In 1851, the English poet Mathew Arnold, only 32 at the time, described his era as, “Wandering between two worlds, one dead/ The other powerless to be born.” It could equally apply to our times, as we gather the shards of “a dead time’s exploded dream.”

The 19th century was a remarkable century. With its many inventions, it provided the building blocks upon which the 20th century was built — from the elevator and escalator, to the sewing machine and the vacuum cleaner, to the telephone, light bulb, alternating current and batteries. The first motion pictures, the first gramophone, the first railroads, the motor car, traffic lights, museums, blue jeans, Coca Cola and the zipper, were all products of this time.

So was the first cricket Test match, football clubs, new games such as basketball and volleyball, and the revival of the Olympic Games. The first detective novels, horror stories and science fiction emerged. X-rays, vaccines, aspirin and anaesthesia were invented. The first steel ships, the underground railway, the first oil refinery, the revolver and the machine gun. The first prison houses and mental asylums were also set up.

It also created political, legal, economic and social systems that carried over into the next century. Europe rejected monarchies in favour of democracies, inventing the independent nation state, urging the rest of the world to follow their example. Yet, they fell back into alliances, such as the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the 42-nation-led attack on Afghanistan, or the creation of the European Union — an imperialism without traditional kings. This unification of political and economic ambitions created reactive alliances such as the Non-Aligned Movement, BRICS, the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation and other less formalised movements of resistance, and the creation of the Cold War.

The rapid progress and development that underpinned much of the 20th century was a direct consequence of the advancements that had taken place in the preceding century. After 200 years, we now find ourselves in desperate need of new systems

If the fruitful achievements of the 19th century were industrialisation, liberalism and a rising entrepreneurial class, these instigated colonialism that swept across Africa, Asia, the Americas and all that lay in between.

The 18th century Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel’s book The Law of Nations became a bible for colonial expansion, and essential reading for diplomats and scholars. While he nobly proclaimed that, “No foreign power has a right to interfere,” Vattel also endowed the “more industrious” nations, the obligation to “civilise” the “barbarous” and “savage” of the earth. Lands that were uncultivated were a rejection of God’s gift of the earth to nourish all mankind. Uncultivated lands were terra nullius or ‘empty land’ to be taken possession of, regardless of its native inhabitants — as with the Americas and Australia.

Where there was resistance, “nations have a right to join in a confederacy for the purpose of punishing and even exterminating those savage nations.” Further, “the entire nation can be punished as a common enemy for the actions of their sovereign”, a policy that informed the attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq , Libya and Syria. It created America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ and justified its ‘Trail of Tears.’

A less ferocious method was the creation of mandates in the Middle East and Africa, whereby “Europeans had the responsibility and duty to hold the land in trust for the indigenous peoples, until they had reached a stage of civilisation at which self-determination was appropriate.”

The widespread use of big data statistics also goes back to the 19th century’s obsession with “figures of arithmetic.” William Playfair invented the line graph, bar and pie charts, and Florence Nightingale developed polar diagrams. Collection of social data was essential for controlling populations, whether for the eradication of poverty or identifying markets in the colonies.

Botanical taxonomy inspired categorising races, economies and world regions. Governments came to depend on statistical reports for policy-making, with 19th century Blue Books evolving into White Papers. However, social data is rarely neutral. Many social categories were designed to control, coerce, judge and even oppress, and micro details obscured the larger narrative.

After 200 years, these systems have come to restrict progress and feed into our collective fear of a dystopian future. The Industrial Revolution improved lives but destroyed the earth’s capacity to sustain human society. The 19th century invention of journalism has morphed into social media, changing our relationship with information.

New technologies are replacing physical skills. The educational need now is to teach editable knowledge and creative adaptability. The new guru on the block, religious and cultural critic Mark C Taylor, says we need to move from walls and grids towards an interconnected, interdependent flow. He warns, “We remain entangled with that from which we struggle to escape.”

It might be pertinent here to return to Mathew Arnold: “We admire with awe/ The exulting thunder of your race;/ You give the universe your law/ You triumph over time and space!/ Your pride of life, your tireless powers,/ We laud them, but they are not ours.”

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 24th, 2024