Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age > Status Update

"The swaggering self-assurance of the middle part of the century gave way to fear and anxiety about the future now that Britain had so evidently passed the peak of its industrial, commercial and political power" - From 'Cool Britannia' to 'Brexit Britain'?

"Technologies that had promised peace were harnessed as the means of waging a new form of high tech, industrialised war." - likewise internet and mobile technologies become a means of digitising propaganda.

"The [1860s] belonged to Lincoln, Bismark and Garibaldi with their brand of romantic nationalism, state activism and democracy" - reaction to the technology and trade driven globalisation of the 1850s. It seems we're in a similar period now, one that belongs to Putin, Orbán and Trump? Strange tp see Lincoln in such company.

"Aware of the hardening international mood, Abraham Lincoln knew that 'a distinct anti-slavery policy would remove the foreign danger'." - suggests here that the Emancipation Proclamation was a product of foreign policy.

"In [Ulrika Wheeler's] days of sainthood she was held up as an icon of pure British womanhood; in her disgrace it was remembered that she was not British at all: she had an Indian mother."

"There were, in fact, strikingly few cases of rape or torture committed by mutinous Indian sepoys...Official inquiries also affirmed that rumoured atrocities did not stand up to scrutiny." - interestingly, I find this hard to believe, what will historians of the future make of recent press coverage of ISIS?

"'The new journalism' helped foster a new imperialism - and an imperial ethos that would reshape Britishness."

'The technological revolution only exacerbated that sense of racial dominance. Nothing was believed to differentiate societies more than the invention and use of modern technologies..."

"This is a common feeling which exists all over the world,...viz: a dislike of foreign masters and new usages..." - interesting that Brexiteers, Trumpeteers and Orbáneers should still see the world in this way: their enemies are imperialists, and they will not be colonies.

"Japan had seen rapid urbanisation and the creation of a commercialised market economy grafted onto a strictly graduated feudal hierarchy" - markets don't need democracy.