Connecting to Enduring Issues

This unit feeds the following enduring issues most heavily:

• Impact of technology: This is the central enduring issue of the unit. Industrial technology is the canonical example.
• Inequality: Class divisions between bourgeoisie and proletariat, global inequality between industrial and non-industrial nations
• Conflict: Strikes and labor disputes, ideological conflict between capitalism and socialism, eventual link to imperial wars
• Power and abuse of power: Treatment of workers, child labor, suppression of unions
• Cultural diffusion: Spread of industrialization from Britain to Europe, the U.S., and Japan
• Environmental impact: Coal pollution, deforestation, urbanization disrupting natural systems. This issue becomes more central in later units but originates here.