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Legitimacy through Popular Entertainment: Bringing the British Empire to Life (1815–1945)

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American Empire and the Arsenal of Entertainment
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Abstract

Despite the restoration of hereditary aristocratic rule at the Congress of Vienna, the beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of social turbulence and political change. The Industrial Revolution was moving Europe away from an agricultural economy lorded over by nobility and toward a machine economy presided over by manufacturers, merchants, and financiers. This shift in the location of social power accompanied the rise of new political ideologies and value systems like utilitarianism and nationalism. Concrete expressions of such novel ideas were visible in 1830 as popular revolts took place in France, Belgium, Poland, and Switzerland, and then again in 1848 when widespread nationalism brought an even larger outbreak of revolt to the aforementioned states plus principalities in what is today Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Hungary. Toward the end of the century, in 1870, the Paris Commune represented yet another attempt by disenfranchised and exploited urban poor to take over the ruling institutions of France.1

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Notes

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© 2014 Eric M. Fattor

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Fattor, E.M. (2014). Legitimacy through Popular Entertainment: Bringing the British Empire to Life (1815–1945). In: American Empire and the Arsenal of Entertainment. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137382238_2

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