1
/
of
1
Heyday - Britain And The Birth Of The Modern World: Ben Wilson
Heyday - Britain And The Birth Of The Modern World: Ben Wilson
Regular price
$30.00 AUD
Regular price
Sale price
$30.00 AUD
Unit price
/
per
Couldn't load pickup availability
From 1851, in the space of little more than a decade, the world was reshaped by technology, trade, mass migration and war. As instantaneous electric communication bridged the vast gulfs that separated human societies, millions of settlers travelled to the far corners of the Earth, building vast cities out of nothing in lightning-quick time. A new generation of fast steamships and railways connected these burgeoning frontier societies, shrinking the world and creating an interlinked global economy. Fortune-seekers and ordinary migrants journeyed to these rapidly expanding frontiers, savouring the frenetic activity and optimism of the boom-towns of the 1850s in Australia, New Zealand the United States. This is a story not only of rapid progress, but of the victims of an assurgent West: indigenous peoples who stood in the pathways of economic expansion, Asian societies engulfed by the forces of modernisation, Muslim guerrilla fighters in the Caucasus mountains and freelance empire-builders in the jungles of Nicaragua, British free trade zealots preying on China and samurai warriors resisting Western incursions in Japan. No less important are the inventions, discoveries and technologies that powered progress, and the great engineering projects that characterised the Victorian heyday, notably the transatlantic telegraph cable. This was a time of explosive energy and dizzying change, a roller-coaster ride of booms and bust, witnessed through the eyes of the men and women reshaping its frontiers. At the centre - Great Britain, at the peak of its power between 1851 and the mid-1860s as it attempted to determine the destinies of hundreds of millions of people. Illustrated with colour and sepia plates.
Product Information
1st edition; hardback; unclipped dust jacket has very slight corner bumps otherwise a fine copy; uncommon title, Autobiography/Bio/Non-FictionShare
