Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
Drag to move · scroll to zoom · click a country or marker
To move the map on a touch screen, drag it. Pinch to zoom, or double-tap to zoom in.
For thousands of years, people had made almost everything they used by hand, drawing power from muscle, wind, water or wood. Around 1750, that was still the ordinary way of making things. By 1914, a few regions of the world were producing cloth, iron, steel, chemicals and electricity with machines driven by coal. The transformation changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Why did it begin in Britain, and how did it spread across Europe, the United States and Japan? People resisted the change as well as taking part in it. We will follow that resistance and ask who gained and who paid, from the enslaved cotton growers of Mississippi to the weavers of Bengal.
The twelve chapters trace this transformation on two maps, one of Britain and Europe and the other of the world. As countries industrialise, they darken from parchment to charcoal. Red patches mark textile districts, hatched patches mark coal and ore fields, and dark hatching shows land worked by enslaved people. Scrub the timeline to see canals and railways grow, or click a territory to learn its story. When you can read the map of the industrial world, you can sit the Field Exam.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.