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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914 Chapter Introduction Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

Chapter Introduction

The Eiffel Tower at the World's Fair of 1900 in Paris

©ND/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

Chapter Outline and Focus Questions

Toward the Modern Consciousness: Intellectual and Cultural Developments

What developments in science, intellectual affairs, and the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “opened the way to a modern consciousness,” and how did this consciousness differ from earlier worldviews?

Politics: New Directions and New Uncertainties

What gains did women make in their movement for women's rights? How did a new right-wing politics affect the Jews in different parts of Europe? What political problems did Great Britain, France, Austria-

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Hungary, Germany, and Russia face between 1894 and 1914, and how did they solve those problems?

The New Imperialism

What were the causes of the new imperialism that took place after 1880, and what effects did the European quest for colonies have on Africa and Asia?

International Rivalry and the Coming of War

What was the Bismarckian system of alliances, and how successful was it at keeping the peace? What issues lay behind the international crises that Europe faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Critical Thinking

What is the connection between the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century and the causes of World War I?

Connections To Today

What scientific discoveries of the past twenty years have challenged the modern consciousness that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

IN 1889, THE EIFFEL TOWER stood above Paris as a beacon of progress, a symbol of what technology and industrialization could accomplish. Constructed from iron to mark the entrance to the World's Fair, it was the tallest structure in the world, extending one thousand feet above the city. Over a period of five months, 3.5 million visitors paid to ascend the tower and overlook the grounds teeming with throngs of people. Almost 175,000 people a day came to visit the fair's 60,000 exhibits, which included an Algerian bazaar, Swedish chalet, Indian palace, and Japanese garden. Guidebooks for the fair posited that a visitor would need ten to twenty days to see all of the displays. One awestruck visitor declared, “There is only one cry; this is the most grandiose, the most dazzling, the most marvelous spectacle ever seen.” For most in attendance, the modern era was indeed an age of progress that was providing more opportunities, higher standards of living, better cities, more goods to consume, and greater democratization.

The optimism found at the World's Fair and throughout Europe's cities was not unchallenged, however. Some were still struggling to achieve progress. Many workers continued to endure pitiful housing conditions and low wages, while many women fought for

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the right to vote. Beneath the apparent calm, political tensions were also building, fueled by imperialist adventures, international rivalries, and cultural uncertainties. After 1880, Europeans engaged in a great race for colonies around the world. This competition for lands abroad greatly intensified existing antagonisms among European states.

Ultimately, Europeans proved incapable of finding constructive ways to cope with their international rivalries. The development of two large alliance systems—the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente—may have helped preserve peace for a time, but eventually the alliances made it easier for the European nations to be drawn into the catastrophic carnage of World War I.

The cultural life of Europe in the decades before 1914 reflects similar dynamic tensions. The advent of mass education produced better-informed citizens but also made it easier for governments to stir up the masses by nationalistic appeals through the new mass journalism. At the same time, despite the appearance of progress, European philosophers, writers, and artists were advancing cultural expressions that questioned traditional ideas and values and undermined public confidence. Before 1914, many intellectuals had a sense of unease about the direction in which society was heading and a feeling of imminent catastrophe. They proved remarkably prophetic.

© 2018 Cengage Learning Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may by reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical, or in any other manner - without the written permission of the copyright holder.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1 Toward the Modern Consciousness: Intellectual and Cultural Developments Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1 Toward the Modern Consciousness: Intellectual and Cultural Developments

Focus Question: What developments in science, intellectual affairs, and the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “opened the way to a modern consciousness,” and how did this consciousness differ from earlier worldviews?

Before 1914, most Westerners continued to believe in the values and ideals that had been generated by the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The ability of human beings to improve themselves and achieve a better society seemed well demonstrated by the rising standard of living, urban improvements, and mass education. Such products of modern technology as electric lights, phonographs, and automobiles reinforced the popular prestige of science and the belief in the ability of the human mind to comprehend the universe through the use of reason. Near the end of the nineteenth century, however, a dramatic transformation in the realm of ideas and culture challenged many of these assumptions. A new view of the physical universe, alternative views of human nature, and radically innovative forms of literary and artistic expression shattered old beliefs and opened the way to a modern consciousness. These new ideas called forth a sense of confusion and anxiety that would become even more pronounced after World War I.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1a Developments in the Sciences: The Emergence of a New Physics Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1a Developments in the Sciences: The Emergence of a New Physics

Science was one of the chief pillars supporting the optimistic and rationalistic view of the world that many Westerners shared in the nineteenth century. Supposedly based on hard facts and cold reason, science offered a certainty of belief in the orderliness of nature that was comforting to many people for whom traditional religious beliefs no longer had much meaning. Many naively believed that the application of already known scientific laws would give humanity a complete understanding of the physical world and an accurate picture of reality. The new physics dramatically altered that perspective.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, Westerners adhered to the mechanical conception of the universe postulated by the classical physics of Isaac Newton. In this perspective, the universe was viewed as a giant machine in which time, space, and matter were objective realities that existed independent of the individuals observing them. Matter was thought to be composed of indivisible, solid material bodies called atoms.

These views were first seriously questioned at the end of the nineteenth century. The French scientist Marie Curie (kyoo-REE) (1867–1934) and her husband Pierre (1859–1906) discovered that an element called radium gave off rays of radiation that apparently came from within the atom itself. Atoms were not simply hard, material bodies but small worlds containing such subatomic particles as electrons and protons that behaved in a seemingly random and inexplicable fashion.

Marie Curie.

Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland, but studied at the University of Paris, where she received degrees in both physics and mathematics. She was the first woman to win two Noble Prizes, one in 1903 in physics and another in 1911 in chemistry. This photograph was taken in her Paris laboratory in 1912. She died of leukemia in 1934, as a result of her laboratory work with radioactivity.

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Science Source/Getty Images

Building on this work, in 1900 a Berlin physicist, Max Planck (PLAHNK) (1858–1947), rejected the belief that a heated body radiates energy in a steady stream but maintained instead that energy is radiated discontinuously, in irregular packets of energy that he called “quanta.” The quantum theory raised fundamental questions about the subatomic realm of the atom. By 1900, the old view of atoms as the basic building blocks of the material world was being seriously questioned, and Newtonian physics was in trouble.

The Work of Einstein

Albert Einstein (YN-styn or YN-shtyn) (1879–1955), a German-born patent officer working in Switzerland, pushed these theories into new terrain. In 1905, Einstein published a paper titled “The Electro-Dynamics of Moving Bodies” that presented his special theory of relativity. According to relativity theory (Einstein's theory that, among other things, (1) space and time are not absolute but are relative to the observer and interwoven into a four-dimensional space-time continuum and (2) matter is a form of energy (E = mc ).) , space and time are not absolute but relative to the observer, and both are interwoven into what Einstein called a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Neither space nor time had an existence independent of human experience. As Einstein later explained simply to a journalist, “It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together

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with the things.” Moreover, Einstein concluded that matter was nothing but another form of energy. His epochal formula —each particle of matter is equivalent to its mass times the square of the velocity of light—was the key to explaining the vast energies contained within the atom. It led to the atomic age.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1b Toward a New Understanding of the Irrational: Nietzsche Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1b Toward a New Understanding of the Irrational: Nietzsche

Intellectually, the decades before 1914 witnessed a combination of contradictory developments. Thanks to the influence of science, confidence in human reason and progress still remained a dominant thread. At the same time, however, a small group of intellectuals attacked the idea of optimistic progress, dethroned reason, and glorified the irrational.

Friedrich Nietzsche (FREED-rikh NEE-chuh or NEE-chee) (1844–1900) was one of the intellectuals who glorified the irrational. According to Nietzsche, Western bourgeois society was decadent and incapable of any real cultural creativity, primarily because of its excessive emphasis on the rational faculty at the expense of emotions, passions, and instincts. Reason, claimed Nietzsche, actually played little role in human life because humans were at the mercy of irrational life forces.

How, then, could Western society be renewed? First, said Nietzsche, one must recognize that “God is dead.” Europeans had killed God, he said, and it was no longer possible to believe in some kind of cosmic order. Eliminating God and hence Christian morality had liberated human beings and made it possible to create a higher kind of being Nietzsche called the superman: “I teach you the Superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.”

Superior intellectuals must free themselves from the ordinary thinking of the masses, create their own values, and lead the masses. Nietzsche rejected and condemned political democracy, social reform, and universal suffrage.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1c Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1c Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

At the turn of the twentieth century, a Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud (SIG-mund or ZIG- munt FROID) (1856–1939) put forth a series of theories that undermined optimism about the rational nature of the human mind. Freud's thought, like the new physics and the irrationalism of Nietzsche, added to the uncertainties of the age. His major ideas were published in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams, which contained the basic foundation of what came to be known as psychoanalysis (a method developed by Sigmund Freud to resolve a patient's psychic conflict.) .

According to Freud, human behavior was strongly determined by the unconscious, by earlier experiences and inner forces of which people were largely unaware. But why did some experiences whose influence persisted in controlling an individual's life remain unconscious? According to Freud, the answer was repression (see the box “Freud and the Concept of Repression”), a process by which unsettling experiences were blotted from conscious awareness but still continued to influence behavior because they had become part of the unconscious. To explain how repression worked, Freud elaborated an intricate theory of the inner life of human beings.

Freud and the Concept of Repression

Freud's psychoanalytical theories resulted from his attempt to understand the world of the unconscious. This excerpt is taken from a lecture given in 1909 in which Freud described how he arrived at his theory of the role of repression.

Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis

I did not abandon it [his technique of encouraging patients to reveal forgotten experiences], however, before the observations I made during my use of it afforded me decisive evidence. I found confirmation of the fact that the forgotten memories were not lost. They were in the patient's possession and were ready to emerge in association to what was still unconscious. The existence of this force could be assumed with certainty, since one became aware of an effort corresponding to it if, in opposition to it, one tried to introduce the unconscious memories into the patient's consciousness. The force which was maintaining the pathological condition became apparent in the form of resistance on the part of the patient.

It was on this idea of resistance, then, that I based my view of the course of physical events in hysteria. In order to effect a recovery, it had proved necessary to remove these resistances. Starting out from the mechanism of cure, it now became possible

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to construct quite definite ideas of the origin of the illness. The same forces which, in the form of resistance, were now offering opposition to the forgotten material's being made conscious, must formerly have brought about the forgetting and must have pushed the pathogenic experiences in question out of consciousness. I gave the name of “repression” to this hypothetical process, and I considered that it was proved by the undeniable existence of resistance.

The further question could then be raised as to what these forces were and what the determinants were of the repression in which we now recognized the pathogenic mechanism of hysteria. A comparative study of the pathogenic situations which we had come to know through the cathartic procedure made it possible to answer this question. All these experiences had involved the emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharp contrast to the subject's other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality. There had been a short conflict, and the end of this internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its attached memories, and was forgotten. Thus, the incompatibility of the wish in question with the patient's ego was the motive for the repression; the subject's ethical and other standards were the repressing forces. An acceptance of the incompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of the conflict would have produced a high degree of unpleasure; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repression, which was thus revealed as one of the devices serving to protect the mental personality.

According to Freud, how did he discover the existence of repression? What function does repression perform? What forces in modern European society might have contributed to forcing individuals into repressive modes of thinking and acting?

Source: From Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey.

Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd.

According to Freud, a human being's inner life was a battleground of three contending forces: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id was the center of unconscious drives and was ruled by what Freud termed the pleasure principle. As creatures of desire, human beings directed their energy toward pleasure and away from pain. The id contained all kinds of lustful drives and desires and crude appetites and impulses. The ego was the seat of reason and hence the coordinator of the inner life. It was governed by the reality principle. Although humans were dominated by the pleasure principle, a true pursuit of pleasure was not feasible. The reality principle meant that people rejected pleasure so that they might live together in society. The superego was the locus of conscience and represented the

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inhibitions and moral values that society in general and parents in particular imposed on people. The superego served to force the ego to curb the unsatisfactory drives of the id.

The human being was thus a battleground among id, ego, and superego. Ego and superego exerted restraining influences on the unconscious id and repressed or kept out of consciousness what they wanted to. Repression began in childhood, and psychoanalysis was accomplished through a dialogue between psychotherapist and patient in which the therapist probed deeply into memory in order to retrace the chain of repression all the way back to its childhood origins. By making the conscious mind aware of the unconscious and its repressed contents, the psychotherapist could resolve the patient's psychic conflict.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1d The Impact of Darwin: Social Darwinism and Racism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1d The Impact of Darwin: Social Darwinism and Racism

In the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific theories were sometimes wrongly applied to achieve other ends. The application of Darwin's principle of organic evolution to the social order came to be known as Social Darwinism (the application of Darwin's principle of organic evolution to the social order; led to the belief that progress comes from the struggle for survival as the fittest advance and the weak decline.) . Using Darwin's terminology, Social Darwinists argued that societies were organisms that evolved through time from a struggle with their environment. Progress came from the “struggle for survival,” as the “fit”—the strong—advanced while the weak declined.

Rabid nationalists and racists also applied Darwin's ideas to human society in an even more radical way. In their pursuit of national greatness, extreme nationalists argued that nations, too, were engaged in a “struggle for existence” in which only the fittest survived. The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi (FREED-rikh fun bayrn-HAR-dee) argued in 1907 that “war is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. ‘War is the father of all things.”’ Numerous nationalist organizations preached the same doctrine as Bernhardi.

Racism, too, was dramatically revived and strengthened by new biological arguments. Perhaps nowhere was the combination of extreme nationalism and racism more evident and more dangerous than in Germany. One of the chief propagandists for German racism at the turn of the twentieth century was Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), an Englishman who became a German citizen. His book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899, made a special impact on Germany. Modern-day Germans, according to Chamberlain, were the only pure successors of the “Aryans,” who were portrayed as the true and original creators of Western culture. The Aryan (AR-ee-un) race, under German leadership, must be prepared to fight for Western civilization and save it from the destructive assaults of such “lower” races as Jews, Negroes, and Orientals. Increasingly, Jews were singled out as the racial enemy who wanted to destroy the Aryan race (see “Jews in the European Nation-State”).

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-1e The Culture of Modernity Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-1e The Culture of Modernity

The revolution in physics and psychology was paralleled by a revolution in literature and the arts. Before 1914, writers and artists self-consciously rejected the traditional literary and artistic styles that had dominated European cultural life since the Renaissance. The changes that they produced have since been called Modernism (the artistic and literary styles that emerged in the decades before 1914 as artists rebelled against traditional efforts to portray reality as accurately as possible (leading to Impressionism and Cubism) and writers explored new forms.) .

Naturalism and Symbolism in Literature

Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, literature was dominated by Naturalism. Naturalists accepted the material world as real and felt that literature should be realistic. By addressing social problems, writers could contribute to an objective understanding of the world. Although Naturalism was a continuation of Realism, it lacked the underlying note of liberal optimism about people and society that had been prevalent in the 1850s. The Naturalists often portrayed characters caught in the grip of forces beyond their control.

The novels of the French writer Émile Zola (ay-MEEL ZOH-lah) (1840–1902) provide a good example of Naturalism. Against a backdrop of the urban slums and coalfields of northern France, Zola showed how alcoholism and different environments affected people's lives. He had read Darwin's Origin of Species and had been impressed by its emphasis on the struggle for survival and the importance of environment and heredity. These themes were central to his Rougon-Macquart, a twenty-volume series of novels on the “natural and social history of a family.” Zola maintained that the artist must analyze and dissect life as a biologist would a living organism. He said, “I have simply done on living bodies the work of analysis which surgeons perform on corpses.”

At the turn of the century, a new group of writers, known as the Symbolists, reacted against Realism. Primarily interested in writing poetry, the Symbolists believed that objective knowledge of the world was impossible. The external world was not real but only a collection of symbols that reflected the true reality of the individual human mind. Art, they believed, should function for its own sake instead of serving, criticizing, or seeking to understand society. In the works of such Symbolist poets as William Butler Yeats (YAYTS) (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (RY-nuh mah-REE-uh RILL-kuh) (1875–1926), poetry ceased to be part of popular culture because only through a knowledge of the poet's personal language could one hope to understand what the poem was saying.

Modernism in the Arts

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Since the Renaissance, artists had largely tried to represent reality as accurately as possible, carefully applying brushstrokes and employing perspective to produce realistic portrayals of their subjects. By the late nineteenth century, however, artists were seeking new forms of expression. The preamble to modern painting can be found in Impressionism (an artistic movement that originated in France in the 1870s. Impressionists sought to capture their impressions of the changing effects of light on objects in nature.) , a movement that originated in France in the 1870s when a group of artists rejected the studios and museums and went out into the countryside to paint nature directly. But the Impressionists did not just paint scenes from nature. Their subjects included streets and cabarets, rivers, and busy boulevards—wherever people congregated for work and leisure. In this sense, Impressionist subject matter reflected the pastimes of the new upper-middle class. Instead of adhering to the conventional modes of painting and subject matter, the Impressionists sought originality and distinction from the past. Their artworks utilized bright colors, dynamic brushstrokes, and a smaller, more private scale than their predecessors. Camille Pissarro (kah-MEEL pee-SAH-roh) (1830–1903), one of Impressionism's founders, described their approach:

Precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of the whole, it destroys all sensations. Do not define too closely the outlines of things; it is the brushstroke of the right value and color which should produce the drawing.… Work at the same time upon sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it.… Don't proceed according to rules and principles, but paint what you observe and feel. Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.

Impressionists like Pissarro tried to put into painting their impressions of the changing effects of light on objects in nature.

An important Impressionist painter was Berthe Morisot (BAYRT mor-ee-ZOH) (1841–1895), who broke with the practice of women being only amateur artists and became a professional painter. One of the three women to exhibit with the original Impressionists, her work fetched the highest price at the first Impressionist auction. Her dedication to the new style of painting won her the disfavor of the traditional French academic artists. Morisot believed that women had a special vision that was, as she said, “more delicate than that of men.” Her special touch is evident in Young Girl by the Window, in which she makes use of soft colors and flowing brushstrokes. Near the end of her life, she lamented the refusal of men to take her work seriously: “I don't think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that's all I would have asked, for I know I'm worth as much as they.”

Berthe Morisot, Young Girl by the Window.

Berthe Morisot came from a wealthy French family that settled in Paris when she was seven. The first female Impressionist painter, she developed her own unique

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style. Her gentle colors and strong use of pastels are evident in Young Girl by the Window, painted in 1878. Many of her paintings focus on women and domestic scenes.

Museé Fabre, Montpellier//Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

By the 1880s, a new movement known as Post-Impressionism (an artistic movement that began in France in the 1880s. Post-Impressionists sought to use color and line to express inner feelings and produce a personal statement of reality.) had emerged in France and soon spread to other European countries. Post-Impressionism retained the Impressionist emphasis on light and color but revolutionized it even further by paying more attention to structure and form. Post-Impressionists sought to use both color and line to express inner feelings and produce a personal statement of reality rather than an imitation of objects. Impressionist paintings had retained a sense of realism, but the Post-Impressionists shifted from objective reality to subjective reality and in so doing began to withdraw from the artist's traditional task of depicting the external world. The works of the Post-Impressionists were the real forerunners of modern art.

A famous Post-Impressionist was the tortured and tragic figure Vincent van Gogh (von GOH or vahn GOK) (1853–1890). For van Gogh, art was a spiritual experience. He was

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especially interested in color and believed that it could act as its own form of language. Van Gogh maintained that artists should paint what they feel.

Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night.

The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was a major figure among the Post- Impressionists. His originality and power of expression made a strong impact on his artistic successors. In The Starry Night, painted in 1889, van Gogh's subjective vision was given full play as the dynamic swirling forms of the heavens above overwhelm the village below. The heavens seem alive with a mysterious spiritual force. Van Gogh painted this work in an asylum one year before he committed suicide.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY//Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the belief that the task of art was to “represent reality” had lost much of its meaning. By that time, the new psychology and the new physics had made it evident that many people were not sure what constituted reality anyway. Then, too, the development of photography gave artists another reason to reject visual realism. Invented in the 1830s, photography became popular and widespread after George Eastman produced the first Kodak camera for the mass market in 1888. What was the point of an artist doing what the camera did better? Unlike the camera, which could only mirror reality, artists could create reality. In modern art, as in literature, individual consciousness became

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the source of meaning. Between 1905 and 1914, this search for individual expression produced a wide variety of schools of painting, all of which had their greatest impact after World War I.

In 1905, one of the most important figures in modern art was just beginning his career. Pablo Picasso (pi-KAH-soh) (1881–1973) was from Spain but settled in Paris in 1904. Extremely versatile and capable of painting in a remarkable variety of styles, Picasso was instrumental in the development of a new style called Cubism (an artistic style developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially by Pablo Picasso, that used geometric designs to re-create reality in the viewer's mind.) that used geometric designs as visual stimuli to re-create reality in the viewer's mind. Picasso's 1907 work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (lay dem-wah-ZEL dah-vee-NYONH) has been called the first Cubist painting.

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Pablo Picasso, a major pioneer of modern art, experimented with a remarkable variety of styles. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was the first great example of Cubism, which one art historian has called “the first style of [the twentieth] century to break radically with the past.” Geometric shapes replace traditional forms, forcing the viewer to re-create reality in his or her own mind. Picasso said of this painting, “I paint forms as I think them, not as I see them.”

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The modern artist's flight from “visual reality” reached a high point in 1910 with the beginning of abstract painting (an artistic movement that developed early in the twentieth century in which artists focused on color to avoid any references to visual reality.) . Wassily Kandinsky (vus-YEEL-yee kan-DIN-skee) (1866–1944), a Russian who worked in Germany, was one of its originators. As is evident in his Painting with White Border, Kandinsky sought to avoid representation altogether. He believed that art should speak directly to the soul. To do so, it must avoid any reference to visual reality and concentrate on color.

At the start of the twentieth century, developments in music paralleled those in painting. Expressionism in music was a Russian creation, the product of the composer Igor Stravinsky (EE-gor struh-VIN-skee) (1882–1971) and the Ballet Russe, the dance company of Sergei Diaghilev (syir-GYAY DYAHG-yuh-lif) (1872–1929). Together they revolutionized the world of music with The Rite of Spring, a ballet staged by Diaghilev to music by Stravinsky. At the premiere on May 29, 1913, the pulsating rhythms, sharp dissonances, and unusual dancing overwhelmed the Paris audience and caused a riot at the theater.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2 Politics: New Directions and New Uncertainties Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2 Politics: New Directions and New Uncertainties

Focus Questions: What gains did women make in their movement for women's rights? How did a new right-wing politics affect the Jews in different parts of Europe? What political problems did Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia face between 1894 and 1914, and how did they solve those problems?

Growing anxieties in European political life also paralleled the uncertainties in European intellectual and cultural life. The seemingly steady progress in the growth of liberal principles and political democracy (a form of government characterized by universal suffrage and mass political parties.) after 1871 soon slowed or even ceased altogether after 1894. The new mass politics had opened the door to changes that many nineteenth-century liberals found unacceptable, and liberals themselves were forced to move in new directions. The appearance of a new right-wing politics based on racism added an ugly note to the existing anxieties. With their newfound voting rights, workers elected socialists who demanded new reforms when they took their places in legislative bodies. Women, too, made demands, insisting on the right to vote and using new tactics to gain it. In central and eastern Europe, tensions grew as authoritarian governments refused to meet the demands of reformers. And outside Europe, a new giant appeared in the Western world as the United States emerged as a great industrial power with immense potential.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2a The Movement for Women's Rights Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2a The Movement for Women's Rights

In the 1830s, a number of women in the United States and Europe who worked together in several reform movements argued for the right of women to divorce and own property. These early efforts were not particularly successful, however. For example, women did not gain the right to their own property until 1870 in Britain, 1900 in Germany, and 1907 in France.

New Professions

Divorce and property rights were only a beginning for the women's movement, however. Some middle- and upper-middle-class women gained access to higher education while others sought entry into occupations dominated by men. The first field to open was teaching. Since medical training was largely closed to women, they sought alternatives in the development of nursing. One nursing pioneer was Amalie Sieveking (uh-MAHL-yuh SEE-vuh-king) (1794–1859), who founded the Female Association for the Care of the Poor and Sick in Hamburg, Germany. As she explained, “To me, at least as important were the benefits which [work with the poor] seemed to promise for those of my sisters who would join me in such a work of charity. The higher interests of my sex were close to my heart.” Sieveking's work was followed by that of the more famous British nurse Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), whose efforts during the Crimean War, like those of Clara Barton (1821–1912) in the American Civil War, transformed nursing into a profession of trained, middle-class “women in white.”

The Right to Vote

By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women's rights had entered the political arena with the call for equal political rights. Many feminists believed that the right to vote was the key to all other reforms to improve the position of women.

Suffragists (advocates of extending the right to vote to women.) had one basic aim: women's full citizenship in the nation-state. The British women's movement was the most vocal and most active in Europe. Emmeline Pankhurst (PANK-hurst) (1858–1928) and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, founded the Women's Social and Political Union, which enrolled mostly middle- and upper-class women, in 1903. The members of Pankhurst's organization realized the value of the media and used unusual publicity stunts to call attention to their demands (see the box “The Struggle for the Right to Vote” and Images of Everyday Life). Derisively labeled “suffragettes” by male politicians, they pelted government officials with eggs, chained themselves to lampposts, smashed the windows of department stores on fashionable shopping streets, burned railroad cars, and went on hunger strikes in jail.

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The Struggle for the Right to Vote

Emmeline Pankhurst, with the help of her daughters, was the leader of the women's movement for the right to vote in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Believing that peaceful requests were having little effect on the members of Parliament, Pankhurst came to advocate more forceful methods, as is evident in this selection from My Own Story, her autobiography published in 1914. Although this confrontational approach was abandoned during World War I, the British government granted women the right to vote in 1918 at the end of the war.

Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story

I had called upon women to join me in striking at the Government through the only thing that governments are really very much concerned about—property—and the response was immediate. Within a few days the newspapers rang with the story of the attack made on letter boxes in London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, and half a dozen other cities. In some cases the boxes, when opened by postmen, mysteriously burst into flame; in others the letters were destroyed by corrosive chemicals; in still others the addresses were rendered illegible by black fluids. Altogether it was estimated that over 5,000 letters were completely destroyed and many thousands more were delayed in transit.

It was with a deep sense of their gravity that these letter-burning protests were undertaken, but we felt that something drastic must be done in order to destroy the apathy of the men of England who view with indifference the suffering of women oppressed by unjust laws. As we pointed out, letters, precious though they may be, are less precious than human bodies and souls.… And so, in order to call attention to greater crimes against human beings, our letter burnings continued.

In only a few cases were the offenders apprehended, and one of the few women arrested was a helpless cripple, a woman who could move about only in a wheeled chair. She received a sentence of eight months in the first division, and, resolutely hunger striking, was forcibly fed with unusual brutality, the prison doctor deliberately breaking one of her teeth in order to insert a gag. In spite of her disabilities and her weakness the crippled girl persisted in her hunger strike and her resistance to prison rules, and within a short time had to be released. The excessive sentences of the other pillar box destroyers resolved themselves into very short terms because of the resistance of the prisoners, every one of whom adopted the hunger strike.

It was at this time, February, 1913, less than two years ago as I write these words, that militancy, as it is now generally understood by the public began—militancy in the sense of continued, destructive, guerrilla warfare against the Government through injury to private property. Some property had been destroyed before this time, but the attacks were sporadic, and were meant to be in the nature of a warning

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as to what might become a settled policy. Now we indeed lighted the torch, and we did it with the absolute conviction that no other course was open to us. We had tried every other measure, as I am sure that I have demonstrated to my readers, and our years of work and suffering and sacrifice had taught us that the Government would not yield to right and justice, what the majority of members of the House of Commons admitted was right and justice, but that the Government would, as other governments invariably do, yield to expediency. Now our task was to show the Government that it was expedient to yield to the women's just demands. In order to do that we had to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe. We had to make English law a failure and the courts farce comedy theatres; we had to discredit the Government and Parliament in the eyes of the world; we had to spoil English sports, hurt business, destroy valuable property, demoralize the world of society, shame the churches, upset the whole orderly conduct of life.

That is, we had to do as much of this guerrilla warfare as the people of England would tolerate. When they came to the point of saying to the Government: “Stop this, in the only way it can be stopped, by giving the women of England representation,” then we should extinguish our torch.

What methods did Emmeline Pankhurst advocate be used to achieve the right to vote for women? Why did she feel justified in using these methods? Do you think she was justified? Why or why not?

Source: From Emmeline Pankhurst, My Own Story (New York: Hearst International Library, 1914).

Images of Everyday Life

The Struggle for the Right to Vote

F�� , the right to vote came to represent the key to other reforms that would benefit women. In Britain, suffragists attracted attention to their cause by carrying out various protest acts. The first photograph shows the arrest of a suffragist who had chained herself to the fence outside Buckingham Palace in London. The second photograph shows police preventing Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters from entering Buckingham Palace to present a petition to the king. The third photograph is of Emily Davison throwing herself under the king's horse at the Epsom Derby horse race. Shortly before her sacrificial action, she had written, “The glorious and indomitable Spirit of Liberty has but one further penalty within its power, the surrender of life itself, the supreme consummation of sacrifice.”

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Central Press/Getty Images

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Arthur Barrett/Getty Images

Although demands for women's rights were heard throughout Europe and the United States before World War I, only in Finland, Norway, and a few American states did women actually receive the right to vote. It would take the dramatic upheaval of World War I before male- dominated governments capitulated on this basic issue.

Women reformers also took on issues besides suffrage. In many countries, women supported peace movements. Bertha von Suttner (ZOOT-nuh) (1843–1914) became head of the Austrian Peace Society and protested against the growing arms race of the 1890s. Her novel Lay Down Your Arms became a bestseller and brought her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. Lower-class women also took up the cause of peace. A group of women workers marched in Vienna in 1911 and demanded, “We want an end to armaments, to the means of murder, and we want these millions to be spent on the needs of the people.”

The New Woman

Bertha von Suttner was but one example of the “new women” who were becoming more prominent at the turn of the twentieth century. These women rejected traditional feminine roles. Although some of them supported political ideologies that flew in the face of the ruling classes such as socialism, others simply sought new freedom outside the household and new roles other than those of wives and mothers.

Maria Montessori (mahn-tuh-SOR-ee) (1870–1952) was a good example of the “new woman.” Breaking with tradition, she attended medical school at the University of Rome and in 1896 became the first Italian woman to receive a medical degree. Three years later, she began a lecture tour in Italy on the subject of the “new woman,” whom she characterized as a woman who followed a rational, scientific perspective. In keeping with this ideal, Montessori put her medical background to work in a school for mentally handicapped children. She devised new teaching materials that enabled these children to read and write and became convinced, as she later wrote, “that similar methods applied to normal students

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would develop or set free their personality in a marvelous and surprising way.” Subsequently, she established a system of childhood education based on natural and spontaneous activities in which students learned at their own pace. By the 1930s, hundreds of Montessori schools had been established in Europe and the United States. As a professional woman and an unwed mother, Montessori also embodied some of the freedoms of the “new woman.”

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2b Jews in the European Nation-State Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2b Jews in the European Nation-State

Near the end of the nineteenth century, a revival of racism combined with extreme nationalism to produce a new right-wing politics directed against the Jews. Of course, anti- Semitism had a long history in Europe, but in the nineteenth century, as a result of the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews had increasingly been granted legal equality in many European countries, enabling many Jews to leave the ghetto and assimilate into the cultures around them. They became successful bankers, lawyers, scientists, scholars, journalists, and stage performers. In 1880, for example, Jews made up 10 percent of the population of the city of Vienna but 39 percent of its medical students and 23 percent of its law students.

These achievements represent only one side of the picture, however. In Germany and Austria during the 1880s and 1890s, conservatives founded right-wing anti-Semitic parties that used anti-Semitism to win the votes of traditional lower-middle-class groups who felt threatened by the economic forces of the times. The worst treatment of Jews at the turn of the century occurred in eastern Europe, where 72 percent of the world's Jewish population lived. Russian Jews were admitted to secondary schools and universities only under a quota system and were forced to live in certain regions of the country. Persecutions and pogroms (organized massacres) were widespread.

Consequently, hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emigrate. Many went to the United States, but some (perhaps 25,000 in all) moved to Palestine, the biblical homeland of the Jews, which soon became the focus of a Jewish nationalist movement called Zionism (an international movement that called for the establishment of a Jewish state or a refuge for Jews in Palestine.) .

A key figure in the growth of Zionism was Theodor Herzl (TAY-oh-dor HAYRT-sul) (1860– 1904). In 1896, he published a book called The Jewish State in which he maintained that “the Jews who wish it will have their state.” Settlement in Palestine was difficult, however, because it was then part of the Ottoman Empire, which was opposed to Jewish immigration. Despite the problems, the First Zionist Congress, which met in Switzerland in 1897, proclaimed as its aim the creation of a “home in Palestine secured by public law” for the Jewish people. Although about a thousand Jews migrated to Palestine in 1900 and three thousand more each year after that, on the eve of World War I the Zionist dream remained only a dream.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2c The Transformation of Liberalism: Great Britain Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2c The Transformation of Liberalism: Great Britain

In dealing with the problems created by the new mass politics, liberal governments often followed policies that undermined the basic tenets of liberalism. This was particularly true in Great Britain, where the demands of the working-class movement caused Liberals to move away from their ideals. Liberals were forced to adopt significant social reforms due to the pressure of two new working-class organizations: trade unions and the Labour Party.

Frustrated by the government's failure to enact social reform, trade unions began to advocate more radical change of the economic system, calling for “collective ownership and control over production, distribution and exchange.” At the same time, a movement for laborers emerged among a group of intellectuals known as the Fabian Socialists. Neither the Fabian Socialists nor the British trade unions were Marxist. They did not advocate class struggle and revolution but instead favored evolution toward a socialist state by democratic means. In 1900, representatives of the trade unions and Fabian Socialists coalesced to form the Labour Party. By 1906, they had managed to elect twenty-nine members to the House of Commons.

The Liberals, who led the government from 1906 to 1914, perceived that they would have to enact a program of social welfare or lose the support of the workers. Under the leadership of David Lloyd George (1863–1945), the Liberals abandoned the classic principles of laissez faire and voted for a series of social reforms. The National Insurance Act of 1911 provided benefits for workers in case of sickness and unemployment, to be paid for by compulsory contributions from workers, employers, and the state. Additional legislation provided a small pension for retirees over seventy and compensation for workers injured on the job. Though both the benefits of the program and the tax increases were modest, they were the first hesitant steps toward the future British welfare state.

In the effort to achieve social reform, Lloyd George was also forced to confront the power of the House of Lords. Composed of hereditary aristocrats, the House of Lords took a strong stance against Lloyd George's effort to pay for social reform measures by taxes, however modest, on the wealthy. The prime minister then pushed through a law in 1911 that restricted the ability of the House of Lords to impede legislation enacted by the House of Commons. After 1911, the House of Lords became largely a debating society.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2d France: Travails of the Third Republic Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2d France: Travails of the Third Republic

In the 1890s, France's fragile Third Republic experienced a crisis that was an outgrowth of the renewed anti-Semitism in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Early in 1895, Alfred Dreyfus (DRY-fuss), a Jew and a captain on the French general staff, was found guilty of selling army secrets by a secret military court and condemned to life imprisonment. Evidence soon emerged that pointed to his innocence. Another officer, a Catholic aristocrat, was more obviously the traitor, but the army, a stronghold of aristocratic and Catholic officers, refused to grant Dreyfus a new trial. Some right-wing journalists even used the case to push their own anti-Semitic views. After a wave of public outrage, however, republic leaders insisted on a new trial. Although the second trial failed to set aside the guilty verdict, the government pardoned Dreyfus in 1899, and in 1906, he was fully exonerated.

Palestine

One result of the Dreyfus affair was a change in government. Moderate republicans lost control to radical republicans who were determined to make greater progress toward a more democratic society by breaking the power of the republic's enemies, especially the army and the Catholic Church. The army was purged of all high-ranking officers who had antirepublican reputations. Moreover, church and state were officially separated in 1905, and during the next two years, the government seized church property and stopped paying clerical salaries. These changes ended the political threat from the right to the Third Republic, which by now commanded the loyalty of most French people.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2e Growing Tensions in Germany Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2e Growing Tensions in Germany

During the reign of Emperor William II (1888–1918), the new imperial Germany begun by Bismarck continued as an “authoritarian, conservative, military-bureaucratic power state.” By 1914, Germany had become the strongest military and industrial power on the continent. New social configurations had emerged as more than 50 percent of German workers had jobs in industry, while only 30 percent of the workforce was still in agriculture. Urban centers had mushroomed in number and size. These rapid changes in William's Germany helped produce a society torn between modernization and traditionalism.

With the expansion of industry and cities came demands for more political participation and growing sentiment for reforms that would produce greater democratization. Conservative forces, especially two of the powerful ruling groups in Germany—the landowning nobility and representatives of heavy industry—tried to block reforms by supporting William II's activist foreign policy of finding Germany's “place in the sun.” Expansionism, they believed, would divert people from further democratization.

The tensions in German society created by the conflict between modernization and traditionalism were also manifested in a new, radicalized, right-wing politics. A number of pressure groups arose to support nationalistic goals. Such groups as the Pan-German League stressed strong German nationalism and advocated imperialism as a tool to overcome social divisions and unite all classes. They were also anti-Semitic and denounced Jews as the destroyers of national community.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2f Austria-Hungary: The Problem of the Nationalities Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2f Austria-Hungary: The Problem of the Nationalities

At the beginning of the 1890s, Austria-Hungary remained troubled by the problem of its numerous nationalities (see Chapter 23). The granting of universal male suffrage in 1907 only exacerbated the problem as nationalities that had previously played no role in the government now agitated in parliament for autonomy. This led prime ministers after 1900 to ignore parliament and rely increasingly on imperial emergency decrees to govern. Parliament itself became a bizarre forum in which, in the words of one incredulous observer, “about a score of men, all decently clad, were seated or standing, each at his little desk. Some made an infernal noise violently opening and shutting the lids of their desks. Others emitted a blaring sound from little toy trumpets;… still others beat snare drums.”

The numerous nationalities threatened the position of the dominant German minority in Austria, producing a backlash in the form of virulent German nationalism. As Austria industrialized in the 1870s and 1880s, two working-class parties came into existence, both strongly influenced by nationalism. The Social Democrats, though a Marxist party, supported the Austrian government, fearful that the autonomy of the various nationalities would hinder industrial development and prevent improvements for workers. Even more nationalistic were the Christian Socialists, who combined agitation for workers with a virulent anti-Semitism.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2g Industrialization and Revolution in Imperial Russia Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2g Industrialization and Revolution in Imperial Russia

Although industrialization came late to Russia, it progressed rapidly after 1890, especially with the assistance of foreign investment capital. By 1900, Russia had become the fourth- largest producer of steel, behind the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. With industrialization came factories, an industrial working class, and the development of socialist parties, although repression in Russia soon forced these parties to go underground and become revolutionary. The Marxist Social Democratic Party, for example, held its first congress in Minsk in 1898, but the arrest of its leaders caused the next one to be held in Brussels in 1903, attended by Russian émigrés. The Social Revolutionaries worked to overthrow the tsarist autocracy and establish peasant socialism. Having no other outlet for opposition to the regime, they advocated political terrorism and attempted to assassinate government officials and members of the ruling dynasty. The growing opposition to the tsarist regime finally exploded into revolution in 1905.

The defeat of the Russians by the Japanese in 1904–1905 encouraged antigovernment groups to rebel against the tsarist regime. After a general strike in October 1905, the government capitulated. Nicholas II (1894–1917) granted civil liberties and agreed to create a legislative assembly, the Duma (DOO-muh), elected directly by a broad franchise. But real constitutional monarchy proved short-lived. Already by 1907, the tsar had curtailed the power of the Duma, and he fell back on the army and bureaucracy to rule Russia.

Nicholas II.

The last tsar of Russia hoped to preserve the traditional autocratic ways of his predecessors. In this photograph, Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, are shown in 1913 with their family in front of the Kremlin at the celebration of the three- hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Romanov dynasty.

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Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

Chronology

Politics, 1894–1914

Reign of Emperor William II 1888–1918

Reign of Tsar Nicholas II 1894–1917

Dreyfus affair in France 1895–1899

Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State 1896

First congress of Social Democratic Party in Russia

1898

Beginning of Progressive era in the United States

1900

Formation of Labour Party in Britain 1900

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Pankhursts establish Women's Social and Political Union

1903

Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905

Revolution in Russia 1905

National Insurance Act in Britain 1911

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2h The Rise of the United States Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2h The Rise of the United States

Between 1860 and 1914, the United States made the shift from an agrarian to a mighty industrial nation. American heavy industry stood unchallenged in 1900. In that year, the Carnegie Steel Company alone produced more steel than Great Britain's entire steel industry. Industrialization also led to urbanization. While established cities, such as New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, grew even larger, other moderate-size cities, such as Pittsburgh, grew by leaps and bounds because of industrialization. Whereas 20 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1860, more than 40 percent did in 1900.

The United States had become the world's richest nation and greatest industrial power. Yet serious questions remained about the quality of American life. In 1890, the richest 9 percent of Americans owned an incredible 71 percent of all the wealth. Labor unrest over unsafe working conditions, strict work discipline, and periodic cycles of devastating unemployment led workers to organize. By the turn of the century, one national organization, the American Federation of Labor, emerged as labor's dominant voice. In 1900, however, it included only 8.4 percent of the American industrial labor force.

During the so-called Progressive era after 1900, a wave of reform swept across the United States. The Meat Inspection Act (1906) and the Pure Food and Drug Act (1905) provided for a limited degree of federal regulation of corrupt industrial practices. The presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) witnessed the imposition of a graduated federal income tax and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, which permitted the federal government to play a role in important economic decisions formerly made by bankers. Like European nations, the United States was slowly adopting policies that extended the functions of the state.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-2i The Growth of Canada Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-2i The Growth of Canada

Canada faced problems of national unity at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1870, the Dominion of Canada had four provinces: Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. With the addition of two more—Manitoba and British Columbia—the following year, Canada stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Real unity was difficult to achieve, however, because of the distrust between the English- speaking majority and the French-speaking Canadians living primarily in Quebec. Wilfred Laurier (LOR-ee-ay) (1841–1919), who became the first French Canadian prime minister in 1896, was able to reconcile the two groups. During his administration, industrialization boomed, especially in production of textiles, furniture, and railway equipment. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants, most of them from Europe, also flowed into Canada. Many settled on lands in the west, thus helping populate Canada's vast territories.

Canada, 1871

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3 The New Imperialism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-3 The New Imperialism

Focus Question: What were the causes of the new imperialism that took place after 1880, and what effects did the European quest for colonies have on Africa and Asia?

Beginning in the 1880s, European states engaged in an intense scramble for overseas territory. This “new imperialism (the revival of imperialism after 1880 in which European nations established colonies throughout much of Asia and Africa.) ,” as some have called it, led Europeans to carve up the continents of Asia and Africa. What were the reasons for this mad scramble for colonies?

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3a Impetus for the New Imperialism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-3a Impetus for the New Imperialism

The existence of competitive nation-states after 1870 was undoubtedly a major factor in the emergence of the new imperialism. As European affairs grew tense, competition led European states to acquire colonies abroad to provide ports and coaling stations for their navies. Great Britain, for example, often expanded into new regions not for economic reasons but to keep the French, Germans, or Russians from setting up bases that could harm British interests. Colonies were also a source of international prestige. Once the dash for colonies began, failure to enter the race was perceived as a sign of weakness, totally unacceptable to an aspiring Great Power. As a British foreign minister wrote, “When I left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody thought about Africa. When I returned to it in 1885, the nations of Europe were almost quarreling with each other as to the various portions of Africa which they should obtain.” Late-nineteenth-century imperialism was closely tied to nationalism.

It was also tied to social Darwinism and racism. Social Darwinists believed that in the struggle between nations, the fit are victorious and survive. Superior races must dominate inferior races by military force to show how strong and virile they are. As one Englishman wrote, “To the development of the White Man, the Black Man and the Yellow must ever remain inferior, and as the former raised itself higher and yet higher, so did these latter seem to shrink out of humanity and appear nearer and nearer to the brutes.”

Some Europeans gave a more religious or humanitarian justification for imperialism by arguing that they had a “moral responsibility” to civilize “ignorant” peoples. This notion of the “white man's burden” (see the box “White Man's Burden, Black Man's Burden”) helped the more idealistic individuals rationalize imperialism in their own minds. One British official declared that the British Empire was, “under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen.” Thousands of Catholic and Protestant missionaries went abroad to seek converts to their faith. Nevertheless, the belief among Europeans that the superiority of their civilization obliged them to impose it on supposedly primitive nonwhites, even if the primitives suffered or died in the process, was yet another manifestation of racism.

Opposing Viewpoints

White Man's Burden, Black Man's Burden

One of the justifications for European imperialism was the notion that superior white peoples had the moral responsibility to raise ignorant native peoples to a higher level of civilization. The British poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) captured this notion in his poem The White Man's Burden. The Western attempt to justify imperialism on the basis of moral responsibility, evident in Kipling's poem, was often

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hypocritical. Edward Morel, a British journalist who spent time in the Congo, pointed out the destructive effects of Western imperialism on Africans in his book The Black Man's Burden.

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden

Take up the White Man's burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

to serve your captives' needs;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.…

Take up the White Man's burden—

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

And when your goal is nearest

The end for others sought,

Watch sloth and heathen Folly

Bring all your hopes to nought.…

Take up the White Man's burden—

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of hosts ye humour

(Ah, slowly!) toward the light—

“Why brought ye us from bondage,

Our loved Egyptian night?” …

Edward Morel, The Black Man's Burden

It is [the Africans] who carry the “Black man's burden.” They have not withered away before the white man's occupation. Indeed … Africa has ultimately absorbed within itself every Caucasian and, for that matter, every Semitic invader, too. In hewing out

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for himself a fixed abode in Africa, the white man has massacred the African in heaps. The African has survived, and it is well for the white settlers that he has.…

What the partial occupation of his soil by the white man has failed to do; what the mapping out of European political “spheres of influence” has failed to do; what the Maxim [machine gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, labor in the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed to do; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis have failed to do; whatever the overseas slave trade failed to do; the power of modern capitalistic exploitation, assisted by modern engines of destruction, may yet succeed in accomplishing.

For from the evils of the latter, scientifically applied and enforced, there is no escape for the African. Its destructive effects are not spasmodic: they are permanent. In its permanence resides its fatal consequences. It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It breaks the spirit. It attacks the African at every turn, from every point of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him from the land, invades his family life, destroys his natural pursuits and occupations, claims his whole time, enslaves him in his own home.

What arguments did Kipling make to justify European expansion in Africa and Asia? How does the selection by Edward Morel challenge or undermine Kipling's beliefs?

Sources: Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden. From Rudyard Kipling's Verse (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, 1919), pp. 371–72. Edward Morel, The Black Man's Burden. From E. D. Morel, The Black

Man's Burden: The White Man in Africa from the Fifteenth Century to World War I (London: National

Labour Press, 1920).

Some historians have emphasized an economic motivation for imperialism. There was a great demand for natural resources and products not found in Western countries, such as rubber, oil, and tin. Instead of trading for these products, European investors advocated direct control of the areas where the raw materials were found. The large surpluses of capital that were being accumulated by bankers and industrialists often encouraged them to seek higher rates of profit in underdeveloped areas. All of these factors combined to form an economic imperialism (the process in which banks and corporations from developed nations invest in underdeveloped regions and establish a major presence there in the hope of making high profits; not necessarily the same as colonial expansion in that businesses invest where they can make a profit, which may not be in their own nation's colonies.) whereby European finance dominated the economic activity of a large part of the world.

Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3a Impetus for the New Imperialism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3b The Creation of Empires Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-3b The Creation of Empires

Whatever the reasons for the new imperialism, it had a dramatic effect on Africa and Asia as European powers competed for control of the two continents.

The Scramble for Africa

Europeans controlled relatively little of the African continent before 1880. In 1875, they controlled 11 percent of Africa, although by 1902 that percentage had grown to 90 percent. During the Napoleonic wars, the British had established themselves in southern Africa by taking control of Cape Town, originally founded by the Dutch. After the wars, the British encouraged settlers to come to what they called the Cape Colony. British policies disgusted the Boers (BOORS or BORS) or Afrikaners (ah-fri-KAH-nurz), as the descendants of the Dutch colonists were called, and led them in 1835 to migrate north on the Great Trek to the region between the Orange and Vaal Rivers (later known as the Orange Free State) and north of the Vaal (the Transvaal). Hostilities between the British and the Boers continued.

In the 1880s, Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) largely determined British policy in southern Africa. Rhodes founded diamond- and gold-mining companies that enabled him to gain control of a territory north of the Transvaal that he named Rhodesia, after himself. Rhodes was a great champion of British expansion. He once said, “If there be a God, I think what he would like me to do is to paint as much of Africa British red as possible.” His imperialist ambitions led to his downfall in 1896, however, when the British government forced him to resign as prime minister of Rhodesia after he conspired to overthrow the neighboring Boer government without British approval.

Although the British government had hoped to avoid war with the Boers, it could not stop extremists on both sides from precipitating a conflict. The Boer War dragged on from 1899 to 1902 as the Boers proved to be an effective opponent. Due to the Boers' use of guerrilla tactics, the British sustained high casualties and immense expenses in securing victory. After the war, British policy toward the Boers was remarkably conciliatory. Transvaal and the Orange Free State had representative governments by 1907, and the Union of South Africa was created in 1910. Like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire.

Before 1880, the French and Portuguese had established the only other European settlements in Africa. The Portuguese had held on to their settlements in Angola on the west coast and Mozambique on the east coast. The French had started the conquest of Algeria in Muslim North Africa in 1830, although it was not until 1879 that French civilian rule was established there. The next year, 1880, the European scramble for possession of Africa began in earnest. By 1900, the French had added the huge area of French West Africa and

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Tunisia to their African empire. In 1912, they established a protectorate over much of Morocco; the rest was left to Spain.

After the Suez Canal was opened by the French in 1869, the British took an active interest in Egypt and sought to control the canal area, considering the canal their lifeline to India. They landed an expeditionary force in 1882 and soon established a protectorate over Egypt. From there, the British moved south into the Sudan and seized it after narrowly averting a war with France. Not to be outdone, Italy joined in the imperialist scramble. Their humiliating defeat by the Ethiopians in 1896 only led the Italians to try again in 1911 by invading and seizing Ottoman Tripoli, which they renamed Libya.

Central Africa was also added to the list of European colonies. Popular interest in the forbiddingly dense tropical jungles of Central Africa was first aroused in the 1860s and 1870s by explorers such as the Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the British American journalist Henry M. Stanley. But the real driving force for the colonization of Central Africa was King Leopold II (1865–1909) of Belgium, who had rushed enthusiastically into pursuit of empire in Africa: “To open to civilization,” he said, “the only part of our globe where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which envelops whole populations, is a crusade, if I may say so, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.” Profit, however, was far more important to Leopold than progress. In 1876, Leopold engaged Stanley to establish Belgian settlements in the Congo.

Between 1884 and 1900, the European powers had carved up most of the rest of Africa. At this time Germany also entered the ranks of the imperialist powers. Initially, Bismarck had downplayed the significance of colonies, but as domestic political pressures for a German empire increased, Bismarck became a political convert to colonialism (see the box “Does Germany Need Colonies?”). As he expressed it, “All this colonial business is a sham, but we need it for the elections.” The Germans established colonies in South West Africa, Cameroons, Togoland, and East Africa.

Does Germany Need Colonies?

After its unification in 1871, Germany sought to join the other great European powers in establishing a colonial empire. Among the supporters of German colonial expansion was Friedrich Fabri, a colonial administrator in Southwest Africa, who argued that colonization would encourage national growth and the spread of German culture. This excerpt is from Fabri's popular book, Does Germany Need Colonies?, published in Germany in 1879.

Friedrich Fabri, Does Germany Need Colonies?

Above all we need to regain ample, rewarding, and reliable sources of employment; we need new and reliable export markets; in short we need a well-designed and firmly implemented commercial and labor policy. Any far-reaching and perceptive

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attempt to execute such a policy will necessarily lead to the irrefutable conclusion that the German State needs colonial possessions.…

For us, the colonial question is not at all a question of political power. Whoever is guided by the desire for expanding German power has a poor understanding of it. It is rather a question of culture. Economic needs linked to broad national perspectives point to practical action. In looking for colonial possessions Germany is not prompted by the desire for expanding its power; it wants only to fulfill a national, we may even say a moral duty.…

In looking for commercial colonies the question is WHERE? German participation seems most important in the colonial exploitation of newly opened Central Africa.… The significance of Central Africa is much greater in every respect than has been assumed since antiquity. Should not Germany in its needs for colonies participate energetically in the competition for this massive territory? …

What matters above all is to raise our understanding about the significance and necessity of colonial possessions and thereby forcefully arouse the will of the nation in that direction. When we have overcome all opposition and turn to effective action, our first attempts with their inevitable troubles and difficulties will justify our effort. The German nation has long experience on the oceans, is skilled in industry and commerce, more capable than others in agricultural colonization, and furnished with an ample manpower like no other modern highly cultured nation. Should it not also enter successfully upon this new venture? The more we are convinced that the colonial question has become now a question of life and death for Germany, the fewer doubts we have. Well-planned and powerfully handled, it will have the most beneficial consequences for our economic situation, and for our entire national development.…

Even more important is the consideration that a people at the height of their political power can successfully maintain their historic position only as long as they recognize and prove themselves as the bearers of a cultural mission.…

It would be well if we Germans began to learn from the colonial destiny of our Anglo- Saxon cousins and emulate them in peaceful competition. When, centuries ago, the German empire stood at the head of the European states, it was the foremost commercial and maritime power. If the new Germany wants to restore and preserve its traditional powerful position in future, it will conceive of it as a cultural mission and no longer hesitate to practice its colonizing vocation.

What were Fabri's justifications for colonization?

Source: From Marvin Perry, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore H. von Laue, Sources of the Western

Tradition, vol. 2 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), pp. 249–250.

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By 1914, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal had divided Africa (see Map 24.1). Only Liberia, founded by emancipated American slaves, and Ethiopia remained free states. Despite the humanitarian rationalizations about the “white man's burden,” Africa had been conquered by European states determined to create colonial empires. With the exception of the Ethiopians, who defeated the Italians, any peoples who dared to resist were swiftly crushed by the superior military force of the Europeans.

Map 24.1

Africa in 1914.

The rush to acquire colonies by Europe's major powers was motivated by a combination of factors: ports and fueling stations for navies, sources of raw materials, enhancement of international prestige, outlets for nationalist feelings, expression of social Darwinism, and a desire to “civilize” non-Europeans.

Of the two countries with the largest amount of territory in Africa, which one's colonies were more geographically concentrated, and what could be the benefits of this?

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Chronology

The New Imperialism: Africa

Opening of the Suez Canal 1869

Leopold II of Belgium's settlements in the Congo

1876

French conquest of Algeria 1879

British expeditionary force in Egypt 1882

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Defeat of Italians by Ethiopians 1896

Boer War 1899–1902

Union of South Africa 1910

Italian seizure of Tripoli 1911

Imperialism in Asia

Although Asia had been open to Western influence since the sixteenth century, not much of its immense territory had fallen under direct European control. The Dutch were established in the East Indies, the Spanish were in the Philippines, and the French and Portuguese had trading posts on the Indian coast.

It was not until the explorations of Australia by Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1771 that Britain took an active interest in the East. The availability of land for grazing sheep and the discovery of gold led to an influx of free settlers, who slaughtered many of the indigenous inhabitants. In 1850, the British government granted the various Australian colonies virtually complete self-government, and fifty years later, on January 1, 1901, all the colonies were unified into the Commonwealth of Australia. Nearby New Zealand, which the British had declared a colony in 1840, was granted dominion status in 1907.

A private trading company known as the British East India Company had been responsible for subjugating much of India. In 1858, however, after a revolt of the sepoys, or Indian troops of the East India Company's army, had been crushed, the British Parliament transferred the company's powers directly to the government in London. In 1876, the title of empress of India was bestowed on Queen Victoria; Indians were now her colonial subjects.

Russian expansion in Asia was a logical outgrowth of its traditional territorial aggrandizement. Gradually, Russian settlers moved into cold and forbidding Siberia. They also moved south, attracted by the crumbling Ottoman Empire. By 1830, the Russians had established control over the entire northern coast of the Black Sea; from there, they pressed on into Central Asia, securing the trans-Caspian region by 1881. These advances brought the Russians to the borders of Persia and Afghanistan, where the British also had interests because of their desire to protect their holdings in India. In 1907, the Russians and British agreed to make Afghanistan a buffer state between Russian Turkestan and British India and divide Persia into two spheres of influence. Halted by the British in their expansion to the south, the Russians then moved east in Asia. But their occupation of Manchuria and their attempt to move into Korea brought war with Japan. After losing the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Russians agreed to a Japanese protectorate in Korea, and their Asian expansion was brought to a temporary halt (see Map 24.2).

Map 24.2

Asia in 1914.

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Asia became an important arena of international competition in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beset by economic stagnation and an inability to modernize, a weak China was unable to withstand the demands of the United States, European powers, and a Westernizing Japan. Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and the United States had direct or indirect control of nearly all of Asia by 1914.

Why would both Russia and Japan covet Manchuria?

The thrust of imperialism after 1880 led Westerners to move into new areas of Asia hitherto largely free of Western influence. By the nineteenth century, the ruling Manchu dynasty of the Chinese empire was showing signs of decline. In 1842, the British had obtained (through war) the island of Hong Kong and rights to trade in a number of Chinese cities. Other Western nations soon rushed in to gain similar trading privileges. Eventually, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan established spheres of influence and long-term leases on Chinese territory.

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Japan avoided Western intrusion until 1853–1854, when American naval forces under Commodore Matthew Perry forced the Japanese to grant the United States trading and diplomatic privileges. Japan, however, managed to avoid China's fate. By absorbing and adopting Western military and industrial methods, the Japanese developed a modern commercial and industrial system as well as a powerful military state. They established their own sphere of influence in China, and five years after they defeated the Russians in 1905, the Japanese formally annexed Korea.

In Southeast Asia, Britain established control over Burma (modern Myanmar) and the Malay States while France played an active role in subjugating Indochina. In the 1880s, the French extended “protection” over Cambodia, Annam, Tonkin, and Laos and organized them into the Union of French Indo-China. Only Siam (Thailand) remained free as a buffer state because of British-French rivalry.

The Pacific was also the scene of great power struggles and witnessed the entry of the United States onto the imperialist stage. Soon after Americans had made Hawaii's Pearl Harbor into a naval station in 1887, American settlers gained control of the sugar industry on the islands. When Hawaiian natives tried to reassert their authority, the U.S. Marines were brought in to “protect” American lives. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898 during the era of American nationalistic fervor generated by the Spanish-American War. The American defeat of Spain also encouraged Americans to extend their empire by acquiring Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands. Although the Filipinos hoped for independence, the Americans refused to grant it. As President McKinley said, the United States had the duty “to educate the Filipinos and uplift and Christianize them,” a remarkable statement in view of the fact that most of them had been Roman Catholics for centuries. It took three years and sixty thousand troops to pacify the Philippines and establish American control.

Chronology

The New Imperialism: Asia

Hong Kong to Britain, along with trading rights in cities in China

1842

Commodore Perry's mission to Japan 1853–1854

Rebellion of sepoys in India 1857–1858

Queen Victoria proclaimed empress of India

1876

Russians in Central Asia 1881

Spanish-American War; U.S. annexation of the Philippines

1898

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Commonwealth of Australia 1901

Commonwealth of New Zealand 1907

Russian-British agreement over Afghanistan and Persia

1907

Japanese annexation of Korea 1910

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3c Responses to Imperialism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-3c Responses to Imperialism

When Europeans imposed their culture on peoples they considered inferior, how did the conquered peoples respond? Initial attempts to expel the foreigners led to devastating defeats at the hands of Westerners, whose industrial technology gave them far superior weapons of war. Most of the indigenous peoples, accustomed to rule by small elites, simply accepted their new governors, making the imposition of Western rule relatively easy. The conquered peoples subsequently adjusted to the rule of foreigners in different ways. Some sought to maintain their cultural traditions, but others believed that adoption of Western ways would enable them to reform their societies and eventually challenge Western rule. Most people probably stood somewhere between the two extremes. Four examples illustrate different responses to foreign rule.

Africa

By the beginning of the twentieth century, a new class of African leaders had emerged. Educated in colonial schools and some even in the West, they were the first generation of Africans to know a great deal about the West and to write in the language of their colonial masters. Although this “new class” admired Western culture and even disliked the ways of their own countries, many came to resent the foreigners and their arrogant contempt for colonial peoples. Equally important, the economic prosperity of the West never extended to the colonies. To many Africans, colonialism meant the loss of their farmlands or terrible jobs on plantations or in sweatshops and factories run by foreigners.

Although middle-class Africans did not suffer to the extent that poor peasants or workers on plantations did, they too had complaints. They usually qualified only for menial jobs in the government or business. Segregated clubs, schools, and churches were set up as more European officials brought their wives and began to raise families. Europeans also had a habit of addressing natives by their first names or calling an adult male “boy.”

Such conditions led many members of the new urban educated class to harbor mixed feelings toward their colonial masters and the civilization they represented. Though willing to admit the superiority of many aspects of Western culture, these new intellectuals fiercely hated colonial rule and were determined to assert their own nationality and cultural destiny. Out of this mixture of hopes and resentments emerged the first stirrings of modern nationalism in Africa. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, in colonial societies across Africa, educated native peoples began to organize political parties and movements seeking the end of foreign rule.

China

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The humiliation of China by the Western powers led to much antiforeign violence, but the Westerners used this lawlessness as an excuse to extort further concessions from the Chinese. A major outburst of violence against foreigners occurred in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1901. “Boxers” was the popular name given to Chinese who belonged to a secret organization called the Society of Harmonious Fists, whose aim was to push the foreigners out of China. The Boxers murdered foreign missionaries, Chinese who had converted to Christianity, railroad workers, foreign businessmen, and even the German envoy to Beijing. Response to the killings was immediate and overwhelming. An allied army consisting of British, French, German, Russian, American, and Japanese troops attacked Beijing, restored order, and demanded more concessions from the Chinese government. The imperial government was so weakened that the forces of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat- sen (SOON yaht-SEN) (1866–1925), who adopted a program of “nationalism, democracy, and socialism,” overthrew the Manchu dynasty in 1912. The new Republic of China remained weak and ineffective, and China's travails were far from over.

Japan

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, it looked as if Japan would follow China's fate and be carved up into spheres of influence by aggressive Western powers. A remarkably rapid transformation, however, produced a very different result. Before 1868, the shogun, a powerful hereditary military governor assisted by a warrior nobility known as the samurai, exercised real power in Japan. The emperor's functions had become primarily religious. After the shogun's concessions to the Western nations, antiforeign sentiment led to a samurai revolt in 1867 and the restoration of the emperor as the rightful head of the government. The new emperor was the astute, dynamic, young Mutsuhito (moo-tsoo-HEE- toh) (1867–1912), who called his reign the Meiji (MAY-jee) (“enlightened government”). The new leaders who controlled the emperor now inaugurated a remarkable transformation of Japan that has since been known as the Meiji Restoration.

Recognizing the obvious military and industrial superiority of the West, the new leaders decided to modernize Japan by absorbing and adopting Western methods. Thousands of young Japanese were sent abroad to receive Western educations, especially in the social and natural sciences. A German-style army and a British-style navy were established. The Japanese copied the industrial and financial methods of the United States and developed a modern commercial and industrial system. A highly centralized administrative system copied from the French replaced the old system. Initially, the Japanese adopted the French principles of social and legal equality, but by 1890, they had created a political system that was democratic in form but authoritarian in practice. In imitating the West, Japan also developed a powerful military state.

India

The British government had been in control of India since the mid-nineteenth century. Under Parliament's supervision, a small group of British civil servants directed the affairs of India's almost 300 million people.

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The British brought order to a society that had been divided by civil wars for some time and implemented a relatively honest and efficient government. They also brought Western technology—railroads, banks, mines, industry, medical knowledge, and hospitals. The British introduced Western-style secondary schools and colleges where the Indian upper and middle classes and professional classes were educated so that they could serve as trained subordinates in the government and the army. British legislation also affected the legal status of Indian women. In 1829, the British banned the practice of sati, which called for a widow to immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre. Female infanticide was also discouraged. Although women's position in Indian society was not significantly altered, the recognition of women by the law did afford some protection against these practices.

However, the Indian people paid a high price for the peace and stability brought by British rule. Due to population growth in the nineteenth century, extreme poverty was a way of life for most Indians; almost two-thirds of the population was malnourished in 1901. British industrialization brought little improvement for the masses. British manufactured goods destroyed local industries, and Indian wealth was used to pay British officials and the large army. The system of education served only the elite, upper-class Indians, and it was conducted only in the rulers' English language, while 90 percent of the population remained illiterate. Even for the Indians who benefited the most from their Western educations, British rule was degrading. The best jobs and the best housing were reserved for Britons. Despite their education, the Indians were never considered equals of the British, whose racial attitudes were made quite clear by Lord Kitchener, one of Britain's foremost military commanders in India, when he said, “It is this consciousness of the inherent superiority of the European which has won for us India. However well educated and clever a native may be, and however brave he may prove himself, I believe that no rank we can bestow on him would cause him to be considered an equal of the British officer.” Such smug racial attitudes made it difficult for British rule, no matter how beneficent, ever to be ultimately accepted and led to the rise of an Indian nationalist movement. By 1883, when the Indian National Congress was formed, moderate, educated Indians were beginning to seek self- government. By 1919, in response to British violence and British insensitivity, Indians were demanding complete independence.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-3d Results of the New Imperialism Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-3d Results of the New Imperialism

By 1900, almost all the societies of Africa and Asia were either under full colonial rule or, as in the case of China and the Ottoman Empire, at a point of virtual collapse. Only a handful of states, such as Japan in East Asia, Thailand in Southeast Asia, Afghanistan and Persia in the Middle East, and mountainous Ethiopia in East Africa, managed to escape internal disintegration or subjection to colonial rule. For the most part, the exceptions were the result of good fortune rather than design. Thailand escaped subjugation primarily because officials in Britain and France found it more convenient to transform the country into a buffer state than to fight over it. Ethiopia and Afghanistan survived due to their remote location and mountainous terrain. Only Japan managed to avoid the common fate through a concerted strategy of political and economic reform. With the coming of imperialism, a global economy was finally established, and the domination of Western civilization over the cultures of Africa and Asia appeared to be complete. At the same time, the competition for lands abroad exacerbated the rivalry among European states.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-4 International Rivalry and the Coming of War Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-4 International Rivalry and the Coming of War

Focus Questions: What was the Bismarckian system of alliances, and how successful was it at keeping the peace? What issues lay behind the international crises that Europe faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

Before 1914, Europeans had experienced almost fifty years of peace. There had been wars (including wars of conquest in the non-Western world), but none had involved the Great Powers. A series of crises occurred that might easily have led to general war. One reason they did not is that until 1890, Bismarck of Germany exercised a restraining influence on the Europeans.

Bismarck knew that the emergence of a unified Germany in 1871 had upset the balance of power established at Vienna in 1815. Fearing a possible anti-German alliance between France and Russia, and possibly even Austria, Bismarck made a defensive alliance with Austria in 1879 that was joined by Italy in 1882. The Triple Alliance of 1882 committed Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy to support the existing political order while providing a defense against France. At the same time, Bismarck maintained a separate treaty with Russia, hoping to prevent a French-Russian alliance that would threaten Germany with the possibility of a two-front war. The Bismarckian system of alliances, geared to preserving peace and the status quo, had worked, but in 1890, Emperor William II dismissed Bismarck and began to chart a new direction for Germany's foreign policy.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-4a New Directions and New Crises Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-4a New Directions and New Crises

Emperor William II embarked on an activist foreign policy dedicated to enhancing German power by finding, as he put it, Germany's rightful “place in the sun.” One of his changes in Bismarck's foreign policy was to drop the treaty with Russia, which the emperor viewed as being at odds with Germany's alliance with Austria. The ending of the pact achieved what Bismarck had feared: it brought France and Russia together. Republican France leaped at the chance to draw closer to tsarist Russia, and in 1894, the two powers concluded a military alliance.

During the next ten years, German policies abroad caused the British to draw closer to France. By 1907, a loose confederation of Great Britain, France, and Russia—known as the Triple Entente (ahn-TAHNT)—stood opposed to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria- Hungary, and Italy. Europe was divided into two opposing camps that became more and more inflexible and unwilling to compromise. When the members of the two alliances became involved in a new series of crises between 1908 and 1913 over control of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans (see Map 24.3), the stage was set for World War I.

Map 24.3

The Balkans in 1913.

The First Balkan War (1912) liberated most of the region from Ottoman control; the Second Balkan War (1913) increased the size of Greece and Serbia at Bulgaria's expense. Russia supported the ambitions of fellow Slavs in Serbia, who sought to create a large Slavic kingdom in the Balkans. Austria and its ally Germany opposed Serbia's ambitions.

What territories had the Ottomans lost by the end of 1913?

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-4b Crises in the Balkans, 1908–1913 Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-4b Crises in the Balkans, 1908–1913

The Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 initiated a chain of events that eventually spun out of control. Since 1878, Bosnia and Herzegovina (HAYRT-suh-guh-VEE-nuh) had been under the protection of Austria, but in 1908, Austria took the drastic step of annexing these two Slavic-speaking territories. Serbia became outraged at this action because it dashed the Serbs' hopes of creating a large Serbian kingdom that would include most of the southern Slavs. But this possibility was why the Austrians had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. A large Serbia would be a threat to the unity of their empire with its large Slavic population. The Russians, as protectors of their fellow Slavs and with their own desire to increase their authority in the Balkans, supported the Serbs and opposed the Austrian action. Backed by the Russians, the Serbs prepared for war against Austria. At this point, William II intervened and demanded that the Russians accept Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina or face war with Germany. Weakened from their defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904– 1905, the Russians backed down. Humiliated, they vowed revenge.

European attention returned to the Balkans in 1912 when Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro (mahn-tuh-NEE-groh), and Greece organized the Balkan League and defeated the Ottomans in the First Balkan War. When the victorious allies were unable to agree on how to divide the conquered Ottoman territory, the Second Balkan War erupted in 1913, in which Greece, Serbia, Romania, and the Ottoman Empire attacked and defeated Bulgaria. As a result, Bulgaria obtained only a small part of Macedonia, and most of the rest was divided between Serbia and Greece. Yet Serbia's aspirations remained unfulfilled. The two Balkan wars left the inhabitants embittered and created more tensions among the Great Powers.

One of Serbia's major ambitions had been to acquire Albanian territory that would give it a port on the Adriatic. At the London Conference, arranged by Austria at the end of the Balkan wars, the Austrians had blocked Serbia's wishes by creating an independent Albania. The Germans, as Austrian allies, had supported this move. In their frustration, Serbian nationalists increasingly portrayed the Austrians as monsters who were keeping the Serbs from becoming a great nation. As Serbia's chief supporters, the Russians were also upset by the turn of events in the Balkans. The feeling was growing among Russian leaders that they could not back down again in the event of a confrontation with Austria or Germany in the Balkans.

Austria-Hungary had achieved another of its aims, but it was still convinced that Serbia was a mortal threat to its empire and must at some point be crushed. Meanwhile, the French and Russian governments renewed their alliance and promised each other that they would not back down at the next crisis. Britain drew closer to France. By the beginning of 1914, two armed camps viewed each other with suspicion. The European “age of progress” was about to come to an inglorious and bloody end.

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Chapter 24: An Age of Modernity, Anxiety, and Imperialism, 1894–1914: 24-5 Chapter Review Book Title: Western Civilization: A Brief History, Volume II: Since 1500 Printed By: Sijia Yu ([email protected]) © 2017 Cengage Learning, Cengage Learning

24-5 Chapter Review

24-5a Chapter Summary

What many Europeans liked to call their “age of progress” in the decades before 1914 was also an era of anxiety. Driven by national rivalry, Social Darwinism, religious and humanitarian concerns, and economic demands for raw materials and overseas investment, Western nations at the end of the nineteenth century began a renewed frenzy of imperialist expansion around the world. By 1914, European nations had carved up most of Africa into colonies and created spheres of influence in Asia. Western imperialism also affected both China and Japan. The opening of China to Western trade concessions ultimately led to a revolution and the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. Japan adopted Western military, educational, and governmental ways, even becoming an imperialist power in its own right. At the same time, Western treatment of non-Western peoples as racial inferiors caused educated, non-Western elites in these colonies to initiate movements for national independence. Before these movements could be successful, however, the power that Europeans had achieved through their mass armies and technological superiority had to be weakened. The Europeans soon inadvertently accomplished this task by demolishing their own civilization on the battlegrounds of Europe in World War I.

This war was a result of the growing tensions created by national rivalries. In competing with and fearing each other, the European nations formed defensive alliances that helped maintain a balance of power but also led to the creation of large armies, enormous military establishments, and immense arsenals. The alliances also generated tensions that were unleashed when Europeans were unable to resolve a series of crises, especially in the Balkans, and rushed into the catastrophic carnage of World War I.

The cultural revolutions before 1914 had also produced anxiety and a crisis of confidence in European civilization. Albert Einstein showed that time and space were relative to the observer, that matter was simply another form of energy, and that the old Newtonian view of the universe was no longer valid. Adding to the uncertainties of the age, Sigmund Freud argued that human behavior was governed not by reason but by the unconscious. Some intellectuals used the ideas of Charles Darwin to argue that in the struggle of races and nations, the fittest survive. Collectively, these new ideas helped create a modern consciousness that

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questioned most Europeans' optimistic faith in reason, the rational structure of nature, and the certainty of progress. As we shall see in the next two chapters, the devastating experiences of World War I would turn this culture of uncertainty into a way of life after 1918.