Heyday: The 1850’s and the Dawn of the Global AgeBy Ben WilsonBasic Books2016When did the modern world begin? This is, ironically, a curiously modern question. The poets and painters of Medieval Europe were little enough concerned with the question of when the old days became the new: to them, the Biblical patriarchs and Roman emperors talked, dressed, and acted just like men of the present day, and the world they inhabited was fundamentally like our own. But from the moment that Petrarch saw a new and less benighted era dawning in 14th century Tuscany, Western thinkers have been convinced of a visible dividing line between the worlds of Then and Now. At some moment in the past, the theory goes, there occurred a decisive moment of transition, when old and antiquated ways of life were superseded by new technologies, philosophies, and social structures. True, history is mired in stories of warfare, famine, ignorance, bigotry, and collective self-destruction. But now we are modern men, fit for modern times.One might think that this impulse would have faded in our own, rather dispiriting century, but, alas, far from it. These days, a sizeable corner of the publishing business is devoted to books proving why precisely one given era marks the beginning of the world we know. In the last decade or so, readers have been helpfully briefed on how modernity began in 1979, 1969, 1968, and 1919, not to mention 1688, 1492, and, of course, 1066. It seems only a matter of time before 1274 BC: The Year the Hittites Changed Everything finds its way to a bookstore near you. Is there any room left at all for yet another disquisition on this topic?As always in publishing, the answer is “sure, why not?” And in his jovial and highly readable new book Heyday: The 1850’s and the Dawn of the Global Age, historian Ben Wilson does his able best to contribute a new argument to the well-trod field. As its subtitle implies, Heyday locates the turning point in the middle decade of the 19th century, a period when new technologies, scientific advances, and political ambitions necessitated the birth of a new world order. What distinguishes Wilson’s account from its myriad rivals is a wide-screen perspective on the planetary dimensions of the change. In his telling, the 1850’s were a moment of worldwide “millennial expectation,” when a combination of new technology and rational philosophy seemed suddenly capable of perfecting the entire globe. As Wilson quotes Britain’s Prince Albert, “We are living at a period of most powerful transition which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points -- the realization of the unity of mankind.”No set-piece could be more tailor-made for this thesis than Albert’s own Great Exhibition of 1851, and it is from here that Wilson launches his global tour. Housed in the custom-built and massively expensive Crystal Palace, and packing 14,000 exhibitors into a space of 990,000 square feet, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations was intended as a showcase for the best and most sophisticated technology from Britain, its European neighbors, the colonies, and beyond. Seen from our modern vantage point, the Exhibition was an overload of industrial invention ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and like any good raconteur, Wilson spares a few moments to engage in some vibrant scene-setting:

The profusion of artifacts and materials made it impossible for the visitor to hold on to anything in particular; it was the totality of the spectacle that made it great rather than any individual exhibit. There were gorgeous fabrics, furs, and silks; intricate clocks and microscopes; lumps of coal; bales of wheat, and samples of wool from around the world; exotic Asian artifacts and modern Western sculpture; medicines and surgical instruments; scissors, Sheffield cutlery, and porcelain; state-of-the-art agricultural machinery, gardening equipment and futuristic tools; foodstuffs, minerals, chemicals, resins, and dyes; fire engines and lifeboats; and furniture, household appliances, and decorations. The industrial completed for space with the domestic, the showy with the mundane, the luxurious with the practical.

But here and elsewhere, Heyday always keeps its eye on a broader thesis: the Exhibition, Wilson argues, was more than just a display of Western goods; it was an indisputable demonstration of Western (and especially British) philosophical values. What was really being sold here was the promise of free trade, and the potential of limitless technological efficiency. This showcase was the apotheosis of the Whig view of history, in which civilization was viewed as a steady ascent toward the linked virtues of freedom, scientific advance, and capitalist prosperity. Gone were the gloomy, pessimistic broodings of Romantic writers and philosophers. Gone, too, were the failed, militarist fantasies of Bonaparte and his offspring. The empires of the future would not be built by force of arms, but through free trade, fast communication, and ever greater efficiency. Wilson writes vividly about the fervent belief this new philosophy could inspire:

What did the rest of the world have to gain by free trade? First there was the possibility of universal peace. Countries and empires that hunkered down behind the barriers of protection were said to be more aggressive and warlike. As the Times had it, in the middle of the nineteenth century, “we fight our battles far less with fire and sword, with gabion and howitzer, than with calico and scissors, with coal and with iron...Trade is now much more than the acquisition of lucre; it is a great political engine.”...Under the glass roof of the Crystal Palace, and surrounded by the produce of the world, many visitors were profoundly moved at this visual representation of peace through trade; some even burst into tears.

Naturally, all of this industrial efficiency required ever more natural resources to fuel it. An unavoidable corollary of economic expansion in the early Victorian era was a rapid and sometimes chaotic exploitation of the earth’s resources, from gold, to cotton, to gutta-purcha latex, harvested in Malayan plantations and used to insulate the deep-water cables of the transatlantic telegraph line. Wilson is careful to remind us, however, that the voracious appetite for resources carried, at that time, few of the bleak implications we might imagine today. This was an era when the earth's abundance, harnessed to efficient technology, seemed infinite. Thus, Wilson makes the sharp observation that the Great Exhibition strove to conceal as much as it publicized about Britain’s place on the economic totem pole. While British industrialists blustered, farm and mineral-rich nations like the United States were ready to reap the biggest rewards of the emerging global marketplace. One of the pleasures of Wilson’s book is his eagerness to take the narrative into some of the less obvious corners of the map: not just obvious contenders like America and Western Europe, but economic might-have-beens like New Zealand, whose fleeting moment of glory he adroitly details:

In an essay published in 1840, the great historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had depicted some future age when a tourist from New Zealand would stand on the remnants of London Bridge and sketch the ruined domes and archeological relics of the once-mighty metropolis, just as modern tourists re-created in their minds the glories of Rome’s capital and mused on the remorseless cycles of history…The tireless salesman for Australia and New Zealand George Butler Earp affirmed that “Australia and New Zealand are rapidly becoming the culminating points of the Anglo-Saxon race...It is something to be amongst the founders of a new empire, such as is rising up in the southern hemisphere - the influence the destinies of the human race, when the old empires of the northern hemisphere shall live only in classical history.”

Of course, this sort of wide-ranging, populist narrative ultimately rises or falls on its author’s capacity to spin a good yarn. Thankfully, when he pauses for more than a few pages in any given location, Wilson has a fine eye for the Herodotean digression, as when he ponders the rise and social significance of beards throughout Europe (they reflected military fashion, and reinforced Europeans’ sense of superior masculinity), or takes a brisk walk through the rapid-fire newspaper business at mid-century. It’s both a compliment and a critique to say that there aren’t nearly enough of these moments in Heyday: more often than not, the book’s headlong drive toward one setting after another discourages any deep examination of a single person or place. Even so, the book gallops along with a sure gait and a genial nature, and Wilson’s larger thesis about the interconnectedness of 1850’s society is interesting enough to survive a certain absence of thorough detail.That thesis grows more complex in the book’s second half, which turns its attention to the limits and consequences of the global industrial boom. A tightly-connected global world brought peaceably together by free traded sounded utopian in theory, but the practice could just as easily turn dystopic. When the United States, puffed up by ten years of rapid overexpansion and an inflationary gold rush, dipped into recession in 1857, ties of trade and finance resulted in a global financial panic -- the first in human history. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, new economic production meant a need for new (and ideally passive) markets to buy everything up: thus, places like Hong Kong, Yokohama, and Lucknow found themselves serving as outlet shops for the factories of Europe and North America, at the point of a musket when necessary.Although Wilson does an adequate job of walking readers through the resentments and resistance that gradually built up in such places, the brevity of his book mars this portion more than the earlier sections. (Here, too, the footnotes reveal a perhaps too-heavy reliance and secondary, and often quite recent, sources. Though one hardly expects breakthrough archive research in a popular history, the shortcut is nonetheless disappointing.) In a section on India, for instance, Wilson manages to paint an engaging portrait of James Ramsay, first marquis of Dalhousie: “the supreme example of a technocratic administrator” who embarked on a ruthlessly efficient policy of territorial annexation, military suppression, and building miles of railroads and telegraph lines for the benefit of India’s British overlords. But for all its sharp analysis, Heyday barely manages to scratch the surface of an economic transformation that reduced India, in less than a century, from the world’s second-largest economy and major importer of cotton manufactures, to a subservient, agricultural colony with virtually no manufacturing to speak of. (Karl Marx came closer to the matter when he summarized, in lamentably condescending fashion that, “English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi­barbarian, semi­civilized communities...and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”) Readers coming to Heyday for this portion of economic history are likely to come away highly intrigued, but more than a little baffled.

These imperfections notwithstanding, Wilson is very good when it comes to narrating the violent fallout of this exploitation, both in India, where a sepoy-sparked rebellion brought chaos and retributive massacres to the northern portion of the subcontinent; and in China, where the horrific Taiping Rebellion ended in years of bloodshed and a capitulation to European powers. In these sections, ironically, Wilson’s use of contemporary sources actually works against his history, since European newspaper accounts of these battles very often strain the limits of credulity. (Take, for instance, the reports of brave, young Margaret Wheeler, a British teenager who supposedly felled five Indian mutineers with either a pistol or a saber, before nobly taking her own life to avoid dishonor.) But Heyday amply compensates with its astute connections between the many worldwide theaters of conflict and rebellion: noting, for instance, that the suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny was made possible by the re-routing of British regulars sailing out to seek retribution in China; or summoning a bevy of newspaper quotes to demonstrate the panic set off in the British textile industry by the onset of the American Civil War.Similarly, the author has a knack for finding small details that shed light on larger historical arguments, as when he observes the role reversal in technological mastery during the rebellion in India: “First the telegraph cables were severed. Then the technology was used against the British. Cable was refashioned into bullets; tubular iron telegraph poles found new life as basic cannon.” Above all, Wilson is a born storyteller, and his snapshots of colonial resistance read with the graphic immediacy of a Victorian sensation novel, as in this description of the aftermath of the siege of Cawnpore:

When Havelock and his men entered Cawnpore on July 17, they discovered the remains of the British entrenchment: a ruined makeshift fort stood in the midst of roofless, battered buildings and a mess of broken furniture, abandoned shoes, torn books, empty bottles, and everything else that was mute testament to the horrors of the three-week siege. Then they entered the Bibighar villa. The first officers who arrived in the house found the rooms ankle-deep in blood, torn hair, children’s shoes, ladies’ bonnets, and bloody handprints on the walls. Even more horrific was the well in the courtyard…

This is gripping (if a tad theatrical) stuff. But here, again, the book’s greatest strength is its overarching analysis of what all this violence and resistance ultimately meant. The result of the pushback, as Wilson sees it, was a hardening of European political philosophy. If the start of the 1850’s had been a time of liberal, Whiggish dreaming, when science and trade seemed destined to bring about a peaceful and better world, the end of the decade saw a retrenchment into pessimism and reaction. If ungrateful subjects in India and China (not to mention striking workers in Manchester and St. Louis) weren’t willing to accept the new global order in peace, they would have to be made to accept it by force. The notion that freedom could be the basis of empire now seemed a ridiculous pipe dream. Wilson writes:

Back at the beginning of the decade it was widely held that the world would be transformed organically. The progressive forces of the age -- multiplying trade, spreading knowledge, new technologies, and long-distance migration -- would rejuvenate the entire planet. By the summer of the great solar storm [1859] few could hold on to that faith. Technologies that had been seen as utopian quickly became the tools of the modern power state. Telegraphs, railways, mass media, and other developments had empowered governments to mobilize their publics and militaries swiftly and efficiently for national ends. In Europe and Asia in 1859 and 1860 change was being realized by the exercise of brute power.

The story Wilson tells, then, is ultimately a dispiriting one: the slow death of the belief that liberty and progress could shape the future. The rest of the 19th century would be a story of increasingly hard and repressive empires, built on blood and iron, not steam ships and free trade. Thus Bismarck’s Prussia, looming like a grim specter over the book’s last chapter, becomes a poster child for European empires to come: heavily armed, nationalist powers that emerged in reaction to the untamed advances of the previous decade. So much for enlightened empires. Here was the spirit of Bonaparte ascendant at last.A new atttidude of cynicism set in: civilization was, at best, a levy against the flood of savagery and barbarity that threatened to deluge European power. Enlightenment was not a divine blessing to be bestowed upon the world, but a precious commodity to be jealously guarded by a small group of possessors. The world's abundance was no longer infinite. Technology would not be rejected, of course, but more and more it would be seen as a self-devouring force; something that could raise society up, and obliterate it just as quickly. The first decades of the next century would make even the cynics look restrained in their warnings.Of course, Wilson is writing with the hindsight of two world wars, and in the midst of a 21st century poised on the brink of environmental catastrophe. It’s just possible that his downbeat conclusion might be informed by the present day as much as by the 1860’s: the later Victorians, after all, are hardly remembered as a bunch of fatalistic nay-sayers. But it is a bracing conclusion for all that, and a provocative departure from the field of sunny, self-congratulatory popular histories. It is fascinating to find a book that views modernity not as the start of greatness, but as the brief and melancholy flowering of a dream that failed.Ben Wilson deserves credit for making this case, and if he makes it in a way that is friendly and accessible to the public at large, so much the better. As a palatable serving of a bitter pill, this book could scarcely be bettered. Heyday is an entertaining and challenging revision of a pivotal moment in time. For fans of thoughtful narrative history, it is very much worthy of being read and pondered.____Zach Rabiroff is an Editor at Open Letters Monthly. He lives in Brooklyn and works for a consulting firm during his daytime hours.