THE WORLD IN 1800 by Oliver Bernier - Book Review

 Book Review - Five Stars

THE WORLD IN 1800 by Oliver Bernier

This book is an extraordinary compilation of the most profound turning points in human history.

As the age of steam power was about to alter the velocity of mankind's advancement and the world’s population surpasses 1,000,000.000, this exceptional book covers that time like none other. The book is worthy of more than five stars...I loved it!

EXCERPTS:

By 1800, the United States had a constitution that guaranteed this. France was just entering an era of dictatorship, but the way of life that had prevailed in the old European monarchies was clearly seen to be doomed.

The modern age, was widespread throughout Europe and the Americas. Science, freed at last from the shackles of religion, had begun to explore and explain the world. Manufactures were giving way to industries in which new, advanced techniques prevailed.

A slave, after all, is held to be less than human, a creature not entitled to the basic rights shared by the rest of humankind. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, slavery was the norm in most of the world.

Four European countries, France, Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, which did not practice slavery on their own soil, traded in slaves and allowed slavery in their colonies.

The United States, a major slaveholder and importer, had been recently founded on the premise that all men were entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What remained true in so many parts of the world, though, was that the economy was based on slavery: all have said that it was impossible to free the slaves without ruining the nation.

Bonaparte was proving, at the same time, that he was as capable of rebuilding a country as he was of leading an army to victory, France had emerged from the Revolution with no laws, no institutions, no system of education, even. Except for the understanding that the purchasers of nationalized estates were to be protected, there was no principle on which to build; and yet, in less than four years from his assumption of power, a new code of civil, criminal, and commercial law was in place: A new school and university system was created, and a stable currency, managed by a national bank, was set up. All these innovations lasted, virtually unchanged, for more than a century.

In Latin America, independence was irreversible, but the new republics were wracked by political and economic disorder. In the United States, after a further advance of democracy in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the North and the South began the dispute that eventually brought on the Civil War.

Great Britain went to war with China to force it to buy the opium it produced in India; the United States became ever more eager to trade with Japan; all over Europe, people began to think that Asia and Africa might be ripe for colonization.

Historians sometimes say that the nineteenth century began in 1789. For the 100 years that followed 1800, people thought that much of what was happening to them had begun in 1800.

Review by John M. Grimsrud