When Victoria rose to the throne, she joined a world stage of so-called Great Powers all
looking to earn their place in the sun, as it were.
As you might know a long awaited game named after this historic ruler is releasing today
- Victoria 3 - and we’ve teamed up with the developers to bring you a special episode
providing an overview of those Great Powers.
We’ll look into their fortunes, friends, and fates, and get an idea of what kind of
challenges the rulers of this period faced - challenges you’ll then be better positioned
to face in the detailed society simulator of Victoria 3, be they economic, diplomatic,
political, military, or philosophical.
It’s a tall order, and the game’s almost out, so let’s get right into it.
[The World Becoming Smaller] Before we begin our nation-by-nation tour,
let us first discuss one of the main themes of the Victorian era: interconnectivity.
Throughout the 19th century, the world became smaller, but everything became bigger: ethnic
groups divided for centuries were united into modern nation states, populations of cities
boomed, and colonial Empires grew like viruses across Africa and Asia.
There were many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important was the increased interconnectivity
of peoples this era brought about.
In 1825, the Active, the world’s first passenger-bearing steam locomotive, made its maiden journey
from Shildon to Darlington, and in the following decades, railway networks across Great Britain
were expanding at a break-neck pace.
In 1840, there were 1454 miles of operating rail lines in the United Kingdom, by 1850,
there were over 6,000.
The rest of Europe was quick to follow.
Between 1840 and 1850, the states of the German confederation expanded from 291 miles of rail
lines to 3,639 miles, while France tailed behind with a still respectable 255 miles
to 1811 miles within the same decade.
As was characteristic of the era, Austria and Russia would lag hopelessly, going from
80 miles to 843 miles, and 17 miles to 311 miles respectively.
Railways were just one part of the 19th century’s revolution in movement, as on the ocean, steam-powered
ironclads defied the capricious whim of the winds which ships of sail had once been beholden
to, while improved roads, bridges and canals made cross-country travel that much easier
in nations across western and central Europe.
The effects of this were felt across the globe, as in the land of the Germans, free and easy
movement across a historically divided land helped break down local loyalties in favour
of the creation of a unified nation state, while with nations like France, Britain and
the United States, the endless horizon of steel and steam enabled an insatiable desire
for endless Imperialistic expansion which would see the subjugation of millions.
On that note, let us begin our tour.
[United Kingdom] As this era of history is so often pegged
to the reign of Queen Victoria, it is fitting to begin our world survey in the nation which
she ruled.
Powered by coal and driven by industry, Britain was growing ever more ravenous in its pursuit
of land and wealth.
When Queen Victoria was crowned, she found herself in control of an Empire which had
subjects across four continents.
The conclusion of the first Anglo-Ashanti war in 1831 was yet another step in a process
which, in later decades, would see Queen Victoria become the sovereign of over 30% of Africa’s
people.
Meanwhile, in Asia, the bulk of colonization was being done not by the British government
itself, but a corporation, the Honourable East India Company.
By the early 1830s, the East India Company had also figured out how to illegally pry
open the closed markets of China as well: through the illicit drug trade.
As a direct result of this, the British crown colony of Hong Kong would be born.
For Britain, expansion and globalization abroad would beget a technological revolution at
home.
From around the 1760s onwards, the pre-modern world of the small artisan, the village seamstress,
and the rural subsistence farmer was increasingly giving way to a modern world of large factories,
mass production, and heavy machinery.
For example, by the 1840s, the textiles industry, fueled by cotton imported from far-off India,
had been nearly fully mechanized in the form of the thundering power loom.
These innovations in steam were a double-edged blade.
On one hand, the productivity of British society increased tenfold.
On the other hand, as the rural poor amassed into cities like Manchester, Liverpool and
Birmingham, they found themselves living in squalid slums built hastily to accommodate
a rapidly growing urban population: a ripe breeding ground for diseases like cholera.
Moreover, they found themselves working exhausting 12-hour shifts in cramped, oppressively loud
factories filled with dangerous machinery, often alongside their own children, as young
as six years old.
Suffice to say, the rights of workers and the fight against capitalistic exploitation
would become a growing movement in the decades to come.
[France] Having spent the last few decades being rocked
to its core by revolution, or starting wars which rippled from Russia to Portugal, the
final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo had seen the Bourbon monarchy restored to the French
throne through the crowning of Louis XVIII, the brother to Louis XVI, whose head had been
chopped off by revolutionaries back in 1792.
One of France’s geopolitical goals at the dawn of the Victorian age was the reestablishment
of a colonial Empire.
In the 1700s, France had been one of Europe’s foremost colonial juggernauts.
However, after the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, the French had lost most
of their North American and Indian territories, mainly to their archrival Britain.
Later, in 1804, Frances’ extremely lucrative sugar plantation island of San Domingue was
ripped from their grasp when its long-suffering black population concluded the only successful
slave revolt in history.
So it was that, when Louis XVIII was succeeded by his brother Charles X in 1824, the new
King sought to regain lost colonial ground.
He got his chance in 1827, when the Dey of Algiers struck a French diplomat with a fan.
Using this diplomatic slight as a pretext, King Charles invaded in 1830.
Unfortunately for Charles, his policies back home would lead to his downfall soon after,
when he attempted to eliminate liberalism and republicanism and restore the absolute
power of the monarchy.
This resulted in the city of Paris rising up against his rule in July of 1830: riots,
looting, barricaded streets, all the usual French stuff.
Within days, Charles was deposed.
He was replaced by his cousin, Louis Phillipe, who presided over a constitutional monarchy
beholden to several solid checks and balances of power.
Throughout the next two decades, Louis Philippe would oversee the continued conquest of Algeria.
However, political tumult in the land of the Franks was not over, for in 1848, another
dizzying string of revolutions would see the July Monarch give way to a second French republic,
then an Empire ruled by the kin of Napoleon, and finally, a third republic which would
bring France’s second-wave of global colonialism to its absolute apex.
[The Germans] For most of the last thousand years, the German
people were divided among as many as 314 sovereign entities of varying sizes.
However, after Napoleon had had his way with the place in 1806, the number of German states
in Europe had shrunken into a considerably more manageable 39.
In areas of central Germany, like Thuringia, the land was still divided between tiny sovereign
Duchies like Anhalt-Cöthen and Anhalt-Dessau, where it was scarcely possible to go for a
casual stroll without unknowingly crossing into another state.
In these small lands, time stood still, as petty nobles clashed over small towns and
scraps of land, an archaic remnant of Europe’s feudal past.
However, these tiny statelets, and even more respectable medium-sized Kingdoms like Bavaria,
Saxony, Württemberg and Hannover were all dwarfed by the big daddy of the German world:
Prussia.
Weighing in with 200,000 square kilometers of land and a population of 11 million, Prussia
had grown into a militaristic juggernaut since its inception on the Baltic Coast after the
fall of the Knightly Teutonic Order in 1525.
By the 1830s, Prussia was also beginning to rival Great Britain for world economic leadership,
as iron, steam, machines, and factory production began the slow process of replacing wood and
water powered small-scale agrarianism.
Another theatre through which Prussia led the German world was its push for economic
standardization through a customs union program known as Zollverein, which many German states
joined in on.
This deconstructed the eclectic array of protectionist trade barriers preventing free commerce across
the German world, and allowed for much freer movement of goods across territorial borders.
This helped increase the appetite of the working class German for a united, modern German nation-state.
As all Europe erupted in a spring of revolutions in 1848, so too did the peoples across the
many states of the German Confederation.
But theirs was a failed movement, and they would have to wait until two and a half decades
later, when a certain Iron Chancellor would forge a nation which, 150 years and two world
wars later, is still the economic and industrial juggernaut of continental Europe.
Prussia was not the only power player of the German world in the mid 19th century.
The Empire of Austria, ruled by the ancient and inbred Habsburg dynasty, looked mighty
impressive on a map.
Covering 270,000 square miles and ruling over 37.5 million people, it was the second largest
nation in Europe behind Russia.
However, looks could be deceiving.
While the other great powers of Europe were rapidly becoming centralized nation-states,
the Austrian Empire resembled political schizophrenia, being composed of a messy patchwork of quasi-independent
Kingdoms, Grand Duchies, Earldoms and Margravates.
Moreover, while Prussia was uniting a confederation predominantly made up of ethnic Germans, the
Austrian Empire ruled over a much more diverse collection of peoples, including Hungarians,
Italians, Romanians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, and Serbs.
This made uniting the massive and unwieldy realm into a coherent and centralized nation
nigh impossible, and ensured that, throughout the 19th century, while nations like France,
Britain and Prussia would surge ahead amidst steel and steam, the realm of the Habsburgs
would fall behind amidst stagnation and silence.
[Russia] Over the last three centuries, what had once
been a small Muscovite Duchy beholden to Mongol Khans had since evolved into a colossus which
blanketed half the globes’ circumference.
By the 1830s, the Russian Empire under Tsar Nicholas I was, alongside Great Britain, one
of the world’s most prolific colonizers, having subjugated many peoples, from the Balts,
Finns and Ruthenians in the west, to the Turkic peoples of central Asia, to the Aleuts and
Tlingit nations of Alaska.
Much of Russia’s more recent expansions had been at the expense of an increasingly
geopolitically contained Ottoman Empire, having annexed their vassals in the Crimean Khanate
back in 1783.
From the 1830s onwards, Russia’s probes into Afghanistan had provoked a so-called
‘great game’ with the British, who saw Russian expansion into the region as a threat
to British holdings in India.
Russian colonization was often as absolutely brutal as it was absolutely thorough.
The same year Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster, Tsar Nicholas was busy orchestrating
a genocide in the north Caucasus, as the region’s native Circassian peoples were horrifically
slaughtered or deported en masse.
In the late 1830s, no ruler in Europe held as much absolute power over his subjects as
Tsar Nicholas I. His empire was perpetually growing, and his capital city of St. Petersburg
was among the most opulent in Europe.
Yet, beneath all the glitz and glamor was an Empire kneecapped by corruption, and increasingly
lagging behind the rest of Europe in both social and economic progress.
Throughout the 19th century, while western Europe industrialized, Russia was pretty much
stuck in the middle ages.
The bulk of the Empires’ population was made up of serfs, who were slaves in all but
name, without any freedom of movement and barely any legal protections, completely at
the mercy of the whims, appetites and temper of their landlords.
The excesses of the Tsars, the callousness of Russian nobles, and the long suffering
of the peasantry would soon come to a fiery, crimson boil, but that is a story for another
century.
[Ottoman Empire] For the Ottoman Empire, the glory days of
Suleiman the Magnificent were well in the past.
Gone were the days when the mighty Osmanli host loomed at the gates of Vienna.
Nowadays, the Islamic Empire at the crossroads of Europe and Asia was still a respectable
regional power, but was increasingly losing global influence to Britain, France, and Russia.
Internally, the Ottoman realm was deeply fragmented.
Since the 17th century, vast swaths of land had fallen under the control of the Ayans,
provincial notables, most of whom acted as de facto autonomous overlords of quasi-independent
fiefs.
Meanwhile, Egypt, under the rule of the Albanian Pasha Mehmed Ali, while still nominally an
Ottoman vassal, was basically a sovereign entity which dictated its own foreign policy
and only listened to the Sultan when they felt like it.
On top of dealing with the frequent rebellions caused by these so-called vassals, the reign
of Sultan Mahmud II also saw a rise of nationalism among the Empire’s subject Christian ethnicities.
In 1817, after a string of uprisings, the Serbians had secured political autonomy for
themselves within the Empire.
Then in 1832, after a brutal, decade-long war which involved Mehmed Ali’s Egyptians
and the intervention of Britain, France and Russia, the Greeks freed themselves as well.
To the Sublime Porte’s credit, significant attempts at social reform were attempted to
reinvigorate their troubled Empire.
In the last months of Mahmud II’s life in 1839, he initiated the Tanzimat reorganizations,
which removed many of the oppressive prohibitions historically enforced on the Empire’s Christian
ethnicities, such as abolishing the Jizya poll tax which non-Muslims were obliged to
pay, allowing Christians to serve in the military, and guaranteeing equality of all Ottoman citizens,
regardless of faith.
These reforms, however, were ultimately a failure, and throughout the rest of the 19th
century, more and more Balkan peoples would declare independence, often with the implicit
or explicit support of Russia, thereby earning the Ottoman Empire the dubious title of the
“sick man of Europe.”
[USA] Between the 1830s and 1850s, America was a
nation on a meteoric rise.
Within those two decades, the population nearly doubled from 12 million to 23 million, as
millions of Germans, Italians and Irish sought salvation in the so-called land of liberty,
fleeing famine and political turmoil in their own homelands.
The American economy boomed, as migrant labour fueled the industrial throng of its east coast
cities, while in the south, innovations like the cotton gin made it so that by the middle
of the century, southern plantations supplied 75% of the world’s cotton.
American prosperity was a relative affair: while millions in the country prospered, others
did not.
Aforementioned southern plantations were places of misery as Black slaves toiled away, without
rights or protections, bought and sold like cattle.
Meanwhile, indigenous nations like the Cherokee, Creeks, and Seminoles were being forced from
their ancestral homelands at gunpoint and put on forced marches to Oklahoma which would
result in the deaths of thousands.
In the latter half of the century, plains tribes like the Pawnee and Lakota would suffer
a similar, lachrymose fate at the hands of ceaseless American manifest destiny, as would
many Mexican landowners and settlers in California and Texas after the conclusion of the Mexican-American
war in 1848.
Indeed, for many, the American dream manifested more as an American nightmare.
Either way, the United States in the 19th century was a nation well on track to become
the absolute global juggernaut it would become in the 20th.
Conclusion Thus far, the vast majority of our tour has
admittedly been highly Eurocentric.
While the nations of Europe, alongside the United States, were the most prolific industrialists
and imperialists of the 19th century, the era also featured an entire world of intrigue,
innovation and fascination in the vibrant Empires and nations of Africa, Asia, South
America and the Middle East which is not within the scope of our video to cover.
Those are stories we will cover in future episodes.
So much of the world we live in today is, for better or worse, built upon the legacy
created by the great Empires of the 19th century, from the echoes of global colonialism which
still deeply impact hundreds of societies across the world to this day, to our reliance
on mass-production and industrial manufacturing in our daily lives.
In our 6000 or so years of recorded history, humankind has undergone many revolutionary
epochs, but it was during the revolution of steel, steam and industry that modernity was
born.
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