Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

CONCLUSION: TOWARDS 1848other countries was not notably higher than this, and indeed wasgenerally rather lower.The working class (including the new proletariat of factory, mine,railway, etc.) naturally grew at the fastest rate of all. Nevertheless,except in Britain it could at best be counted in hundreds of thousandsrather than millions. Measured against the total population of theworld, it was still a numerically negligible, and in any case—exceptonce again for Britain and small nuclei elsewhere—an unorganizedone. Yet, as we have seen, its political importance was already immense,and quite disproportionate to its size or achievements.The political structure of the world was also very considerablytransformed by the 1840s; and yet by no means as much as the sanguine(or pessimistic) observer might have anticipated in 1800. Monarchystill remained overwhelmingly the most common mode ofgoverning states, except on the American continent; and even thereone of the largest countries (Brazil) was an Empire, and another(Mexico) had at least experimented with imperial titles under GeneralIturbide (Augustin I) from 1822 to 1833. It is true that several Europeankingdoms, including France, could now be described as constitutionalmonarchies, but outside a band of such regimes along theeastern edge of the Atlantic, absolute monarchy prevailed everywhere.It is true that there were by the 1840s several new states, the productof revolution; Belgium, Serbia, Greece and a quiverful of LatinAmerican ones. Yet, though Belgium was an industrial power ofimportance (admittedly to a large extent because it moved in the wakeof its greater French neighbour*), the most important of the revolutionarystates was the one which had already existed in 1789, theUSA. It enjoyed two immense advantages: the absence of any strongneighbours or rival powers which could, or indeed wanted to, preventits expansion across the huge continent to the Pacific—the French hadactually sold it an area as large as the then USA in the 'LouisianaPurchase' of 1803—and an extraordinarily rapid rate of economicexpansion. The former advantage was also shared by Brazil, which,separating peacefully from Portugal, escaped the fragmentation whicha generation of revolutionary war brought to most of Spanish America;but its wealth of resources remained virtually unexploited.Still, there had been great changes. Moreover, since about 1830 theirmomentum was visibly increasing. The revolution of 1830 introducedmoderate liberal middle class constitutions—anti-democratic but equallyplainly anti-aristocratic—in the chief states of Western Europe. There* About a third of the Belgian coal and pig iron output was exported, almost entirelyto France.301