AP European History › Unit 6
Industrialization began in Britain and spread across the continent in the 19th century. This unit covers why Britain led, the second wave of industry, urban growth, new social classes, and the political responses: conservatism, liberalism, socialism, nationalism, and the revolutions of 1848. Exam questions often pair data on population, cities, or production with written sources. A common mistake is assuming industry spread evenly, when many regions industrialized late or only in part. Students also lump the 19th-century ideologies together instead of explaining what each one wanted.
These are taken from the Regular set, with the answer and explanation shown.
I saw clearly that free competition between two nations which are highly civilised can only be mutually beneficial in case both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development, and that any nation which owing to misfortunes is behind others in industry, commerce, and navigation ... must first of all strengthen her own individual powers, in order to fit herself to enter into free competition with more advanced nations.... I felt that Germany must abolish her internal tariffs, and by the adoption of a common uniform commercial policy towards foreigners, strive to attain to the same degree of commercial and industrial development to which other nations have attained by means of their commercial policy.
Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1909), “Some Extracts from the Author’s Preface to the First Edition,” via the Online Library of Liberty. Source
1. The policy List recommends in the passage was most directly put into practice by which development?
Answer: C. List wants Germany to “abolish her internal tariffs” and adopt one trade policy toward foreigners. The Zollverein did this for most German states in 1834. The Corn Laws repeal was a British move toward free trade, the opposite of List’s protection.
Common trap: The Frankfurt Parliament tempts students because it aimed at German unity. But it was political, it failed, and it came after the customs union was already working.
See what is passing in the breasts of the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet.... can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that there are gradually forming in their breasts opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself ...?
Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly ... that the present distribution of goods throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation which is not an equitable foundation? ... This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano.
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1896), Part I, chapter 1, where he reprints the speech, via Project Gutenberg. Source
2. When Tocqueville says workers’ passions have become “social” instead of “political,” he means that workers
Answer: D. Tocqueville says workers think the “distribution of goods” is unjust and property is not “equitable.” Their target is society’s economic order, not just a ministry or a law. That is the rise of socialist ideas among workers.
Common trap: Students sometimes read “not political” as “not interested in politics.” Tocqueville means their demands went deeper than politics, not that they stopped caring.
That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other....
What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others....
Meanwhile the wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), chapters 1 and 2, via Project Gutenberg. Source
3. Which development in Britain in the early 1900s most directly built on arguments like Mill’s?
Answer: D. Mill’s call for equality between the sexes fed the women’s suffrage movement. Millicent Fawcett’s suffragists used peaceful pressure, and Emmeline Pankhurst’s suffragettes used militant tactics. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, much earlier.
Common trap: The Labour Party tempts because it was a major reform movement of the time. But it focused on workers’ rights, not equality between women and men.