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. One story Wilson does not tell was about the American screw manufacturer who revolutionised the way screws were made. His UK patent was bought by Joseph Chamberlain’s uncle, who within a decade or so had put out of business most of the screw-makers of Birmingham, and created the fortune that funded Radical Joe’s career in politics.

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The world became smaller. Wilson relates how clippers — so termed because of the time they cut off sea voyages — allowed news and goods to be taken around the world in record time. The invention of the telegraph enabled Julius Reuter to make his fortune (and traders to make killings) and set up his news business. The invention of the hard, rubber-like substance gutta percha — a commodity forgotten now, but revolutionary then — enabled cabling to be insulated and encased, and to join Britain, telegraphically, to the Continent, and after 1858 to North America.