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.