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By Nate Bowling, Teacher, American Community School of Abu Dhabi
Wanted: History Salesperson
At its core, teaching world history is a sales job.
We have to convince students to care about events and empires far removed from them in space and time. How do we make the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans feel relevant? What’s the hook for a discussion on the Golden Horde and the Mongol Empire? Why should a kid from Peru care about the rise of the Mughals in India?
I’ve spent many a commute thinking about how to reel students into these conversations. I know that if I can get them hooked from the start of a unit, they’ll stay engaged and learn more along the way.
Teaching the Industrial Revolution in the Arabian Gulf is uniquely fascinating because, for much of the population, it’s a lived experience rather than a distant historical event.
Left: A black-and-white photo of Abu Dhabi prior to the oil boom (mid-20th century), public domain. Right: An aerial photo of downtown (2018), copyright Getty Images.
Just as coal reshaped cities like Manchester and Moscow, oil transformed tiny fishing villages here in the Gulf into sprawling metropolises within a single lifetime. Now, after a generation of oil-driven growth, a new chapter is unfolding—a nuclear power plant and vast solar arrays are rising in the desert, their construction and operation employing the families of many of the students at my school.
The Industrial Revolution: From Manchester to Abu Dhabi
I love making history local.
In our course, we reach the Industrial Revolution in the first classes after winter break. To kick off the unit, we challenge students to consider the impact of industrialization on their daily lives. The clothes they’re wearing, the mass-produced food they’re eating, the manufactured desks they’re sitting at—all of it exists because of the Industrial Revolution. It’s the foundation of the modern world.
We then launch The Urbanization Game—a simulation you might be familiar with (if not, here’s a link). The goal of the simulation is to help students grasp just how quickly industrialization transformed societies. They watch as their quaint little hamlets are stripped of forests and replaced by sprawling cities, packed with crowded tenements and smoke-belching factories. The speed of change is staggering. Feeling that shift firsthand makes it real for students.
The simulation drives home the speed with which the Industrial Revolution reshaped so many aspects of modern life. Students can see the dramatic shifts in everything from the physical landscape (such as high-rises and highways); to lifestyle changes (factory-based work schedules, for example); to the changes brought by new, complex systems that altered both the seen and unseen (the development of mass transit systems).
A before-and-after map of Manchester (1750 and 1850) that we use for our DBQ assessment at the end of the unit. Ashley Baynton-Williams, Town and City Maps of the British Isles, 1800-1855, late 1850's, fair use.
From there, we pivot to this OER video on the role of coal, focusing on how it powered industrial expansion and how miners in England were at the heart of that transformation. Too often, history focuses on the so-called great men, ignoring the people whose labor carried the weight of “progress.” This video helps correct that imbalance.
In the UAE, a country whose economy is built on petroleum, the story of coal miners in industrial England resonates with students. They see clear parallels between those workers and the laborers powering our own modern world.
I grew up in Washington state. In my lifetime, I witnessed a tech-boom-driven transformation of the region. The Microsoft campus was once farmland. Amazon’s headquarters sprang up where warehouses and light manufacturing once operated. But when I moved to Abu Dhabi in 2019, I stepped into a place that had undergone an even more radical transformation—one that drew in foreign workers at every level of the economy, from laborers and engineers to my students’ parents and teachers, like me. The sweeping changes that took over a century in Manchester played out here in less than half the time, creating a metropolis where nearly everything around us has been built in just a few decades.
That experience makes industrialization feel immediate, helping students see history not as distant, but as a force still shaping their lives.
Cleveland Clinic opened a massive hospital on Al Maryah Island, north of downtown Abu Dhabi. The hospital employs dozens of our students’ families. Ó Angelo Cavalli/Getty Images
Making Connections: Industrialization’s Ripple Effect
Our Industrial Revolution unit naturally transitions into a study of social movements that emerged in response to societal upheaval. We examine labor organizing, abolitionism, women’s suffrage, and child-labor reform using OER Project resources to explore how people fought for better lives.
We also emphasize how industrialization lowered manufacturing costs, increased demand for goods, and dramatically expanded global production capacity. This sets the stage for a later pivot to World War I, which we frame as the product of a three-way marriage between industrialization, European nationalism, and the application of new technologies to warfare. Understanding these forces helps students see the Great War not as an isolated event, but as an inevitable consequence of broader historical trends.
As we progress through the rest of the course, we circle back to the Industrial Revolution as the key to understanding the vast scale of death during World War II, the rapid acceleration of resource consumption and environmental degradation, and the current system of economic globalization.
The Industrial Revolution isn’t just the foundation of today’s world; it’s the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of modern history. By making this critical turning point relatable and relevant to students, we open doors to exploring the complexities of the world they live in.
Looking for more teaching resources on the Industrial Revolution? Check out our Industrialization topic page for articles, videos, activities, and lesson plans you can use in your classroom today!
About the author: Nate Bowling teaches world history and political science at the American Community School of Abu Dhabi. He is a past Washington State Teacher of the Year and host of the Nerd Farmer Podcast.
Cover image: An aerial photo of the Etihad Towers (center), the waterfront, and Al Khalidiya neighborhood (top right) where the author lives.Ó Extreme-Photographer/E+/Getty Images.
