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August 20 - November 13, 2022
came to an end in July 1794 with the execution of its own leaders,
first under the somewhat ineffective Directory, between 1795 and 1799, and then with more concentrated power in the form of a three-person Consulate, consisting of Ducos, Sieyès, and Napoleon Bonaparte.
between 1799 and the end of Napoleon’s reign, 1815, witnessed a series of great military victories for France,
The fall of Napoleon after his final defeat in 1815 would also bring a period of retrenchment, more restricted political rights, and the restoration of the French monarchy under Louis XVII.
On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, there were severe restrictions placed on Jews throughout Europe.
As the French Revolution erupted, a successful young businessman, Mayer Amschel Rothschild,
By the early 1780s, Rothschild had established himself as the leading dealer in coins, metals, and antiques in Frankfurt.
In 1791 the French National Assembly emancipated French Jewry.
In 1796 the French bombarded Frankfurt, demolishing half of the Judengasse in the process. Around two thousand Jews were left homeless and had to move outside the ghetto.
they could seize new business opportunities.
By the end of the decade, Rothschild was one of the richest Jews in Frankfurt and already a well-established businessman.
Congress of Vienna of 1815,
This was not an isolated event. First the French Revolutionary Armies and then Napoleon invaded large parts of continental Europe, and in almost all the areas they invaded, the existing institutions were remnants of medieval times, empowering kings, princes, and nobility and restricting trade both in cities and the countryside.
The leaders of the French Revolution and, subsequently, Napoleon exported the revolution to these lands, destroying absolutism, ending feudal land relations, abolishing guilds, and imposing equality before the law—the
the all-important notion of rule of law, which we will discuss in greater detail in the next chapter.
several European powers organized around Austria in 1792 to attack France,
the armies of the new French Republic were victorious in an initially defensive war.
mass conscription. Introduced in August 1793, mass conscription allowed the French to field large armies and develop a military advantage verging on supremacy even before Napoleon’s famous military skills came on the scene.
the Republic’s leadership to expand France’s borders,
In 1802 the Rhineland was officially incorporated into France.
Italy remained the main seat of war in the second half the 1790s, with the Austrians as the opponents.
The Treaty of Campo Formio, signed with the Austrians in October 1797, ended the War of the First Coalition
the French now controlled the entire Italian peninsula either directly,
There was further back-and-forth in the War of the Second Coalition, between 1798 and 1801, but this ended with the French essentially remaining in control.
What was started by the French Revolutionary Armies was continued, in one form or another, by Napoleon.
had a genuine desire to continue and deepen the reforms of the revolution.
the Code Napoleon.
In some places, such as in Hanover, Germany, the old elites were reinstated shortly after Napoleon’s fall and much of what the French achieved was lost for good.
These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places.
In 1868 Japan was an economically underdeveloped country that had been controlled since 1600 by the Tokugawa family, whose ruler had taken the title shogun (commander) in 1603.
The Japanese emperor was sidelined and assumed a purely ceremonial role. The Tokugawa shoguns were the dominant members of a class of feudal lords who ruled and taxed their own domains,
In the south of the country, the Satsuma domain remained quite autonomous and was even allowed to trade independently with the outside world
Shimazu Nariakira had already formulated a plan to use Satsuma troops to overthrow the shogun.
On the Tosa side, one of the treaty’s signers was Sakamoto Ryūma. As Satsuma and Chōshū mobilized their armies, Sakamoto Ryūma presented the shogun with an eight-point plan, urging him to resign to avoid civil war.
Shogun Yoshinobu agreed to resign, and on January 3, 1868, the Meiji Restoration was declared; Emperor Kōmei and, one month later after Kōmei died, his son Meiji were restored to power.
and civil war broke out;
process of transformative institutional reforms in Japan.
The state became heavily involved in the construction of infrastructure.
By 1890 Japan was the first Asian country to adopt a written constitution, and it created a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament, the Diet, and an independent judiciary.
China was a centralized bureaucratic empire ruled by an absolute emperor.
the Tokugawa power was not absolute, and domains such as that of the Satsumas maintained independence,
As with France, an important consequence of the British Industrial Revolution for China and Japan was military vulnerability.
First Opium War, between 1839 and 1842,
U.S. warships, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, pulled int...
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different initial political institutions made it much harder to overthrow the emperor,
Mao’s communist revolution in 1949.
Whether a country did embark on industrialization was largely a function of its institutions.
The roots of the world inequality we observe today can be found in this divergence. With a few exceptions, the rich countries of today are those that embarked on the process of industrialization and technological change starting in the nineteenth century, and the poor ones are those that did not.
The Blacks were groups of local men who had their faces “blacked” to conceal their appearance at night.
Illegal hunting (poaching) deer in lands owned by the king or other members of the aristocracy had been going on for a long time.
