From
the 17th century to the mid-19th century, Europeans had come to regard their continent
as the only great power and the center of the universe. The rest of the world
was either ignored or exploited. The world economy, international politics,
even cultural and social issues revolved around a handful of countries; the
“great powers” that believed that they controlled the destiny of the world. As
crazy as it may sound, they did just that. However, in defense of Western
imperialism and the force of nationalism, some countries began to not only
strengthen, but go on the offensive and join the ranks of the great powers.
Mounting tensions in Europe led to the Great War as Russia and China erupted in
revolution. The Ottoman Empire became modern Turkey, and the Arab lands were
taken over by France and Britain. While the capitalistic nations fell into
depression, the Soviet Union industrialized. World War II led to the
destruction of many cities and people. Most of all, it weakened Europe’s
overseas empires. The new shift in power is lead to what historians now call
the Second Industrial Revolution.
While
the first Industrial Revolution gave rise to textiles, railroads, iron, and
coal, the second Industrial Revolution introduced steel, electricity,
chemicals, and petroleum. These new technologies revolutionized everyday life
and transformed the world economy. By 1890, Germany and the U.S. surpassed
Britain as the world’s leading industrial powers. Shipbuilding developments
included the use of iron (and then steel) for hulls, propellers, and more
efficient engines. Shipping lines also used the growing system of submarine
telegraph cables in order to coordinate the movements of their ships around the
globe. Steel is an especially hard and elastic form of iron that could be made
only in small quantities by skilled blacksmiths before the eighteenth century. The
nineteenth century brought large-scale manufacture of chemicals and the
invention of synthetic dyes and other new organic chemicals. Nineteenth century
advances in explosives (including Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite) had
significant effects on both civil engineering and on the development of more
powerful and more accurate firearms. The complexity of industrial chemistry
made it one of the first fields in which science and technology interacted on a
daily basis. In the 1870s inventors devised efficient generators that turned
mechanical energy into electricity that could be used to power arc lamps,
incandescent lamps, streetcars, subways, and electric motors for industry. Electricity
helped to alleviate the urban pollution caused by horse-drawn vehicles.
Between
1850 and 1914 Europe saw very rapid population growth, while emigration from
Europe spurred population growth in the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and Argentina. As a result, the proportion of people of European
ancestry in the world’s population rose from one-fifth to one-third. Reasons
for the increase in European population include a drop in the death rate,
improved crop yields, the provision of grain from newly opened agricultural
land in North America, and the provision of a more abundant year-round diet as
a result of canning and refrigeration. In the latter half of the nineteenth
century European, North American, and Japanese cities grew tremendously both in
terms of population and of size. Technologies that changed the quality of urban
life for the rich (and later for the working class as well) included mass
transportation networks, sewage and water supply systems, gas and electric
lighting, police and fire departments, sanitation and garbage removal, building
and health inspection, schools, parks, and other amenities. [1]New neighborhoods and
cities were built (and older areas often rebuilt) on a rectangular grid pattern
with broad boulevards and modern apartment buildings. While urban environments
improved in many ways, air quality worsened.[2] Coal used as fuel polluted
the air, while the waste of the thousands of horses that pulled carts and
carriages lay stinking in the streets until horses were replaced by streetcars
and automobiles in the early twentieth century. The term “Victorian Age” refers
not only to the reign of Queen Victoria (r.1837–1901), but also to the rules of
behavior and the ideology surrounding the family and relations between men and
women. Men and women were thought to belong in “separate spheres,” the men in
the workplace, the women in the home. Before electrical appliances, a
middle-class home demanded lots of work; the advent of modern technology in the
nineteenth century eliminated some tasks and made others easier. The most
important duty of middle-class women was to raise their children. Women were
excluded from jobs that required higher education; teaching was a permissible
career, but women teachers were expected to resign when they got married.[3] Some middle-class women
were not satisfied with home life and became involved in volunteer work or in
the women’s suffrage movement. Working-class women led lives of toil and pain.
Many became domestic servants, facing long hours, hard physical labor, and
sexual abuse from their masters or their masters’ sons. Many more young women
worked in factories, where they were relegated to poorly paid work in the textiles
and clothing trades. Married women were expected to stay home, raise children,
do housework, and contribute to the family income.
Socialism
began as an intellectual movement. The best-known socialist was Karl Marx
(1818–1883) who, along with Friedrich Engles (1820–1895) wrote the Communist
Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867). Marx saw history as a long series of
clashes between social classes. Marx's theories provided an intellectual
framework for general dissatisfaction with unregulated industrial capitalism. Labor
unions were organizations formed by industrial workers to defend their
interests in negotiations with employers. During the nineteenth century workers
were brought into electoral politics as the right to vote was extended to all
adult males in Europe and North America. Instead of seeking the violent
overthrow of the bourgeois class, socialists used their voting power in order
to force concessions from the government and even to win elections; the classic
case of socialist electoral politics is the Social Democratic Party of Germany.
Working-class women had little time for politics and were not welcome in the
male dominated trade unions or in the radical political parties.[4] By the mid-nineteenth
century, popular sentiment favored Italian unification. Unification was opposed
by Pope Pius IX and Austria. Count Cavour, the prime minister of
Piedmont-Sardinia, used the rivalry between France and Austria to gain the help
of France in pushing the Austrians out of northern Italy. In the south, Giuseppe
Garibaldi led a revolutionary army in 1860 that defeated the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies. A new Kingdom of Italy, headed by Victor Emmanuel (the former king of
Piedmont-Sardinia) was formed in 1860. In time, Venetia (1866) and the Papal
States (1870) were added to Italy. Until the 1860s the German-speaking people
were divided among Prussia, the western half of the Austrian Empire, and
numerous smaller states. Prussia took the lead in the movement for German unity
because it had a strong industrial base in the Rhineland and an army that was
equipped with the latest military, transportation, and communications
technology. During the reign of Wilhelm I (r. 1861–1888) the Prussian
chancellor Otto von Bismarck achieved the unification of Germany through a combination
of diplomacy and the Franco-Prussian War. Victory over France in the
Franco-Prussian War completed the unification of Germany, but it also resulted
in German control over the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine and thus in
the long-term enmity between France and Germany.
After
the Franco-Prussian War all politicians tried to manipulate public opinion in
order to bolster their governments by using the press and public education in
order to foster nationalistic loyalties. In many countries the dominant group
used nationalism to justify the imposition of its language, religion, or
customs on minority populations. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and others took up
Charles Darwin’s ideas of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” and
applied them to human societies in such a way as to justify European conquest
of foreign nations and the social and gender hierarchies of Western society. [5]International relations
revolved around a united Germany, which, under Bismarck’s leadership, isolated
France and forged a loose coalition with Austria-Hungary and Russia. At home,
Bismarck used mass politics and social legislation to gain popular support and
to develop a strong sense of national unity and pride amongst the German
people. Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918) dismissed Bismarck and initiated a German
foreign policy that placed emphasis on the acquisition of colonies. France was
now a second-rate power in Europe, its population and army being smaller than
those of Germany, and its rate of industrial growth lower than that of the
Germans. In Britain, a stable government and a narrowing in the disparity of
wealth were accompanied by a number of problems. Particularly notable were
Irish resentment of English rule, an economy that was lagging behind those of
the United States and Germany, and an enormous empire that was very expensive
to administer and to defend. For most of the nineteenth century Britain pursued
a policy of “splendid isolation” toward Europe; preoccupation with India led
the British to exaggerate the Russian threat to the Ottoman Empire and to the
Central Asian approaches to India while they ignored the rise of Germany. The
forces of nationalism weakened Russia and Austria-Hungary. Austria had
alienated its Slavic-speaking minorities by renaming itself the
“Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ethnic diversity also contributed to instability in
Russia. [6]In 1861 Tsar Alexander II
emancipated the peasants from serfdom, but did so in such a way that it only
turned them into communal farmers with few skills and little capital. [7]Russian industrialization
was carried out by the state, and thus the middle-class remained small and weak
while the land-owning aristocracy dominated the court and administration.
Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Revolution of 1905
demonstrated Russia’s weakness and caused Tsar Nicholas to introduce a
constitution and a parliament (the Duma), but he soon reverted to the
traditional despotism of his forefathers.
In
the late nineteenth century China resisted Western influence and became weaker;
Japan transformed itself into a major industrial and military power. [8]The difference can be
explained partly by the difference between Chinese and Japanese elites and
their attitudes toward foreign cultures. In China a “self-strengthening
movement” tried to bring about reforms, but the Empress Dowager Cixi and other
officials opposed railways or other technologies that would carry foreign
influences into the interior. In the early nineteenth century, Japan was ruled
by the Tokugawa shogunate and local lords had significant autonomy. In 1853,
the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived in Japan with a fleet of
steam-powered warships and demanded that the Japanese open their ports to trade
and American ships. Dissatisfaction with the shogunate's capitulation to
American and European demands led to a civil war and the overthrow of the
shogunate in 1868. The new rulers of Japan were known as the
Meiji oligarchs. The Meiji oligarchs were willing to change their institutions
and their society in order to help transform their country into a world-class
industrial and military power. [9]The Japanese government
encouraged industrialization, funding industrial development with tax revenue
extracted from the rural sector and then selling state-owned enterprises to
private entrepreneurs. Industrialization was accompanied by the development of
an authoritarian constitutional monarchy and a foreign policy that defined
Japan’s “sphere of influence” to include Korea, Manchuria, and part of China. Japan
defeated China in a war that began in 1894, thus precipitating an abortive
Chinese reform effort (the Hundred Days Reform) in 1898 and setting the stage
for Japanese competition with Russia for influence in the Chinese province of
Manchuria. Japanese power was further demonstrated when Japan defeated Russia
in 1905 and annexed Korea in 1910.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/checkerboardcornwall/chapter-26-the-new-power-balance
[2] http://www.wuhsd.org/cms/lib/ca01000258/centricity/domain/391/chapter26.pdf
[3] http://www.slideshare.net/checkerboardcornwall/chapter-26-the-new-power-balance
[4] http://www.wuhsd.org/cms/lib/ca01000258/centricity/domain/391/chapter26.pdf
[5] http://www.slideshare.net/checkerboardcornwall/chapter-26-the-new-power-balance
[6] http://www.slideshare.net/checkerboardcornwall/chapter-26-the-new-power-balance
[7] http://www.wuhsd.org/cms/lib/ca01000258/centricity/domain/391/chapter26.pdf
[8] http://www.wuhsd.org/cms/lib/ca01000258/centricity/domain/391/chapter26.pdf
[9] http://www.wuhsd.org/cms/lib/ca01000258/centricity/domain/391/chapter26.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment