The century of the greatest advances, but it's not this one

WHEN YOU come down, the papers are already on the breakfast table.

Flicking through them, you shake your head. It isn't yet New Year and already the pages are full of learned articles looking back over the past hundred years and predicting what lies ahead. How many more times do you have to read that this has been the century which ushered in the modern world and brought civilisation to the masses: the century of the greatest changes, for good and ill, that the world has ever seen?

It's probably true of course, you concede, as you put on your frock-coat, gloves and top hat and walk out to hail a hansom-cab in the street. Looking back from the modern vantage-point of 1898, this has been an extraordinary era of progress, and it is hard to see how the 20th century will be able to match it. As the Euro debate shows, we British are naturally an insular lot - but the point I am making is that our insularity extends in time as well as space. Islanded in the second half of the 20th century, we don't stop to ask ourselves if history has lessons to teach us from an earlier date. Because we are unique, we want to believe that our century is unique - uniquely cursed with mass misery and torture; uniquely blessed with progress in medicine and living standards; uniquely bewildering in the rapidity of technological progress. Ours is the "dark century", we are told: the century of tyranny and terrible war, in which man has lost his innocence but not rediscovered God. Its keynote has been speed. In 100 years we have gone from the horse-and-trap to space travel, from pigeon post to electronic mail flashing instantaneously from every quarter of the global village. No other century, it is said, has experienced such revolutions - political, technological, economic - or made such giant strides in medicine, social welfare and international aid. My father, who has been thinking of investing in digital TV, would no doubt agree. Now in his 96th year, he was born 10 months before Wilbur and Orville Wright flew the world's first aeroplane (travelling all of 37 metres above a strip of sand in North Carolina). In 1903 his childhood home, like most private homes, had no electric lights, telephone, fridge or central heating. Plastic had not been invented. Cars were only for the very rich, and were driven on mostly dirt roads. Too young to fight in the First World War and too old for the Second, he reaped the benefits of technological advance without suffering the worst penalties. But let us go back again, to 1898. Our Victorian businessman let the hansom-cab go and took a tram to the City (getting to work more quickly than his 1998 equivalent). Now warmly ensconced in his office where the typewriters are clacking, the newly invented telephones are ringing and the tickertape is chattering out the market news, he is bound to perceive just as wide a gulf between the life he leads now and his ancestors' England of 1803. In fact, he can scarcely imagine what life must have been like in that era of slaves and sailing ships, highwaymen, child labour, and (despite the gradual advance of steam power) a largely agricultural economy which had changed little since Tudor times. England was still ruled by the King and a small group of noblemen. News from Westminster took several days to reach people in the North. The truth is, the gulf would have been just as great for him as it is for us today. For every radical event which changed the course of the 20th century, a similar one changed the course of the 19th. Early in the 20th century, the 1914-18 War triggered seismic social changes, eroding the political power base of the upper classes and giving women the vote. Early in the 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars had an exactly comparable effect. After victory at Waterloo in 1815 the ruling class remained in power, but they became very conscious of the pressure from below to reform themselves into people deserving of their high position. They sobered up; they recognised the importance of the mercantile class, and their measured response to social unrest culminated in the Great Reform Act of 1832 which enlarged the electorate and made Parliament more accountable to the people. We pride ourselves on the spread of democracy in the 20th century, as kings have gone into exile and tyrants have been defeated. The Russian Revolution may have introduced the greater evil of Communist dictatorship, but that too has crumbled away under the pressure of capitalism. Since the pulling down of the Berlin Wall, the Eastern bloc has embraced Western values, and Germany itself has been reunited. Throughout the West and beyond, America has reigned supreme. Yet the 19th century too had its revolutions. The year of 1848 saw kings and emperors deposed across Europe, and replaced either by republics or by political systems in which the role of the monarch was greatly weakened. After fighting three wars, Otto von Bismarck achieved his ambition of unifying Germany in an Empire which was to remain intact until 1918. As for the United States, finance capitalism and the spread of the railroads allowed it to recover so quickly from its Civil War that well before the end of the century it had become the world's leading industrial nation. From our perspective, the computer-led microchip revolution seems the most earth-shattering technological advance in history. Yet the fact remains that the most successfully sold item on the Internet is the printed book, and our daily lives are still governed by things invented in the 19th century. Without steam power, there would have been no microchip. The Industrial Revolution, most of which took place in Britain in the first half of the 19th century, could well be described as the most dynamic single advance in documented history. It took workers off the land and into cities. It engineered railways, fast ships and machines which vastly increased the speed and variety of manufacture. It reshaped Britain's entire landscape and social structure. Between 1801 and 1851, Britain's population virtually doubled; standards of living rose too, though more slowly. Thomas Cook started in 1841. Though the 19th century saw no space age, by the end of it, speed of travel and communications allowed ordinary tourists to visit parts of the earth that until recently had been as remote and alien as the surface of the moon. As huge areas of the globe that had been terra incognita were explored and mapped, the world became as knowable as the nearest planets are to astronomers today. In science, yes, we have seen astonishing advances this century, from Einstein to nuclear physics, from microsurgery to the consequences of the discovery of DNA. Does any of it match Darwin's discovery of the evolution of the species? In the sciences, again, the advances often seem to parallel each other. The single greatest medical event of the 20th century was Sir Alexander Fleming's 1928 discovery of the antibiotic properties of penicillin. In 1865, the brilliant surgeon Joseph Lister had begun the fight against infectious germs by pioneering the antiseptic treatment of wounds - thus preventing what had been the chief cause of death in surgical wards. A century which had begun with bleeding, cupping, purging and the raising of blisters ended with anaesthetics, sterilised medical equipment and scientifically-based diagnosis. Set against the evils of the 20th century - systematic genocide and the development of warfare by remote control - there have of course been remarkable collaborative efforts in our times to make the world a better place. Tax-funded social welfare in the industrialised West has brought comfort and nourishment to the poorest, to a degree the 19th century could not contemplate. Yet proportionately the advances made between 1800 and 1900 may have been greater still. The abolition of slavery, made law in 1807 and vigorously policed on the high seas by British governments for the next 60 years, was one of the greatest moral achievements of any nation in history. Meanwhile in Britain, under pressure from social reformers like the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and the mill-owner Robert Owen, new regulations were introduced on child labour and the care of those unable to work and the mentally ill. At the same time, London itself was transformed from a reeking, slovenly mudbath into a modern metropolis by the wholesale demolition of slums and the introduction of sanitation and a sewer system. One of the greatest changes this century is that Britain now has to compete for its place at the top table. At the end of the 19th century, despite the Boer War, Britain was at the zenith of its imperial might. Its empire, the largest ever known, covered more than one-fifth of the earth's surface and incorporated one in every four human beings. Our 1898 businessman lived at the hub of a huge moneymaking machine. Yet as he contemplated the future, collecting his coat and hat, his perspective was not that different from ours. He deplored the decadence of the times: the loosening of moral standards, and the consequent spread of a frightening sexual plague - not Aids but venereal disease. Living towards the end of the reign of a Queen who had ruled longer than most people could remember, he would have noted that some younger members of the royal family were damaging the reputation of the monarchy by their behaviour. He worried about the increasing power of the popular press, and the widening gulf between rich and poor. The City itself was at risk from over-ambitious speculators, who had already caused the collapse, in 1890, of Baring's Bank. Abroad, the problem of Ireland, for all Gladstone's efforts, remained unsolved. And on the Continent, there were disturbing signs of a newly-invigorated Germany gathering its forces. Food for thought on the journey home. One can make too much of all this, I know. That wise old bird, Anonymous, remarked that the only lesson history has taught us is that man has not yet learned anything from history. It never repeats itself, but nevertheless it carries warnings. And one of them is not to pride ourselves on having made more progress than our 19th century forebears did. If you look, we actually haven't made as much.

Copyright 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.