A History of the World (106 page)

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Authors: Andrew Marr

BOOK: A History of the World

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35. William and Mary, the Dutch king and his wife who turned themselves into British monarchs after invading in 1688 – but only after accepting the supremacy of Parliament.

36. The Enlightenment was dominated by the French and British: Voltaire and his mistress are bathed in the light of Isaac Newton’s Reason.

37. Jethro Tull’s seed drill was one of the gadgets that turned the British into the world’s most successful farmers, and so prepared the soil for the industrial revolution.

38. But what did they drink? Rebel Bostonians, emptying taxed tea into the sea, drank herbal teas and smuggled tea during their protest against the British empire.

39. The Australian Aborigine Bennelong, kidnapped by the British to be a translator: he became a kind of time traveller, moving between the Stone Age and the industrial age.

40. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the ex-slave idealist whose dream republic was crushed by Napoleon.

41. Promoted, not invented by Dr Guillotin, this was the ultimate democratic killing-machine, treating kings, aristocrats and commoners alike.

42. Napoleon’s 1804 coronation as emperor marked the end of the French revolutionary era: Beethoven was so disgusted that he scratched the Corsican’s name off the dedication page of his third symphony.

43. The young Tolstoy would turn from being a wastrel, gambling landowner into a passionate friend to Russia’s serfs . . . while writing some books on the side.

44. A Russian Revolution in 1825; but the Decembrists, who wanted to make Russia more European, failed and were executed or sent to Siberia.

45. The bombardment of Fort Henry, Tennessee: the American Civil War, creating the colossus of the modern US, was the most important conflict of the nineteenth century.

46. John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was soon caught: but in the South this failed actor became a hero for killing ‘the tyrant’.

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