commercial projects, for a strong navy to protect ships

Cheap cotton produced by slaves in North America

Rule of law; protection of assets

Valuable immigrants (Dutch, Jews, Huguenots [French Protestants])

Possible reasons why industrialization did not begin in China include:

Location of China's coal, which was in the north, while economic activity was centered in the south

Rapid growth of population in China, giving less incentive for machines and more for labor-intensive methods

Confucian ideals that valued stability and frowned upon experimentation and change

Lack of Chinese government support for maritime explorations, thinking its empire seemed large enough to provide everything needed

China's focus on defending self from nomadic attacks from the north and west

Global forces influencing the development of industrialization in Britain include:

Britain's location on the Atlantic Ocean

British colonies in North America, which provided land, labor, and markets

Silver from the Americas, used in trade with China

Social and ideological conditions in Britain, and new thoughts about the economy, that encouraged an entrepreneurial spirit

By the way, if you're wondering what oil and natural gas were doing while coal was powering the Industrial Revolution, they had been discovered long before and were in use, but mostly as fuels for lamps and other light sources. It wasn't until the mid-20th century that oil caught up - and surpassed - coal in use.

The Spread of the Industrial Revolution

Britain tried to keep secret how its machines were made, but people went there to learn about them and took the techniques back home. Sometimes they smuggled the machines out in rowboats to neighboring countries. The first countries after Britain to develop factories and railroads were Belgium, Switzerland, France, and the states that became Germany. Building a national railroad system proved an essential part of industrialization. Belgium began its railroads in 1834, France in 1842, Switzerland in 1847, and Germany in the 1850s.

Industrialization began in the United States when Samuel Slater emigrated from Britain to Rhode Island in 1789 and set up the first textile factory on U.S soil. He did this from memory, having left Britain without notes or plans that could have been confiscated by British authorities. Francis Cabot Lowell, of Massachusetts, visited Britain from 1810 to 1812 and returned to set up the first power loom and the first factory combining mechanical spinning and weaving in the States. Railroad construction in America boomed from the 1830s to 1870s. The American Civil War (1861-65) was the first truly industrial war - the increasingly urbanized and factory-based North fighting against the agriculture-focused South - and industrialization grew explosively afterward. By 1900 the United States had overtaken Britain in manufacturing, producing 24 percent of the world's output.

After 1870 both Russia and Japan were forced by losing wars to abolish their feudal systems and to compete in the industrializing world. In Japan, the monarchy proved flexible enough to survive through early industrialization. In Russia, a profoundly rural country, the czar and the nobility undertook industrialization while trying to retain their dominance. Factory workers often worked 13-hour days without any legal rights. Discontent erupted repeatedly, and eventually a revolution brought the Communist party to power in 1917.

Industrialized nations used their strong armies and navies to colonize many parts of the world that were not industrialized, gaining access to the raw materials needed for their factories, a practice known as imperialism. In 1800 Europeans occupied or controlled about 34 percent of the land surface of the world; by 1914 this had risen to 84 percent.

Britain led the 19th-century takeovers and ended the century with the largest noncontiguous empire the world has ever known. ("The sun never sets on the British Empire," as the British liked to say.) Britain exerted great influence in China and the Ottoman Empire without taking over direct rule, while in India, Southeast Asia, and 60 percent of Africa, it assumed all governmental functions.

In the last decade of the 19th century most European nations grabbed for a piece of Africa, and by 1900 the only independent country left on the continent was Ethiopia. After World War II (1939-1945) Europe's colonies demanded their independence, which didn't always happen immediately or without conflict but eventually took root. Now, in the early 21st century, Brazil, China, and India are becoming economic powerhouses, while many European countries are enduring troubled economic times.

Consequences of the Industrial Revolution

The statistics that reflect the effects of industrialization are staggering. In 1700, before the widespread use of fossil fuels, the world had a population of 670 million people. By 2011 the world's population had reached 6.7 billion, a 10-fold increase in a mere 300 years. In the 20th century alone, the world's economy grew 14-fold, the per capita income grew almost fourfold, and the use of energy expanded at least 13-fold. This kind of growth has never before occurred in human history.

Many people around the world today enjoy the benefits of industrialization. With so much more energy flowing through human systems than ever before, many of us must do much less hard physical labor than earlier generations did. People today are able to feed more babies and bring them to adulthood. Many people vote and participate in modern states, which provide education, social security, and health benefits. Large numbers of people enjoy levels of wealth, health, education, travel, and life expectancy unimagined before industrialization.

The benefits of industrialization, however, have come at great cost. For one thing, the rate of change (acceleration) is now so rapid that individuals and social systems struggle to keep up. And strong arguments can be made about depersonalization in the age of mass production.

The increased complexity of the industrial system has also brought increased fragility. Industrialization depends on the interaction of many diverse components, any one of which could fail. We know that many of the essential components of the industrial system, and the natural resources it depends on, are being compromised - the soil, the oceans, the atmosphere, the underground water levels, plants, and animals are all at risk. Will growth continue unchecked, or are we approaching the end of an unsustainable industrial era? Whatever the future holds, we'll be debating - and dealing with - the consequences of modernization for years to come.

For Further Discussion

The innovations of the Industrial Revolution transformed textile production. Can you think of innovations today in some other industry that are transforming that industry and changing the way humans live? Share your answer in the Questions Area below. Then, respond to someone else's answer, commenting on the characteristics of that transformation that either make it similar to or different from what happened in the Industrial Revolution.

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READ: The Industrial Revolution (article) | Khan Academy

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