Steam power was already being used in mining, heavy industry, and to power trains when in the 1830s innovators like Isambard Kingdom Brunel turned their attentions to powering ocean going ships. The Great Western Steamship Company was established and in 1838 made the first transatlantic steamship crossing from Bristol to New York. It is important to know that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Bristol was probably the biggest port city in England, but by the second half, it had been replaced by Liverpool and Manchester.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, labor unions were furiously and energetically repressed and made illegal by the British government. The factory owners did not want the workers to be able to organize and demand better wages, and the government responded to the interests of the wealthy and powerful by making unions illegal. This trend changed over the course of the nineteenth century as reformers made the British population aware of the horrors of the factory system. By the twentieth century, strikes were legal and workers were keenly aware of their political power and their rights, at least collectively.

Jeremy Bentham is considered to be the founder of the philosophical tradition of utilitarianism. He was a philosopher of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who advocated for individual legal rights for all members of society. He also is often credited as being the earliest advocate for the welfare state. In the welfare state, the government takes care of the needs of those who cannot take care of themselves. This emerged first in Britain and France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and is currently a feature of many European societies.

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. It spread to the European continent to Belgium, the Netherlands, and France in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had spread to Germany, Austria, Italy, and much of the rest of central Europe. It was not until the 1880s and 1890s that the Industrial Revolution really spread to Russia.

The cities of the early nineteenth century were extremely unsafe and unsanitary places to live. Too many people had arrived in too little time and the appropriate services had not been extended quickly enough to provide adequate relief to the multiplying masses. Sanitation and public health was appalling; sewage frequently ran through the streets and diseases like cholera were extremely common. There was too little housing, so people were forced to crowd together into slums, and there was little to no public transportation, meaning people had a very difficult time getting to work or wherever else they needed to go. Urban planners, inspired by Bentham and others, tried to tackle these issues by reforming the layout of cities. One problem they did not tackle, however, was insufficient nutrition. This was a problem to be remedied by increased agricultural production and by improvements to transportation (trains, canals, and later automobiles and refrigeration) that allowed more food to be delivered to the urban population.

Hadrian's Wall separated Rome's Britain from those to the North known as Picts who would later be known as Scots. Little is known about the Picts who were called such because they painted their faces. This tradition carried through to their Scot descendants. 

The Emancipation of the Russian serfs took place in 1861 during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. 

The Reform Bill of 1832 was designed to extend voting privileges to the urban middle class by restructuring the representatives in the British Houses of Parliament. Prior to the Reform Bill, there were many so-called “rotten boroughs” where one wealthy aristocrat controlled the election of the official for a district that contained very few actual people. Many urban centers were excluded. The Reform Bill created new districts to match up with the population redistribution brought about by urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. The eligible electorate nearly doubled, and the people who benefitted the most were the urban middle class.

The English Civil War, which raged from 1642 to 1649, was fought between the royalists on one side (supporting the King) and the parliamentarians on the other side (supporting Parliament). The conflict arose primarily from two sources of disagreement. First, Charles I believed that Parliament was there to serve him, whereas Parliament believed it was there to serve the people and itself. Second, Parliament was overwhelmingly Protestant, and many believed that Charles planned to return the English Kingdom to the Catholic fold. When the Parliamentarians defeated Charles, he was tried in what we would probably call a “show trial” and promptly executed.

The Tudors, Stuarts, and Plantagenets are all historical British ruling families. The Bourbons were a very notable French ruling family. The Hapsburgs were the ruling family of Austria, Austro-Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. They are perhaps the most important ruling family in European history in terms of longevity, impact on European and global life, and territorial size.