On the surface, the 1800s had little in common with today's global society. Most people lived on the land or a nomadic existence, with few technologies save for the compass and some basic tools. However, Adam Smith had already recognized the momentum towards a more efficient and organized society with his Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The decade brought some monumental winds of change, including the Napoleonic conquests and the beginnings of liberation wars in the Caribbean and Latin America. Jefferson bought Florida from the French, setting course for eventual US dominance on the North American continent as well as its accession to great power status.

Meanwhile, the British did not belabor the "loss" of much of their North American colonies, and proceeded to occupy Cape Town and parts of India. London's sea power eclipsed that of Spain, and established the foundations of an empire on which the sun never set. Then as now, Russia continued its expansionist course, having gobbled up nearly two thirds of Poland in the 1790s. In the aftermath of the Finnish War, Finland became part of the Russian Empire in 1809, renamed the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Europe experienced nearly continuous warfare, enticing community leaders elsewhere to seek out alternatives based on Islam and eastern religions. On a smaller scale, conflict also erupted in China and Africa, much of it stoked by the British, later culminating in the discriminatory Unequal Treaties and the colonialization of the Dark Continent.

Scientific and other imaginative minds created momentum towards industrialization and mass culture. The Enlightenment had already awakened curiosity and generated discussion on how to improve society, even though the French Revolution raised doubts about the "perfectibility of man." Romanticism represented a reaction against what many perceived as the excesses of progress-oriented thinking. Chateaubriand in France and Byron in England articulated the widespread disillusionment and longing for stability. The movement also celebrated nature, captured by Romantic painters, composers and Alexander von Humboldt in his travel notes. At the same time, the steam engine, invention of the hydraulic press and atomic theory presaged the end of pastoral life and the beginning of urbanization and acceleration of mass production.
Like most decades of the modern era, the 1800s were full of contradictions. Johann Gottlieb Fichte embodied them. A proponent of German idealism, his address to the German nation in 1807/8 helped generated momentum towards unification. He meant to promote universal education and identity, although imperialists later misused this intent to "demonstrate" the superiority of Germans over their neighbours. Hence, enlightened ideas became subsumed to raison d'état. Similar trends unfolded in France, Britain, the United States and Russia. Politics began to dominate public discourse, manifested in the debates over Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. Conflict fanned nationalist sentiment and prejudice.

In the end, it was an era of stark choices. Unfortunately, Europe's great powers opted for control rather than liberalization, consolidation rather than decentralization, and censorship rather than freedom of speech. Most of the established authorities viewed the US and French revolutions as an aberration, rather than the shape of things to come. For them, democracy remained a radical, even dangerous idea. It would take decades for the European nobles' monopoly on power to be broken. However, the Haitian Revolution and the fledgling liberation movement sweeping Spanish America demonstrated that things did not have to be this way. Japan's example of self-sufficiency and isolation also presented an example of how to avoid European colonization. All these factors turn the period into a story worth telling.