4.32 Europe: a.d. 1801 to 1900  (Page 18/27)

This practice was continued until late in the century. The principle of canning with heat was developed by Nicholas Appert in 1810. Francois Arago (and Humphrey Davy, independently) discovered that an electric current could be made to magnetize iron. (Ref. 140 , 125 , 213 ) Work was done in mathematics by Lagrange and Legendre and in histology by Bichat.

The netherlands and belgium

Napoleon's take-over of Belgium caused Britain to enter the war against him and we have seen above how the final battles and French defeat occurred on Belgian soil. At the termination of the initial Napoleonic Wars, the Congress of Vienna created the Kingdom of the Netherlands and gave William of Holland the Austrian Netherlands as compensation for some Dutch colonial losses. Since this was the first time that the northern and southern parts of the Netherlands had been united since the 1 6th century, there were now many differences in religion and in the economics of the two sections. The Belgians felt themselves conquered subjects rather than equals and as part of a July revolution in Paris in 1830, the Belgians rose up in Brussels and by October had declared their independence from King William and had separated themselves from the Dutch and the Dutch language. But there were still two peoples and two languages in the liberated Belgium.

56% of the people were Flemings in the north, while 32% were Walloons, speaking French in the south. They elected Leopold as a Belgian king. By 1850 their railroad network was virtually complete and by the last of the century there was mechanized industry in a great part of Belgium, spreading out from the Walloon district. Mechanization, however, ruined the old artisan trade of making guns by hand at Liege, so that city shrank in world importance. (Ref. 8 , 24 , 175 , 55 , 279 )

British isles

All four of the countries of the British Isles were now united under the government of Great Britain. The nation went to war with Napoleon when France took Belgium and Admiral Nelson won a great victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805. As we have previously noted, when Napoleon had control of the continent he established a port and coast blockade to exclude British goods and this was so effective that England came close to starvation in the years 1810 and 1811. Within half a century, however, with the help of great British seamen, the nation overcame that to build a powerful and civilizing empire, in spite of the fact that at the same time their King George III had become completely insane. The English, although socially and economically divided into classes, were in another sense surprisingly homogenous. They were almost all Protestant, with only some 60,000 Catholics (chief Iy of Irish origin) and some 26,000 Jews, almost all of whom lived in London and who were still without civil liberties. Nevertheless, it was the Jewish banker, Nathan Rothschild who established a branch bank in London in 1810 and transmitted the subsidies from England to Austria and Prussia that enabled them to fight and def eat Napoleon. Thereafter he played a leading role in the industrial and commercial expansion of England.