Heyday: The 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age

From the American Midwest to Shanghai, from London to Tokyo, the 1850s was a decade of extraordinary upheaval. The world economy expanded fivefold, millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out lives in the wilderness, new technologies revolutionized how people communicated, a [...]
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From the American Midwest to Shanghai, from London to Tokyo, the 1850s was a decade of extraordinary upheaval. The world economy expanded fivefold, millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out lives in the wilderness, new technologies revolutionized how people communicated, and railways cut across vast continents.
In "Heyday," Ben Wilson tells an epic story of this global transformation, from the Australian gold rush to the laying of the first undersea telegraph cables, and from the American Civil War to the opening of Japan and China. Wilson shows that these innovations intoxicated contemporaries and convinced them that the future held out the promise of exponential progress. But he also reckons with the victims of innovation and expansion: local cultures and freedoms, and, above all, those who could not keep pace with the acceleration of capitalism and free trade.
An exhilarating chronicle of a tumultuous period, "Heyday" illuminates the complex origins of our globalized world.
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