Reconstructed setting· The columns of time
Steam and the crowd
1800 → 1950
Sawtooth roofs, smoking chimneys, and buildings climbing behind them. The first landscape whose horizon is made of things people built to make other things.
What the evidence shows
Steam-powered industry spread from Britain between 1800 and 1900, and the cities grew with it. That is why the buildings in this backdrop rise behind the factories rather than beside them: the housing followed the work. Across the band the human population goes from about one billion to two and a half, and in some countries, for the first time, most people live somewhere other than where their food is grown.
Bounds and conventions
Drawn from the British and northern European case, where the process began and where it is best documented. Elsewhere industrialisation arrived later, differently, or as something done to a place rather than in it.