The World in 1776 by Marshall B. Davidson is a monumental synopsis of the world’s transition into the Industrial Revolution. Well-written, with excellent editing, makes this historical book read like a thriller novel. This enlightening story lays out the foundation for the world we live in today and answers more questions than a thousand wise men could ask. This is one of the few books I would deem worthy of a reread.
Excerpts:
For forty years, from her accession to the throne until her death in 1780, Maria Theresa played a vigorous and significant part in the wars and politics of Europe. Her family, the Hapsburgs, had been the ruling house of Austria since 1282 (and would continue until 1918).
The success of the American Revolution had given a decisive blow to the royal system. In this new and growing nation across the Atlantic, the ideas of the Enlightenment, to which the European despots had paid lip service for several generations, were actually realized, institutionalized for the first time on a large and practical scale, and all trace of monarchy had been eliminated in the process.
The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. As a classic example, Smith cited the manufacture of pins by “modern” mechanical means.
There is no rich man that does not speedily become a noble, so that the body of the nobles includes the body of the rich, and the cause of the privileged is no longer the cause of distinguished families against a common class, but the cause of the rich against the poor.
(It was Lavoisier’s improved gunpowder that early in the next century du Pont de Nemours started to make in his powder mill on the banks of the Brandywine in Delaware, which was the seed of today’s gigantic Du Pont enterprises.)
No comments:
Post a Comment