Heyday: Britain and the birth of the modern world

Heyday brings to life one of the most extraordinary periods in modern history. Over the course of the 1850s, the world was reshaped by technology, trade, mass migration and war. The global economy expanded fivefold, millions of families emigrated to the ends of the earth to carve out new lives, technology revolutionized communications, while steamships and railways cut across vast continents and oceans, shrinking the world and creating the first global age.