Going global

We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and technological advances of the 1910s and 1940s are obvious. Ben Wilson has been more thoughtful, and has chosen the 1850s — or, more specifically, the years from 1851 to 1862. It was a time when, as he says, Britain was at the peak of her power. The empire was not at its greatest — the Scramble for Africa had yet to occur — but Germany had not unified, and America was economically overdependent on slavery and, not least because of that abomination, about to fall into civil war.

Wilson describes the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a showcase of Britain’s manufacturing might, when it was truly ‘the workshop of the world’. He makes the shrewd observation that what was not displayed by foreign countries was more interesting than what was: these were the inventions that would in time relegate Britain in the list of powers.