This should help you!:)Developments in 19th-century Europe are bounded by two great events. The French Revolution broke out in 1789, and its effects reverberated throughout much of Europe for many decades. World War I
began in 1914. Its inception resulted from many trends in European
society, culture, and diplomacy during the late 19th century. In between
these boundaries—the one opening a new set of trends, the other
bringing long-standing tensions to a head—much of modern Europe was
defined.
Europe during this
125-year span was both united and deeply divided. A number of basic
cultural trends, including new literary styles and the spread of
science, ran through the entire continent. European states were
increasingly locked in diplomatic interaction, culminating in
continentwide alliance systems after 1871. At the same time, this was a
century of growing nationalism, in which individual states jealously
protected their identities and indeed established more rigorous border
controls than ever before. Finally, the European continent was to an
extent divided between two zones of differential development. Changes
such as the Industrial Revolution and political liberalization spread
first and fastest in western Europe—Britain, France, the Low Countries,
Scandinavia, and, to an extent, Germany and Italy. Eastern and southern
Europe, more rural at the outset of the period, changed more slowly and
in somewhat different ways.
Europe
witnessed important common patterns and increasing interconnections,
but these developments must be assessed in terms of nation-state
divisions and, even more, of larger regional differences. Some trends,
including the ongoing impact of the French Revolution, ran through
virtually the entire 19th century. Other characteristics, however, had a
shorter life span.
Some
historians prefer to divide 19th-century history into relatively small
chunks. Thus, 1789–1815 is defined by the French Revolution and
Napoleon; 1815–48 forms a period of reaction and adjustment; 1848–71 is
dominated by a new round of revolution and the unifications of the
German and Italian nations; and 1871–1914, an age of imperialism, is
shaped by new kinds of political debate and the pressures that
culminated in war. Overriding these important markers, however, a
simpler division can also be useful. Between 1789 and 1849 Europe dealt
with the forces of political revolution and the first impact of the
Industrial Revolution. Between 1849 and 1914 a fuller industrial society
emerged, including new forms of states and of diplomatic and military
alignments. The mid-19th century, in either formulation, looms as a
particularly important point of transition within the extended 19th
century.
<span>The Industrial Revolution</span>
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Economic effects
Undergirding
the development of modern Europe between the 1780s and 1849 was an
unprecedented economic transformation that embraced the first stages of
the great Industrial Revolution and a still more general expansion of
commercial activity. Articulate Europeans were initially more impressed
by the screaming political news generated by the French Revolution and
ensuing Napoleonic Wars, but in retrospect the economic upheaval, which
related in any event to political and diplomatic trends, has proved more
fundamental.
Major economic change was spurred by western Europe’s tremendous population growth
during the late 18th century, extending well into the 19th century
itself. Between 1750 and 1800, the populations of major countries
increased between 50 and 100 percent, chiefly as a result of the use of
new food crops (such as the potato) and a temporary decline in epidemic
disease. Population growth of this magnitude compelled change. Peasant
and artisanal children found their paths to inheritance blocked by sheer
numbers and thus had to seek new forms of paying labour. Families of
businessmen and landlords also had to innovate to take care of
unexpectedly large surviving broods. These pressures occurred in a
society already attuned to market transactions, possessed of an active
merchant class, and blessed with considerable capital and access to
overseas markets as a result of existing dominance in world trade.
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