OPINION:
HEYDAY: THE 1850S AND THE DAWN OF THE GLOBAL AGE
By Ben Wilson
Basic Books, $32.50, 520 pages
Two long afternoon immersions in Ben Wilson’s book left me feeling as if I had been on a high-speed roller coaster, rocketing from the gold fields of Australia and California to the financial houses of London, battlefields in Central America and the steppes of the Caucasus and telegraph offices sprinkled over the continent.
The young historian (born in 1980) touches these locales, and many more, in depicting the 1850s as a significant decade in world history. And he skillfully melds seeming disparate happenings — a global jigsaw, if you will — into a narrative that is both convincing and entertainingly readable.
The driving force was interconnectivity of communications and travel — the transoceanic telegraph, railroads, express mail streamers and clippers, even news agencies. The undersea telegraph was made possible by development of gutta-percha, a hard and flexible latex to coat cables, insulating them from salt water. Once the telegraph came into use, Mr. Wilson notes, “events in one place reverberated around the planet with unprecedented celerity.”
The 1850s saw mass population shifts, with millions of persons finding new lives elsewhere; the overall global economy expanded an estimated five-fold.
Another precipitant was Britain’s repeal in the late 1840s of the so-called “Corn Laws,” which repealed high tariffs on imported grain, which kept bread prices high. Cheaper food freed farm workers to enter mills and factories. Even more important, merchants in America, Russia and elsewhere in Europe, used cash from produce sales to buy British goods, making the island nation “the workshop and financier of the world.”
The opening of the American West to settlers, aided by railroads, caused a massive migration to fertile lands in the plains — 70,000 persons in the summer of 1852 alone, versus 2,000 annually the past decade. A single railroad company, the Illinois Central, received 2.6 million acres in land grants, which it sold to pay British bondholders. The population of Illinois soared; Chicago, which had 200 inhabitants in 1833, boasted 112,172 by the end of the 1850s.
These farms produced tremendous quantities of wheat. The crafting of an intricate network of grain elevators eliminated the need for stevedores and enabled shipments from farms to Atlantic ports. As Mr. Wilson observes, “The grain never knew the inside of a sack; it moved over prodigious distances with the felicity of a liquid.”
But a dagger dangled over the United States: slavery. The British imported more than a billion pounds of raw cotton annually, which meant jobs for scores of thousands of textile workers, sailors and other laborers involved in converting it into spun cloth. If shipments of cotton ceased, commented a (pro-slavery) South Carolina senator, “England will topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her.” Emancipation of American slaves would come in the next decade, and in due course cotton from India supplanted Southern plantations.
Mr. Wilson also takes readers on a delightful side trip to Central America, where the freelance mercenary William Walker briefly seized Nicaragua as the anticipated core of a tropical slave-holding annex to the American South. He unwisely recruited two associates of shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. Feeling betrayed, Vanderbilt wrote them, “Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours Truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
Global commercial expansion had its dark sides. Faced with an unfavorable balance of trade with China, Britain resorted to opium to fill the gap. Tons of the narcotic were processed in India and shipped to 400 million potential customers in China, producing an annual flow of billions of dollars back to London. When weak Chinese rulers resisted, British gunships blasted away their defenses and imposed unequal treaties. During the opium wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the drug became “one of the pillars of global capitalism,” enriching some of the more prominent personages of London.
Alas, warfare matured along with the economy. The foremost development was of the Enfield rifle, produced by the millions for the British, American and Indian armies. Its predecessor, the Brown Bess of the Napoleonic era allowed a soldier to shoot an enemy at perhaps 100 yards; the Enfield “gave ordinary infantrymen a good chance of hitting a target at 600 yards.” The British put the Enfield to deadly use in the Crimean War with Russia 1853-6, thus retaining control of access to India and its Middle East satraps.
As the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli summed up the decade, “It is a privilege to live in this age of rapid and brilliant events.” Mr. Wilson does note, critically, the West’s “acts of creative destruction and its celebration of racial superiority.” Nonetheless, “the confidence and millennial hopes it generated resulted in a whirlwind of energy, innovation, creativity and risk-taking that hastened, and conditioned, what we regard as modernity.”
• Joseph Goulden is the author of 18 nonfiction books.
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