The Dawn of a Globalized Century

The late 19th century witnessed the birth of a truly interconnected world. By the 1880s, nearly every corner of the globe had been mapped, with exploration transitioning from discovery to sporting challenge. The race to conquer the poles captured public imagination – American Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909, while Norway’s Roald Amundsen beat Britain’s Robert Scott to the South Pole in 1911. These symbolic conquests, while lacking practical significance, demonstrated humanity’s growing technological mastery over nature.

Transportation and communication networks shrank the world dramatically. The completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1904 reduced travel time from Paris to Vladivostok to just fifteen days. Telegraph lines crisscrossed continents, enabling near-instantaneous global communication. Tourism statistics reveal this new mobility – in 1879 alone, nearly one million visitors traveled to Switzerland, including over 200,000 Americans, a figure representing 5% of the entire U.S. population at the time of its first census in 1790.

Demographic Transformations and Global Inequality

The world’s population nearly doubled between the 1780s and 1880s, reaching approximately 1.5 billion. Asia remained the most populous region, though its share decreased from two-thirds of humanity in 1800 to 55% by 1900. Europe’s population more than doubled from 200 million to 430 million during this period. The most dramatic changes occurred in the Americas, where population exploded from 30 million to nearly 160 million, with North America alone growing from 7 million to over 80 million.

This demographic expansion coincided with growing global inequality. In 1750-1800, what we now call “developed” and “developing” nations had roughly comparable per capita GDP. By 1880, the developed world’s average income was twice that of the Third World, a gap that would widen to 3:1 by 1913 and eventually reach 7:1 by 1970. Industrial technology became both the cause and reinforcement of this growing divide, with military applications creating what one observer bluntly stated: “Whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun, and they have not.”

The Two Worlds of the Late 19th Century

The global system had effectively split into two unequal parts by the 1880s. The developed world, centered in Northwestern Europe and its overseas extensions, represented capitalism’s core. This smaller but dominant sphere contained within it significant variations – from industrial powerhouses to rural backwaters like Portugal or Russia’s vast hinterlands. The much larger “second world” encompassed everything from ancient empires like China and the Ottoman Empire to African societies still organized along pre-state lines.

Urbanization became a key marker of development. European cities with over 100,000 inhabitants grew from 17 in 1800 to 103 by 1890, their combined populations increasing sixfold. Industrial areas like Germany’s Ruhr Valley or Britain’s Tyneside formed dense urban networks, though surprisingly few major cities served as both capitals and international ports. Outside the developed world, some colonial cities like Calcutta and Buenos Aires rivaled European metropolises in size, functioning as commercial gateways for imperial economies.

Technology and the Illusion of Progress

The material achievements of the age appeared undeniable. Steam-powered machinery, predominantly iron and steel constructions fueled by coal, drove industrial production. Railways became the century’s most visible technological triumph – by the early 1880s, nearly 2 billion passenger journeys occurred annually, mostly in Europe (72%) and North America (20%). Telegraph lines stretched three to four times the length of global rail networks.

Yet beneath this apparent progress lay contradictions. While literacy rates rose and democratic institutions spread (at least for male populations), fundamental inequalities persisted. In France, funeral classifications revealed stark divisions: 3.5% for the wealthy, 13-14% for the middle class, and 82-83% for the working class. Life expectancy in developed nations averaged just 43-50 years, with infant mortality only beginning its decline. The “moral statistics” touted as evidence of progress – rising letter volumes, newspaper circulation, scientific society membership – masked persistent poverty for most.

The Crisis of Progress and Rising Doubts

By the 1870s, cracks appeared in the narrative of inevitable progress. The Long Depression beginning in 1873 challenged assumptions about perpetual economic expansion. While technological innovations continued apace – electricity, internal combustion engines, telephones emerging in this period – their benefits remained concentrated among elites. The first department stores like Paris’s Bon Marché catered to middle-class consumers, not the working masses.

More troublingly, the civilizing mission of progress revealed its dark side. Indigenous populations faced extermination or marginalization, whether in the American West (where Native Americans numbered just 230,000 in a population of 63 million by 1890) or the Amazon rubber plantations that funded opera houses while destroying native communities. Pseudo-scientific racism flourished as justification for imperial domination and domestic inequality, with theories of biological determinism explaining why most of humanity seemed incapable of matching Western achievements.

The Paradox of Modernity

The age produced a fundamental paradox: unprecedented technological and economic transformation coexisted with deepening global divisions. What appeared as progress to European and North American elites often meant disruption or destruction for others. As the Bishop Mandell Creighton declared, “We must assume that human affairs are in progress, just as the scientific hypothesis on which history has always been written.” Yet this assumption increasingly required ignoring the lived experience of most of humanity.

The stage was set for the violent contradictions of the 20th century – a world simultaneously unified by technology and fractured by inequality, where the rhetoric of progress masked growing tensions between and within nations. The “Age of Revolution” had created the modern world’s infrastructure, but not its conscience. As one 1910 observer presciently noted through the fictional Mr. Dooley: “Hogan is the happiest man in the world today, but tomorrow something will happen.” The coming decades would test whether progress could truly belong to all humanity, or remain the privilege of a few.