CHAPTER 24dennis/106/106-Bkgr/24-Fin-de-Siecle.pdf · The cultural life of Europe in the decades...

C H A P T E R

24An Age ofModernityand Anxiety,1894–1914

L

CHAPTER OUTLINE

• Toward the Modern Consciousness: Intellectual and Cultural Developments

• Politics: New Directions and New Uncertainties• The New Imperialism• International Rivalry and the Coming of War• Conclusion

FOCUS QUESTIONS

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

• What difficulties did women, Jews, and the working classes face in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how successful werethey in achieving their goals?

• 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 andAsia?

• What was the Bismarckian system of alliances, and how successful wasit at keeping the peace?

• What issues lay behind the international crises that Europe faced in thelate nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

MANY EUROPEANS AFTER 1894 continued to believethey lived in an era of material and human progress. For

some, however, progress entailed much struggle. Emmeline Pankhurst,who became the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Britain,said that her determination to fight for women’s rights stemmed from achildhood memory: “My father bent over me, shielding the candle flamewith his big hand and I heard him say, somewhat sadly, ‘What a pityshe wasn’t born a lad.’” Eventually, Emmeline Pankhurst and herdaughters marched and fought for women’s right to vote. The strugglewas often violent: “They came in bruised, hatless, faces scratched, eyes

710

An Age of Modernity and Anxiety, 1894–1914 711

swollen, noses bleeding,” one of the Pankhurst daugh-ters recalled. Arrested and jailed in 1908, Pankhurstinformed her judges: “If you had the power to send usto prison, not for six months, but for six years, or forour lives, the Government must not think they couldstop this agitation. It would go on!” It did go on, andwomen in Britain did eventually receive the right tovote; to some, this was yet another confirmation ofEurope’s progress.

But the period after 1894 was not just a time ofprogress; it was also a time of great tension as imperial-ist adventures, international rivalries, and culturaluncertainties disturbed the apparent calm. After 1880,Europeans engaged in a great race for colonies aroundthe world. This competition for lands abroad greatlyintensified existing antagonisms among Europeanstates.

Ultimately, Europeans proved incapable of find-ing constructive ways to cope with their internationalrivalries. The development of two large alliance sys-tems—the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente—mayhave helped preserve peace for a time, but eventuallythe alliances made it easier for the European nations tobe drawn into World War I. The alliances helped main-tain a balance of power, but also led to the creation oflarge armies, enormous military establishments, andimmense arsenals. The alliances also helped createtensions that were unleashed when Europeans rushedinto the catastrophic carnage of World War I.

The cultural life of Europe in the decades before1914 reflected similar dynamic tensions. The advent ofmass education produced more well-informed citizens,but also made it easier for governments to stir up themasses by nationalistic appeals through the new massjournalism. At the same time, despite the appearance ofprogress, European philosophers, writers, and artistswere creating modern cultural expressions that ques-tioned traditional ideas and values and increasinglyprovoked a crisis of confidence. Before 1914, manyintellectuals had a sense of unease about the directionsociety was heading, accompanied by a feeling of immi-nent catastrophe. They proved remarkably prophetic.

◆ Toward the ModernConsciousness: Intellectualand Cultural Developments

Before 1914, most Europeans continued to believe in thevalues and ideals that had been generated by the Scien-tific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Reason, science,and progress were still important words in the European

vocabulary. The ability of human beings to improve them-selves and achieve a better society seemed to be welldemonstrated by a rising standard of living, urban improve-ments, and mass education. Such products of moderntechnology as electric lights, phonographs, and automo-biles reinforced the popular prestige of science and the beliefin the ability of the human mind to comprehend the uni-verse through the use of reason. Near the end of the nine-teenth century, however, a dramatic transformation in therealm of ideas and culture challenged many of theseassumptions. A new view of the physical universe, anappeal to the irrational, alternative views of human nature,and radically innovative forms of literary and artistic expres-sion shattered old beliefs and opened the way to a mod-ern consciousness. Although the real impact of many ofthese ideas was not felt until after World War I, they servedto provoke a sense of confusion and anxiety before 1914that would become even more pronounced after the war.

l Developments in the Sciences: TheEmergence of a New Physics

Science was one of the chief pillars underlying the opti-mistic and rationalistic view of the world that many West-erners shared in the nineteenth century. Supposedly basedon hard facts and cold reason, science offered a certaintyof belief in the orderliness of nature that was comfortingto many people for whom traditional religious beliefs nolonger had much meaning. This faith in science’s ability toexplain the world was reflected in an introductory para-graph in the University of Chicago’s catalog in 1893: “Itseems probable that most of the grand underlying princi-ples in the physical sciences have been firmly establishedand that further advances are to be sought chiefly in therigorous application of these principles to all the phe-nomena which come under our notice.” Many naivelybelieved that the application of already known scientificlaws would give humanity a complete understanding ofthe physical world and an accurate picture of reality. Thenew physics dramatically altered that perspective.

Throughout much of the nineteenth century, West-erners adhered to the mechanical conception of the uni-verse postulated by the classical physics of Isaac Newton.In this perspective, the universe was viewed as a giantmachine in which time, space, and matter were objectiverealities that existed independently of those observingthem. Matter was thought to be composed of indivisibleand solid material bodies called atoms.

These views were first seriously questioned at the endof the nineteenth century. The French scientist Marie Curie(1867–1934) and her husband Pierre (1859–1906) discov-ered that an element called radium gave off rays of radia-tion that apparently came from within the atom itself.Atoms were not simply hard, material bodies but smallworlds containing such subatomic particles as electronsand protons that behaved in seemingly random and inex-plicable fashion. Inquiry into the disintegrative processwithin atoms became a central theme of the new physics.

712 C H A P T E R 2 4

Building upon this work, in 1900 a Berlin physicist,Max Planck (1858–1947), disclosed a discovery that hebelieved was “as important as that of Newton.” Planckrejected the belief that a heated body radiates energy ina steady stream, but maintained instead that energy isradiated discontinuously, in irregular packets that hecalled “quanta.” The quantum theory raised fundamentalquestions about the subatomic realm of the atom. By1900, the old view of atoms as the basic building blocksof the material world was being seriously questioned, andthe world of Newtonian physics was in trouble.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955), a German-born patentofficer working in Switzerland, pushed these new theoriesof thermodynamics into new terrain. In 1905, Einsteinpublished a paper, entitled “The Electro-dynamics of Mov-ing Bodies,” that contained his special theory of relativity.According to relativity theory, space and time are not ab-solute, but relative to the observer, and both are inter-woven into what Einstein called a four-dimensionalspace-time continuum. Neither space nor time had anexistence independent of human experience. As Einsteinlater explained simply to a journalist: “It was formerly

believed that if all material things disappeared out of theuniverse, time and space would be left. According to therelativity theory, however, time and space disappeartogether with the things.”1 Moreover, matter and ener-gy reflected the relativity of time and space. Einstein con-cluded that matter was nothing but another form ofenergy. His epochal formula E = mc2—that each particleof matter is equivalent to its mass times the square ofthe velocity of light—was the key theory explaining thevast energies contained within the atom. It led to theatomic age.

Like many geniuses throughout the ages, Einsteinsoon learned that new ideas are not readily accepted bypeople accustomed to old patterns. His work threatenedthe long-accepted Newtonian celestial mechanics and wasnot well received initially. When Einstein applied for aposition at the University of Bern in 1907, he was imme-diately rejected. Many scientists were also unable to com-prehend Einstein’s ideas. During a total eclipse of the sunin May 1919, however, scientists were able to demonstratethat light was deflected in the gravitational field of the sun,just as Einstein had predicted. This confirmed Einstein’sgeneral theory of relativity and opened the scientific andintellectual world to his ideas. The 1920s would becomethe “heroic age” of physics.

l Toward a New Understanding of the Irrational

Intellectually, the decades before 1914 witnessed a com-bination of contradictory developments. Thanks to theinfluence of science, confidence in human reason andprogress still remained a dominant thread. At the sametime, however, a small group of intellectuals attacked theidea of optimistic progress, dethroned reason, and glori-fied the irrational. Although these thinkers and writerswere a distinct minority, the destructiveness of World WarI made their ideas even more appealing after 1918 whenit seemed that they had been proved right.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was one of theintellectuals who glorified the irrational. According to Nietzsche, Western bourgeois society was decadent andincapable of any real cultural creativity, primarily becauseof its excessive emphasis on the rational faculty at theexpense of emotions, passions, and instincts. Reason,claimed Nietzsche, actually played little role in human lifebecause humans were at the mercy of irrational life forces.

Nietzsche believed that Christianity should shoul-der much of the blame for Western civilization’s enfee-blement. The “slave morality” of Christianity, he believed,had obliterated the human impulse for life and hadcrushed the human will:

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormousand innermost perversion. . . . I call it the one immortalblemish of mankind. . . . Christianity has taken the side ofeverything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an idealout of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life.

MARIE CURIE. Marie Curie was born in Warsaw, Poland,but studied at the University of Paris where she receiveddegrees in both physics and mathematics. She was thefirst woman to win two Nobel Prizes, one in 1903 inphysics and another in chemistry in 1911. She is shown here in her Paris laboratory in 1921.


. . . Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands inantithesis to the basic emotions which enhance the energyof the feeling of life: it has a depressive effect. One losesforce when one pities.2

According to Nietzsche, Christianity had crushed spon-taneous human instincts and inculcated weakness andhumility.

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 longerpossible to believe in some kind of cosmic order. Elimi-nating God and hence Christian morality had liberatedhuman beings and made it possible to create a higher kindof being Nietzsche called the superman: “I teach you theSuperman. Man is something that is to be surpassed.”3

Superior intellectuals must free themselves from the ordi-nary thinking of the masses, “the slaves, or the populace,or the herd, or whatever name you care to give them.”Beyond good and evil, the supermen would create theirown values and lead the masses: “It is necessary for higherman to declare war upon the masses.” Nietzsche rejectedand condemned political democracy, social reform, anduniversal suffrage.

Another popular revolutionary against reason in the1890s was Henri Bergson (1859–1941), a French Jewishphilosopher whose lectures at the University of Paris madehim one of the most important influences in Frenchthought in the early twentieth century. Bergson acceptedrational, scientific thought as a practical instrument forproviding useful knowledge, but maintained that it wasincapable of arriving at truth or ultimate reality. To him,reality was the “life force” that suffused all things; it couldnot be divided into analyzable parts. Reality was a wholethat could only be grasped intuitively and experienceddirectly. When we analyze it, we have merely a descrip-tion, no longer the reality we have experienced.

Georges Sorel (1847–1922), a French political the-orist, combined Bergson’s and Nietzsche’s ideas on thelimits of rational thinking with his own passionate interestin revolutionary socialism. Sorel understood the politicalpotential of the nonrational and advocated violent actionas the only sure way to achieve the aims of socialism. Todestroy capitalist society, he recommended the use of thegeneral strike, envisioning it as a mythic image that hadthe power to inspire workers to take violent, heroic actionagainst the capitalist order. Sorel also came to believe thatthe new socialist society would have to be governed by asmall elite ruling body because the masses were incapableof ruling themselves.

l Sigmund Freud and the Emergence of Psychoanalysis

Although poets and mystics had revealed a world ofunconscious and irrational behavior, many scientificallyoriented intellectuals under the impact of Enlightenmentthought continued to believe that human beings

responded to conscious motives in a rational fashion.At the end of the nineteenth century and beginning ofthe twentieth, the Viennese doctor Sigmund Freud(1856–1939) put forth a series of theories that underminedoptimism about the rational nature of the human mind.Freud’s thought, like the new physics and the irrational-ism of Nietzsche, added to the uncertainties of the age. Hismajor ideas were published in 1900 in The Interpretationof Dreams, which contained the basic foundation of whatcame to be known as psychoanalysis.

According to Freud, human behavior was stronglydetermined by the unconscious, by former experiencesand inner drives of which people were largely oblivious.To explore the contents of the unconscious, Freud reliednot only on hypnosis but also on dreams, but the latterwere dressed in an elaborate code that had to be deci-phered if the contents were to be properly understood.

But why did some experiences whose influence per-sisted in controlling an individual’s life remain uncon-scious? According to Freud, the answer was repression(see the box on p. 714), a process by which unsettlingexperiences were blotted from conscious awareness butstill continued to influence behavior because they hadbecome part of the unconscious. To explain how repres-sion worked, Freud elaborated an intricate theory of theinner life of human beings.

According to Freud, a human being’s inner life wasa battleground of three contending forces: the id, ego, andsuperego. The id was the center of unconscious drives andwas ruled by what Freud termed the pleasure principle. Ascreatures of desire, human beings directed their energytoward pleasure and away from pain. The id contained allkinds of lustful drives and desires, crude appetites andimpulses, loves and hates. The ego was the seat of rea-son and hence the coordinator of the inner life. It was gov-erned by the reality principle. Although humans weredominated by the pleasure principle, a true pursuit of plea-sure was not feasible. The reality principle meant that peo-ple rejected pleasure so that they might live together insociety. The superego was the locus of conscience and rep-resented the inhibitions and moral values that society ingeneral and parents in particular imposed upon people.The superego served to force the ego to curb the unsatis-factory drives of the id.

The human being was thus a battleground betweenid, ego, and superego. Ego and superego exerted restrain-ing influences on the unconscious id and repressed or kept out of consciousness what they wanted to. The mostimportant repressions, according to Freud, were sexual,and he went on to develop a theory of infantile sexualdrives embodied in the Oedipus complex (Electra complexfor females), or the infant’s craving for exclusive posses-sion of the parent of the opposite sex. Repression beganin childhood, and psychoanalysis was accomplishedthrough a dialogue between psychotherapist and patientin which the therapist probed deeply into memory in orderto retrace the chain of repression all the way back to its

714 C H A P T E R 2 4

childhood origins. By making the conscious mind awareof the unconscious and its repressed contents, the patient’spsychic conflict was resolved.

Freud, Marx, and Darwin have often been linkedtogether as the three intellectual giants of the nineteenthcentury. Although many of Freud’s ideas have been shownto be wrong in many details, he is still regarded as animportant figure because of the impact his theories havehad. Many historians still accept Freud’s judgment of him-self: “I have the distinct feeling that I have touched on oneof the great secrets of nature.”

l The Impact of Darwin: SocialDarwinism and Racism

In the second half of the nineteenth century, scientific the-ories were sometimes wrongly applied to achieve otherends. The application of Darwin’s principle of organic evo-lution to the social order came to be known as Social Dar-

winism. The most popular exponent of Social Darwinismwas the British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).Using Darwin’s terminology, Spencer argued that societieswere organisms that evolved through time from a strug-gle with their environment. Progress came from “the strug-gle for survival,” as the “fit”—the strong—advanced whilethe weak declined. As Spencer expressed it in 1896 in hisbook Social Statics:

Pervading all Nature we may see at work a stern disciplinewhich is a little cruel that it may be very kind. . . . Mean-while, the well-being of existing humanity and the unfoldingof it into this ultimate perfection, are both secured by thesame beneficial though severe discipline to which the ani-mate creation at large is subject. It seems hard that anunskillfulness, which with all his efforts he cannot over-come, should entail hunger upon the artisan. It seems hardthat a laborer, incapacitated by sickness from competingwith his stronger fellows, should have to bear the resultingprivations. It seems hard that widows and orphans shouldbe left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when

Freud’s psychoanalytical theories resulted from his attemptto understand the world of the unconscious. This excerptis taken from a Iecture given in 1909 in which Freuddescribes how he arrived at his theory of the role of repres-sion. Although Freud valued science and reason, his theo-ries of the unconscious produced a new image of thehuman being as governed less by reason than by irra-tional forces.

l Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures onPsychoanalysis

I did not abandon it [his technique of encouragingpatients to reveal forgotten experiences], however,before the observations I made during my use of itafforded me decisive evidence. I found confirmation ofthe fact that the forgotten memories were not lost. Theywere in the patient’s possession and were ready toemerge in association to what was still known by him;but there was some force that prevented them frombecoming conscious and compelled them to remainunconscious. The existence of this force could beassumed with certainty, since one became aware of an effort corresponding to it if, in opposition to it, onetried to introduce the unconscious memories into thepatient’s consciousness. The force which was maintain-ing the pathological condition became apparent in theform of resistance on the part of the patient.

It was on this idea of resistance, then, that I basedmy view of the course of physical events in hysteria. Inorder to effect a recovery, it had proved necessary toremove these resistances. Starting out from the mecha-nism of cure, it now became possible to construct quite

definite ideas of the origin of the illness. The same forceswhich, in the form of resistance, were now offeringopposition to the forgotten material’s being made con-scious, must formerly have brought about the forgettingand must have pushed the pathogenic experiences inquestion out of consciousness. I gave the name of“repression” to this hypothetical process, and I consid-ered that it was proved by the undeniable existence ofresistance.

The further question could then be raised as to whatthese forces were and what the determinants were of therepression in which we now recognized the pathogenicmechanism of hysteria. A comparative study of thepathogenic situations which we had come to knowthrough the cathartic procedure made it possible toanswer this question. All these experiences had involvedthe emergence of a wishful impulse which was in sharpcontrast to the subject’s other wishes and which provedincompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards ofhis personality. There had been a short conflict, and theend of this internal struggle was that the idea which hadappeared before consciousness as the vehicle of thisirreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression, waspushed out of consciousness with all its attached memo-ries, and was forgotten. Thus the incompatibility of thewish in question with the patient’s ego was the motivefor the repression; the subject’s ethical and other stan-dards were the repressing forces. An acceptance of theincompatible wishful impulse or a prolongation of theconflict would have produced a high degree of unplea-sure; this unpleasure was avoided by means of repres-sion, which was thus revealed as one of the devicesserving to protect the mental personality.

Freud and the Concept of Repression

L


regarded not separately but in connection with the interestsof universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to befull of beneficence—the same beneficence which brings toearly graves the children of diseased parents, and singlesout the intemperate and the debilitated as the victims of anepidemic.4

The state, then, should not intervene in this natural pro-cess. Some prominent entrepreneurs used Social Darwin-ism to explain their success in the competitive businessworld. The strong and fit, the able and energetic had risento the top; the stupid and lazy had fallen by the wayside.

Darwin’s ideas were also applied to human societyin an even more radical way by rabid nationalists andracists. In their pursuit of national greatness, extremenationalists argued that nations, too, were engaged in a“struggle for existence” in which only the fittest survived.The German general Friedrich von Bernhardi gave war aDarwinist interpretation in his book, Germany and theNext War, published in 1907. He argued that:

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regu-lative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dis-pensed with, since without it an unhealthy developmentwill follow, which excludes every advancement of the race,and therefore all real civilization. “War is the father of allthings.” The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recog-nized this.5

Numerous nationalist organizations preached the samedoctrine as Bernhardi. The Nationalist Association of Italy,for example, founded in 1910, declared that “we mustteach Italy the value of international struggle. But inter-national struggle is war? Well, then, let there be war! Andnationalism will arouse the will for a victorious war, . . .the only way to national redemption.”6

Although certainly not new to Western society,racism, too, was dramatically revived and strengthenedby new biological arguments. Darwinian concepts wereused throughout the Western world to justify the newimperialism of the late nineteenth century (see The New

SIGMUND FREUD. Freud was one of theintellectual giants of the nineteenth cen-tury. His belief that unconscious forcesstrongly determine human behaviorformed the foundation for twentieth-century psychoanalysis.

716 C H A P T E R 2 4

Imperialism later in this chapter). Perhaps nowhere wasthe combination of extreme nationalism and racism moreevident and more dangerous than in Germany where racistnationalism was expressed in volkish thought. The con-cept of the Volk (nation, people, or race) had been anunderlying idea in German history since the beginning ofthe nineteenth century. One of the chief propagandists forGerman volkish ideology at the turn of the century wasHouston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), an English-man who became a German citizen. His book, The Foun-dations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1899, madea special impact on Germany. Modern-day Germans,according to Chamberlain, were the only pure successorsof the Aryans who were portrayed as the true and origi-nal creators of Western culture. The Aryan race, underGerman leadership, must be prepared to fight for Westerncivilization and save it from the destructive assaults ofsuch lower races as Jews, Negroes, and Orientals. Increas-ingly, Jews were singled out by German volkish national-ists as the racial enemy in biological terms and as parasiteswho wanted to destroy the Aryan race.

l The Attack on Christianity and theResponse of the Churches

The growth of scientific thinking as well as the forces ofmodernization presented new challenges to the Christianchurches. Industrialization and urbanization had an espe-cially adverse effect on religious institutions. The massmigration of people from the countryside to the city meanta change from the close-knit, traditional ties of the vil-lage in which the church had been a key force to newurban patterns of social life from which the churches wereoften excluded. The established Christian churches had aweak hold on workers. Although workers were not athe-ists, as is sometimes claimed, they tended to develop theirown culture in which organized religion played little role.

The political movements of the late nineteenth cen-tury were also hostile to the established Christianchurches. Beginning during the eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment and continuing well into the nineteenthcentury, European governments, especially in predomi-nantly Catholic countries, had imposed controls overchurch courts, religious orders, and appointments of theclergy. But after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, gov-ernments were eager to use the churches’ aid in reestab-lishing order and therefore relaxed these controls. InFrance, the murder of the archbishop of Paris by the ParisCommune of 1871 served as an impetus to return peopletemporarily to organized religion. As the British CatholicCardinal Manning wrote to the British prime minister, “Mybelief is that society without Christianity is the Commune.What hope can you give me?”7

Eventually, however, the close union of state author-ities with established churches produced a backlash in theform of anticlericalism, especially in the liberal nation-states of the late nineteenth century. As one example, in

the 1880s the French republican government substitutedcivic training for religious instruction in order to under-mine the Catholic church’s control of education. In 1901,Catholic teaching orders were outlawed, and four yearslater, in 1905, church and state were completely separated.

Science became one of the chief threats to all theChristian churches and even to religion itself in the nine-teenth century. Darwin’s theory of evolution, acceptedby ever-larger numbers of educated Europeans, seemed tocontradict the doctrine of divine creation. By suppress-ing Darwin’s books and forbidding the teaching of the evo-lutionary hypothesis, the churches often caused even moreeducated people to reject established religions.

The scientific spirit also encouraged a number of bib-lical scholars to apply critical principles to the Bible, lead-ing to the so-called higher criticism. One of its leadingexponents was Ernst Renan (1823–1892), a FrenchCatholic scholar. In his Life of Jesus, Renan questioned thehistorical accuracy of the Bible and presented a radicallydifferent picture of Jesus. He saw Jesus not as the son ofGod, but as a human being whose value lay in the ex-ample he provided by his life and teaching. To Renan,Jesus’ belief in his own divinity was merely the result ofhallucinations.

One response of the Christian churches to theseattacks was the outright rejection of modern ideas andforces. Protestant fundamentalist sects were especiallyimportant in maintaining a literal interpretation of theBible. The Catholic church under Pope Pius IX (1846–1878) also took a rigid stand against modern ideas. In 1864, Pope Pius issued a papal encyclical called theSyllabus of Errors in which he stated that it is “an error tobelieve that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcilehimself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and mod-ern civilization.” He condemned nationalism, socialism,religious toleration, lay-controlled education, and freedomof speech and press.

Rejection of the new was not the churches’ onlyresponse, however. A religious movement called Mod-ernism included an attempt by the churches to reinterpretChristianity in the light of new developments. The mod-ernists viewed the Bible as a book of useful moral ideas,encouraged Christians to become involved in socialreforms, and insisted that the churches must provide agreater sense of community. The Catholic church con-demned Modernism in 1907 and had driven it under-ground by the beginning of World War I. In Protestantchurches, modernists competed with fundamentalists andhad more success.

Yet another response of the Christian churches tomodern ideas was compromise, an approach especiallyevident in the Catholic church during the pontificate ofLeo XIII (1878–1903). Pope Leo permitted the teaching ofevolution as a hypothesis in Catholic schools and alsoresponded to the challenges of modernization in the eco-nomic and social spheres. In his encyclical De RerumNovarum, issued in 1891, he upheld the individual’s right


to private property but at the same time criticized “naked”capitalism for the poverty and degradation in which it hadleft the working classes. Much in socialism, he declared,was Christian in principle, but he condemned Marxiansocialism for its materialistic and antireligious foundations.The pope recommended that Catholics form socialist par-ties and labor unions of their own to help the workers.

Other religious groups also made efforts to win sup-port for Christianity among the working-class poor andto restore religious practice among the urban workingclasses. The mainstream churches played only a limitedrole, however, because their parish systems were not pre-pared to cope with the flood of urban immigrants. Sects ofevangelical missionaries were more successful, especiallythe Salvation Army founded in London in 1865 by WilliamBooth, the first “general” of the army. The Salvation Armyestablished food centers, shelters where the homelesscould sleep, and “rescue homes” for women, but all thesehad a larger purpose as Booth admitted: “It is primarilyand mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek thesalvation of the body.”8 The Salvation Army moved toParis in the 1880s, but was not well received by FrenchProtestants who considered its revivalist-style meetingsvulgar.

l The Culture of Modernity

The revolution in physics and psychology was paralleledby a revolution in literature and the arts. Before 1914, writ-ers and artists were rebelling against the traditional liter-ary and artistic styles that had dominated Europeancultural life since the Renaissance. The changes that theyproduced have since been called Modernism.

/ NATURALISM AND SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE

Throughout much of the late nineteenth century, literaturewas dominated by Naturalism. Naturalists accepted thematerial world as real and felt that literature should berealistic. By addressing social problems, writers could con-tribute to an objective understanding of the world.Although Naturalism was a continuation of Realism, itlacked the underlying note of liberal optimism about peo-ple and society that had still been prevalent in the 1850s.The Naturalists were pessimistic about Europe’s future andoften portrayed characters caught in the grip of forcesbeyond their control.

The novels of the French writer, Émile Zola(1840–1902), provide a good example of Naturalism.Against a backdrop of the urban slums and coal fields ofnorthern France, Zola showed how alcoholism and differ-ent environments affected people’s lives. The materialisticscience of his age had an important influence on Zola. He had read Darwin’s Origin of Species and had beenimpressed by its emphasis on the struggle for survival andthe importance of environment and heredity. These themeswere central to his Rougon-Macquart, a twenty-volumeseries of novels on the “natural and social history of a fam-

ily.” Zola maintained that the artist must analyze life asa biologist would dissect a living organism. He said, “Ihave simply done on living bodies the work of analysiswhich surgeons perform on corpses.”

The last half of the nineteenth century was a goldenage for Russian literature. The nineteenth-century realis-tic novel reached its high point in the works of Leo Tolstoy(1828–1910) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881). Tol-stoy’s greatest work was War and Peace, a lengthy novelplayed out against the historical background of Napoleon’sinvasion of Russia in 1812. It is realistic in its vividdescriptions of military life and character portrayal. Eachperson is delineated clearly and analyzed psychologically.Upon a great landscape, Tolstoy imposed a fatalistic viewof history that ultimately proved irrelevant in the face oflife’s enduring values of human love and trust.

Fyodor Dostoevsky combined narrative skill andacute psychological and moral observation with profoundinsights into human nature. Dostoevsky maintained thatthe major problem of his age was a loss of spiritual belief.Western people were attempting to gain salvation throughthe construction of a materialistic paradise built only byhuman reason and human will. Dostoevsky feared that thefailure to incorporate spirit would result in total tyranny.His own life experiences led him to believe that onlythrough suffering and faith could the human soul be puri-fied, views that are evident in his best-known works, Crimeand Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

At the turn of the century, a new group of writers,known as the Symbolists, reacted against Realism. Pri-marily interested in writing poetry, the Symbolists believedthat an objective knowledge of the world was impossi-ble. The external world was not real but only a collectionof symbols that reflected the true reality of the individualhuman mind. Art, they believed, should function for itsown sake instead of serving, criticizing, or seeking tounderstand society. In the works of the Symbolist poets,W. B. Yeats and Rainer Maria Rilke, poetry ceased to bepart of popular culture because only through a knowledgeof the poet’s personal language could one hope to under-stand what the poem was saying (see the box on p. 718).

/ MODERNISM IN THE ARTS

Since the Renaissance, artists had tried to represent real-ity as accurately as possible. By the late nineteenth cen-tury, however, artists were seeking new forms ofexpression. The preamble to modern painting can befound in Impressionism, a movement that originated inFrance in the 1870s when a group of artists rejected thestudios and museums and went out into the countrysideto paint nature directly. Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), oneof Impressionism’s founders, expressed what they sought:

Precise drawing is dry and hampers the impression of thewhole, it destroys all sensations. Do not define too closelythe outlines of things; it is the brush stroke of the right valueand color which should produce the drawing. . . . The eyeshould not be fixed on one point, but should take in

718 C H A P T E R 2 4

everything, while observing the reflections which the colorsproduce on their surroundings. Work at the same time uponsky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going onan equal basis and unceasingly rework until you have got it.. . . Don’t proceed according to rules and principles, butpaint what you observe and feel. Paint generously andunhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression.9

Impressionists like Pissarro sought to put into paintingtheir impressions of the changing effects of light on objectsin nature. Capturing the untold variety of ways in whichlight reflected off different kinds of surfaces proved espe-cially challenging to them.

Pissarro’s suggestions are visibly portrayed in thework of Claude Monet (1840–1926). He was especiallyenchanted with water and painted many pictures in whichhe sought to capture the interplay of light, water, andatmosphere, especially evident in Impression, Sunrise. But

the Impressionists did not just paint scenes from nature.Streets and cabarets, rivers, and busy boulevards—wher-ever people congregated for work and leisure—formedtheir subject matter.

Another important Impressionist painter was BertheMorisot (1841–1895), who broke with the practice ofwomen being only amateur artists and became a profes-sional painter. Her dedication to the new style of paintingwon her the disfavor of the traditional French academicartists. Morisot believed that women had a special vision,which was, as she said, “more delicate than that of men.”Her special touch is evident in the lighter colors and flow-ing brush strokes of Young Girl by the Window. Near theend of her life, Morisot lamented the refusal of men to takeher work seriously: “I don’t think there has ever been a manwho treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I wouldhave asked, for I know I’m worth as much as they.”10

The Symbolist movement was an important foundation forModernism. The Symbolists believed that the working ofthe mind was the proper study of literature. Arthur Rim-baud was one of Symbolism’s leading practitioners inFrance. Although his verses seem to have little real mean-ing, they were not meant to describe the external worldprecisely, but to enchant the mind. Art was not meant forthe masses, but only for “art’s sake.” Rimbaud wrote, “Bythe alchemy of the words, I noted the inexpressible. I fixedgiddiness.”

l Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat

As I floated down impassable rivers, I felt the boatmen no longer guiding me. After them came redskins who with war cries Nailed them naked to the painted poles.

I was oblivious to the crew, I who bore Flemish wheat and English cotton. When the racket was finished with my boatmen, The waters let me drift my own free way.

In the tide’s furious pounding, I, the other winter, emptier than children’s minds, I sailed! And the unmoored peninsulas Have not suffered more triumphant turmoils.

The tempest blessed my maritime watches. Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves, Those eternal rollers of victims, Ten nights, without regretting the lantern-foolish eye!

Sweeter than the bite of sour apples to a child, The green water seeped through my wooden hull, Rinsed me of blue wine stains and vomit, Broke apart grappling iron and rudder.

And then I bathed myself in the poetry Of the star-sprayed milk-white sea, Devouring the azure greens; where, pale And ravished, a pensive drowned one sometimes floats;

Where , suddenly staining the blueness, frenzies And slow rhythms in the blazing of day, Stronger than alcohol, vaster than our lyres, The russet bitterness of love ferments. . . .

I have dreamed of the green night bedazzled with snow, A kiss climbing slowly to the eyes of the sea, The flow of unforgettable sap, And the yellow-blue waking of singing phosphorous!

Long months I have followed, like maddened cattle, The surge assaulting the rocks Without dreaming that the Virgin’s luminous feet Could force a muzzle on the panting ocean!

I have struck against the shares of incredible Floridas Mixing panther-eyed flowers like human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridle reins Under the ocean’s horizon, toward sea-green troops!

I have seen the fermenting of monstrous marshes, Nets where a whole Leviathan rots in the reeds! The waters collapsing in the middle of the calm, And horizons plunging toward the abyss!

Glaciers, silver suns, waves of pearl. charcoal skies, Hideous beaches at the bottom of brown gulfs Where giant serpents devoured by vermin Tumble from twisted trees with black perfumes!

I would have liked to show the children those dolphins On the blue waves, those golden singing fish. —The froth of flowers lulled my voyagings, Ineffable winds gave me wings by the moment. . . .

Symbolist Poetry: Art for Art’s Sake

L


CLAUDE MONET, IMPRESSION, SUNRISE.Impressionists rejected “rules and principles” and soughtto paint what they observed and felt in order “not to losethe first impression.” As is evident in Impression, Sunrise,Monet sought to capture his impression of the fleetingmoments of sunrise through the simple interplay of light,water, and atmosphere.

BERTHE MORISOT, YOUNG GIRL BYTHE WINDOW. Berthe Morisotcame from a wealthy French familythat settled in Paris when she wasseven. The first female painter tojoin the Impressionists, she devel-oped her own unique Impressioniststyle. Her gentle colors and stronguse of pastels are especially evidentin Young Girl by the Window,painted in 1878. Many of herpaintings focus on women anddomestic scenes.

720 C H A P T E R 2 4

PAUL CÉZANNE, WOMAN WITH COFFEE POT.Post-Impressionists sought above all to express theirinner feelings and capture on canvas their own vision ofreality. In Woman with Coffee Pot, Paul Cézanne tried torelate the geometric shapes of his central female figure tothe geometric shapes of the coffee pot and the rectanglesof the door panels.

By the 1880s, a new movement known as Post-Impressionism arose in France but soon spread to otherEuropean countries. Post-Impressionism retained theImpressionist emphasis upon light and color but revolu-tionized it even further by paying more attention to struc-ture and form. Post-Impressionists sought to use bothcolor and line to express inner feelings and produce a per-sonal statement of reality rather than an imitation ofobjects. Impressionist paintings had retained a sense ofrealism, but the Post-Impressionists shifted from objectivereality to subjective reality and, in so doing, began to with-draw from the artist’s traditional task of depicting the exter-nal world. Post-Impressionism was the real beginning ofmodern art.

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was one of the mostimportant Post-Impressionists. Initially, he was influencedby the Impressionists but soon rejected their work. In hispaintings, such as Woman with Coffee Pot, Cézanne soughtto express visually the underlying structure and form ofeverything he painted. The geometric shapes (cylindersand triangles) of the human form are related to the geo-metric shapes (cylinders and rectangles) of the otherobjects in the picture. As Cézanne explained to one youngpainter: “You must see in nature the cylinder, the sphere,and the cone.”

Another famous Post-Impressionist was the torturedand tragic figure, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890). For vanGogh, art was a spiritual experience. He was especiallyinterested in color and believed that it could act as its ownform of language. Van Gogh maintained that artists shouldpaint what they feel. In his Starry Night, he painted a skyalive with whirling stars that overwhelm the buildings hud-dled in the village below.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the beliefthat the task of art was to represent “reality” had lost muchof its meaning. By that time, the new psychology and thenew physics had made it evident that many people werenot sure what constituted reality anyway. Then, too, thedevelopment of photography gave artists another reasonto reject visual realism. First invented in the 1830s, pho-tography became popular and widespread after GeorgeEastman produced the first Kodak camera for the massmarket in 1888. What was the point of an artist doing whatthe camera did better? Unlike the camera, which couldonly mirror reality, artists could create reality. As in liter-ature, so also in modern art, individual consciousnessbecame the source of meaning. As one artist expressedit: “Each [artist] should follow where the pulse of his ownheart leads. . . . Our pounding heart drives us down, deepdown to the source of all. What springs from this source,whether it may be called dream, idea or phantasy—mustbe taken seriously.”11 Between 1905 and 1914, this searchfor individual expression produced a wide variety ofschools of painting, all of which had their greatest impactafter World War I.

By 1905, one of the most important figures in mod-ern art was just beginning his career. Pablo Picasso

(1881–1973) was from Spain but settled in Paris in 1904.Picasso was extremely flexible and painted in a remark-able variety of styles. He was instrumental in the devel-opment of a new style called Cubism that used geometricdesigns as visual stimuli to re-create reality in the viewer’smind. Picasso’s 1907 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon hasbeen called the first Cubist painting.

The modern artist’s flight from “visual reality”reached a high point in 1910 with the beginning of abstractpainting. A Russian who worked in Germany, VasilyKandinsky (1866–1944), was one of the founders ofAbstract Expressionism. As is evident in his Painting withWhite Border, Kandinsky sought to avoid representationaltogether. He believed that art should speak directly tothe soul. To do so, it must avoid any reference to visualreality and concentrate on color.

/ MODERNISM IN MUSIC

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Romantics’attraction to exotic and primitive cultures had sparked afascination with folk music, which became increasinglyimportant as musicians began to look for ways to express


their national identities. In the second half of the cen-tury, new flames of nationalistic spirit were fanned in bothliterary and musical circles. Nationalistic feelings wereexpressed in a variety of ways, from the employment ofnational themes for operas to the incorporation of folksongs and dances in new compositions.

One example of this new nationalistic spirit may befound in the Scandinavian composer Edvard Grieg(1843–1907), who remained a dedicated supporter of Nor-wegian nationalism throughout his life. Grieg’s national-ism expressed itself in the lyric melodies found in the folkmusic of his homeland. These simple melodies were farbetter suited to smaller compositional forms, so he tendednot to write in the grand symphonic style. Among his best-known works is the Peer Gynt Suite (1876), incidentalmusic to Henrik Ibsen’s play. Grieg’s music paved the wayfor the creation of a national music style in Norway.

The Impressionist movement in music followed itsartistic counterpart by some thirty years. Impressionistmusic stressed elusive moods and haunting sensationsand is distinct in its delicate beauty and elegance of sound.The composer most tangibly linked to the Impressionistmovement was Claude Debussy (1862–1918), whosemusical compositions were often inspired by the visualarts. The titles that Debussy often assigned to his works,such as Sketches, Images, and Prints, are indicative of thisclose association between painters and musicians.

One of Debussy’s most famous works, Prelude to theAfternoon of a Faun (1894), was actually inspired by apoem, “Afternoon of a Faun,” composed by his friend,the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. But Debussy didnot tell a story in music, as was the goal of the Romantictone poems. Rather, Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faunre-created in sound the overall feeling of the poem. Said

VINCENT VAN GOGH, THE STARRY NIGHT (1889).The Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh was a major figureamong the Post-Impressionists. His originality and powerof expression made a strong impact upon his artisticsuccessors.

In The Starry Night, van Gogh’s subjective vision wasgiven full play as the dynamic swirling forms of theheavens above overwhelmed the village below. Theheavens seem alive with a mysterious spiritual force.

722 C H A P T E R 2 4

PABLO PICASSO, LES DEMOISELLES D’AVIGNON (1907).Pablo Picasso, a major pioneer and activist of modern art,experimented with a remarkable variety of modern styles.His Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was the first great exampleof Cubism, which one art historian has called “the firststyle of this century to break radically with the past.”Geometric shapes replace traditional forms, forcing theviewer to re-create reality in his or her own mind.

VASILY KANDINSKY, COMPOSITIONVIII, NO. 2 (PAINTING WITH WHITEBORDER). One of the founders ofAbstract Expressionism was theRussian Vasily Kandinsky, whosought to eliminate representationaltogether by focusing on color andavoiding any resemblance to visualreality. In Painting with WhiteBorder, Kandinsky used color “tosend light into the darkness ofmen’s hearts.” He believed thatcolor, like music, could fulfill aspiritual goal of appealing directlyto the human being.

Mallarmé upon listening to Debussy’s piece, “I was notexpecting anything like this. This music prolongs theemotion of my poem, and evokes the scene more vividlythan color.”12

Other composers adopted stylistic idioms that imi-tated presumably primitive forms in an attempt to expressless refined, and therefore more genuine, feelings. A chiefexponent of musical primitivism was Igor Stravinsky(1882–1971), one of the twentieth century’s most impor-tant composers, both for his compositions and for hisimpact on other composers. He gained international fameas a ballet composer and together with the Ballet Russe,under the direction of Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), rev-

olutionized the world of music with a series of ballets. Thethree most significant ballets Stravinsky composed forDiaghilev’s company were The Firebird (1910), Petrushka(1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). All three were basedon Russian folk tales. The Rite of Spring proved to be a revolutionary piece in the development of music. At the premiere on May 29, 1913, the pulsating rhythms,sharp dissonances, and unusual dancing overwhelmed theParis audience and caused a riot at the theater. Like theintellectuals of his time, Stravinsky sought a new under-standing of irrational forces in his music, which became an important force in inaugurating a modern musicalmovement.


◆ Politics: New Directions andNew Uncertainties

The uncertainties in European intellectual and cultural lifewere paralleled by growing anxieties in European politicallife. The seemingly steady progress in the growth of liberalprinciples and political democracy after 1871 was soonslowed or even halted altogether after 1894. The new masspolitics had opened the door to changes that many nine-teenth-century liberals found unacceptable, and liberalsthemselves were forced to move in new directions. Theappearance of a new right-wing politics based on racismadded an ugly note to the already existing anxieties. Withtheir newfound voting rights, workers elected socialistswho demanded new reforms when they took their placesin legislative bodies. Women, too, made new demands,insisting on the right to vote and using new tactics to gainit. In central and eastern Europe, tensions grew as author-itarian governments refused to meet the demands ofreformers. And outside Europe, a new giant appeared inthe Western world as the United States emerged as a greatindustrial power with immense potential.

l The Movement for Women’s Rights

In the 1830s, a number of women in the United States andEurope, who worked together in several reform move-ments, became frustrated by the apparent prejudicesagainst females. They sought improvements for women byfocusing on specific goals. Family and marriage laws wereespecially singled out since it was difficult for women tosecure divorces and property laws gave husbands almostcomplete control over the property of their wives. Theseearly efforts were not overly successful, however. Forexample, women did not gain the right to their own prop-erty until 1870 in Britain, 1900 in Germany, and 1907 inFrance. Although the British legalized divorce in 1857, theFrench state permitted only a limited degree of divorcein 1884. In Catholic countries such as Spain and Italy,women had no success at all in achieving the right todivorce their husbands.

Custody and property rights were only a beginningfor the women’s movement, however. Some middle- andupper-middle-class women gained access to higher edu-cation, and others sought entry into occupations domi-nated by men. The first to fall was teaching. As medicaltraining was largely closed to women, they sought alter-natives in the development of nursing. One nursing pio-neer was Amalie Sieveking (1794–1859), who foundedthe Female Association for the Care of the Poor and Sickin Hamburg, Germany. As she explained: “To me, at leastas important were the benefits which [work with the poor]seemed to promise for those of my sisters who would joinme in such a work of charity. The higher interests of mysex were close to my heart.”13 Sieveking’s work was fol-lowed by the more famous British nurse, Florence

Nightingale (1820–1910), whose efforts during theCrimean War, along with those of Clara Barton(1821–1912) in the American Civil War, transformednursing into a profession of trained, middle-class “womenin white.”

By the 1840s and 1850s, the movement for women’srights had entered the political arena with the call for equalpolitical rights. Many feminists believed that the right tovote was the key to all other reforms to improve the posi-tion of women. This movement was most vibrant in GreatBritain and the United States, both countries that hadbeen influenced by the natural rights tradition of theEnlightenment. It was not as strong in Germany becauseof that country’s authoritarian makeup nor in Francewhere feminists were unable to organize mass rallies insupport of women’s rights.

The British women’s movement was the most vocaland active in Europe, but divided over tactics. The liberalMillicent Fawcett (1847–1929) organized a moderategroup who believed that women must demonstrate thatthey would use political power responsibly if they wantedParliament to grant them the right to vote. Another group,however, favored a more radical approach. EmmelinePankhurst (1858–1928) and her daughters, Christabeland Sylvia, founded the Women’s Social and PoliticalUnion in 1903, which enrolled mostly middle- and upper-class women. Pankhurst’s organization realized the valueof the media and used unusual publicity stunts to callattention to its demands. Derisively labeled suffragettesby male politicians, they pelted government officials witheggs, chained themselves to lampposts, smashed the win-dows of department stores on fashionable shopping

THE ARREST OF SUFFRAGISTS. The nineteenth centurywitnessed the development of a strong movement forwomen’s rights. For many feminists, the right to votecame to represent the key to other reforms that wouldbenefit women. In Britain, suffragists attracted atten-tion to their cause by unusual publicity stunts. Thisphotograph shows the arrest of suffragists after ademonstration near Buckingham Palace, the Londonresidence of the royal family.

724 C H A P T E R 2 4

streets, burned railroad cars, and went on hunger strikesin jail. In 1913, Emily Davison accepted martyrdom forthe cause when she threw herself in front of the king’shorse at the Epsom Derby horse race. Suffragists had onefundamental aim, the right of women to full citizenship inthe nation-state.

Although few women elsewhere in Europe used thePankhursts’ confrontational methods, demands forwomen’s rights were heard throughout Europe and theUnited States before World War I. Nevertheless, only inFinland, Norway, and some American states did womenactually receive the right to vote before 1914. It would take the dramatic upheaval of World War I before male-dominated governments capitulated on this basic issue(see Chapter 25).

Women reformers took on other issues besides suf-frage. In many countries, women supported peace move-ments. Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) became the headof the Austrian Peace Society and protested against thegrowing arms race of the1890s. Her novel Lay Down YourArms became a best-seller and brought her the NobelPeace Prize in 1905. Lower-class women also took up the cause of peace. In 1911, a group of female workersmarched in Vienna and demanded: “We want an end toarmaments, to the means of murder and we want thesemillions to be spent on the needs of the people.”14

/ THE NEW WOMAN

Bertha von Suttner was only one of the “new women” whowere becoming more prominent at the turn of the century.These women renounced traditional feminine roles (seethe box on p. 725). Although some of them supportedpolitical ideologies such as socialism that flew in the faceof the ruling classes, others simply sought new freedomoutside the household and new roles other than those ofwives and mothers.

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was a good exampleof the “new woman.” Breaking with tradition, she attendedmedical school at the University of Rome. Although oftenisolated by the male students, she persisted and in 1896became the first Italian woman to receive a medicaldegree. Three years later she undertook a lecture tour inItaly on the subject of “The New Woman,” whom shecharacterized as a woman who followed a rational, sci-entific perspective. In keeping with this ideal, Montes-sori put her medical background to work in a school formentally retarded children. She devised new teachingmaterials that enabled these children to read and write andbecame convinced, as she later wrote, “that similar meth-ods applied to normal students would develop or set freetheir personality in a marvelous and surprising way.” Sub-sequently, she established a system of childhood educa-tion based on natural and spontaneous activities in whichstudents learned at their own pace. By the 1930s, hun-dreds of Montessori schools had been established inEurope and the United States. As a professional womanand an unwed mother, Montessori also embodied some ofthe freedoms of the “new woman.”

l Jews within the European Nation-State

Near the end of the nineteenth century, a revival of racismcombined with extreme nationalism to produce a newright-wing politics aimed primarily at the Jews. Of course,anti-Semitism was not new to European civilization. Sincethe Middle Ages, Jews had been portrayed as the mur-derers of Jesus and subjected to mob violence; their rightshad been restricted, and they had been physically sepa-rated from Christians in quarters known as ghettos.

In the nineteenth century, as a result of the ideals ofthe Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Jews wereincreasingly granted legal equality in many Europeancountries. The French revolutionary decrees of 1790 and1791 emancipated the Jews and admitted them to full cit-izenship. They were not completely accepted, however,and anti-Semitism remained a fact of French life. In 1805,Napoleon consolidated their position as citizens, but fol-lowed this in 1808 with an “Infamous Decree” that placedrestrictions on Jewish moneylending and on the movementof Jews within France.

This ambivalence toward the Jews was apparentthroughout Europe. In Prussia, for example, Jews wereemancipated in 1812 but still restricted. They could nothold government offices or take advanced degrees in uni-versities. After the revolutions of 1848, emancipationbecame a fact of life for Jews throughout western and cen-tral Europe. For many Jews, emancipation enabled themto leave the ghetto and become assimilated as hundredsof thousands of Jews entered what had been the closedworlds of parliaments and universities. In 1880, for exam-ple, Jews made up 10 percent of the population of the cityof Vienna, Austria, but 39 percent of its medical studentsand 23 percent of its law students. “A Jew could leave hisJewishness” behind as the career of Benjamin Disraeli,who became prime minister of Great Britain, demon-strated. Many other Jews became eminently successful asbankers, lawyers, scientists, scholars, journalists, andstage performers.

These achievements represent only one side of thepicture, however, as is evident from the Dreyfus affair inFrance. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, was a captain in the Frenchgeneral staff. Early in 1895, a secret military court foundhim guilty of selling army secrets and condemned him tolife imprisonment on Devil’s Island. During his trial, right-wing mobs yelled “Death to the Jews.” Soon after the trial,however, evidence emerged that pointed to Dreyfus’s inno-cence. The government pardoned Dreyfus in 1899, and in1906, he was finally fully exonerated.

In Austrian politics, the Christian Socialists com-bined agitation for workers with a virulent anti-Semitism.They were most powerful in Vienna where they were ledby Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910. Impe-rial Vienna at the turn of the century was a brilliant cen-ter of European culture, but it was also the home of aninsidious German nationalism that blamed Jews for thecorruption of German culture. It was in Vienna between1907 and 1913 that Adolf Hitler later claimed to have


found his worldview, one that was largely based on a vio-lent German nationalism and a rabid anti-Semitism.

Germany, too, had its right-wing anti-Semitic parties,such as Adolf Stocker’s Christian Social Workers. Theseparties used anti-Semitism to win the votes of traditionallower-middle-class groups who felt threatened by the neweconomic forces of the times. These German anti-Semiticparties were based on race. In medieval times Jews could

convert to Christianity and escape from their religion. Tomodern racial anti-Semites, Jews were racially stained; thiscould not be altered by conversion. One could not be bothGerman and Jew. Hermann Ahlwardt, an anti-Semiticmember of the German Reichstag, made this clear in aspeech to that body: “The Jew is no German. . . . A Jewwho was born in Germany does not thereby become a Ger-man; he is still a Jew. Therefore it is imperative that we

Although a majority of women probably followed the nineteenth-century middle-class ideal of women as keepersof the household and nurturers of husband and children,an increasing number of women fought for the rights ofwomen. This selection is taken from Act III of HenrikIbsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), in which the characterNora Helmer declares her independence from her hus-band’s control.

l Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

NORA (Pause): Does anything strike you as we sit here?HELMER: What should strike me? NORA: We’ve been married eight years; does it not strike

you that this is the first time we two, you and I, manand wife, have talked together seriously?

HELMER: Seriously? What do you mean, seriously?NORA: For eight whole years, and more—ever since the

day we first met—we have never exchanged one seri-ous word about serious things. . . .

HELMER: Why, my dearest Nora, what have you to dowith serious things?

NORA: There we have it! You have never understood me.I’ve had great injustice done to me, Torvald; first byfather, then by you.

HELMER: What! Your father and me? We, who haveloved you more than all the world!

NORA (Shaking her head): You have never loved me. Youjust found it amusing to think you were in love withme.

HELMER: Nora! What a thing to say! NORA: Yes, it’s true, Torvald. When I was living at home

with father, he told me his opinions and mine were thesame. If I had different opinions, I said nothing aboutthem, because he would not have liked it. He used tocall me his doll-child and played with me as I playedwith my dolls. Then I came to live in your house.

HELMER: What a way to speak of our marriage! NORA (Undisturbed): I mean that I passed from father’s

hands into yours. You arranged everything to yourtaste and I got the same tastes as you; or pretendedto—I don’t know which—both, perhaps; sometimesone, sometimes the other. When I look back on itnow, I seem to have been living here like a beggar, on

handouts. I lived by performing tricks for you, Tor-vald. But that was how you wanted it. You and fatherhave done me a great wrong. It is your fault that mylife has come to naught.

HELMER: Why, Nora, how unreasonable and ungrateful!Haven’t you been happy here?

NORA: No, never. I thought I was, but I never was. HELMER: Not—not happy! . . .NORA: I must stand quite alone if I am ever to know

myself and my surroundings; so I cannot stay withyou.

HELMER: Nora! Nora! NORA: I am going at once. I daresay [my friend]

Christina will take me in for tonight. HELMER: You are mad! I shall not allow it! I forbid it! NORA: It’s no use your forbidding me anything now. I

shall take with me only what belongs to me; from youI will accept nothing, either now or later.

HELMER: This is madness! NORA: Tomorrow I shall go home—I mean to what was

my home. It will be easier for me to find a job there. HELMER: On, in your blind inexperience—NORA: I must try to gain experience, Torvald. HELMER: Forsake your home, your husband, your chil-

dren! And you don’t consider what the world will say. NORA: I can’t pay attention to that. I only know that I

must do it. HELMER: This is monstrous! Can you forsake your holi-

est duties? NORA: What do you consider my holiest duties? HELMER: Need I tell you that? Your duties to your hus-

band and children. NORA: I have other duties equally sacred. HELMER: Impossible! What do you mean? NORA: My duties toward myself. HELMER: Before all else you are a wife and a mother. NORA: That I no longer believe. Before all else I believe

I am a human being just as much as you are—or atleast that I should try to become one. I know thatmost people agree with you, Torvald, and that theysay so in books. But I can no longer be satisfied withwhat most people say and what is in books. I mustthink things out for myself and try to get clear aboutthem.

Advice to Women: Be Independent

L

726 C H A P T E R 2 4

realize that Jewish racial characteristics differ so greatlyfrom ours that a common life of Jews and Germans underthe same laws is quite impossible because the Germanswill perish.”15 After 1898, the political strength of the Ger-man anti-Semitic parties began to decline.

The worst treatment of Jews in the last two decadesof the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twen-tieth occurred in eastern Europe where 72 percent of the entire world Jewish population lived. Russian Jewswere admitted to secondary schools and universities onlyunder a quota system and were forced to live in certainregions of the country. Persecutions and pogroms werewidespread. Between 1903 and 1906, pogroms took placein almost 700 Russian towns and villages, mostly inUkraine. Hundreds of thousands of Jews decided to emi-grate to escape the persecution. Between 1881 and 1899,an average of 23,000 Jews left Russia each year. Many ofthem went to the United States and Canada, althoughsome (probably about 25,000) moved to Palestine, whichsoon became the focus for a Jewish nationalist movementcalled Zionism.

The emancipation of the nineteenth century had pre-sented vast opportunities for some Jews, but dilemmas forothers. What was the price of citizenship? Did emanci-

pation mean full assimilation, and did assimilation meanthe disruption of traditional Jewish life? Many paid theprice willingly, but others questioned its value and advo-cated a different answer, a return to Palestine. For manyJews, Palestine, the land of ancient Israel, had long beenthe land of their dreams. During the nineteenth century,as nationalist ideas spread and Italians, Poles, Irish,Greeks, and others sought national emancipation so toodid the idea of national independence capture the imagi-nation of some Jews. A key figure in the growth of politicalZionism was Theodor Herzl (1860–1904). Herzl hadreceived a law degree in Vienna where he became a jour-nalist for a Viennese newspaper. He was shocked intoaction on behalf of Jews when he covered the Dreyfus trialas a correspondent for his newspaper in Paris. In 1896, hepublished a book called The Jewish State (see the box onp. 727) in which he straightforwardly advocated that “theJews who wish it will have their state.” Financial supportfor the development of yishuvs, or settlements in Pales-tine, came from wealthy Jewish banking families whowanted a refuge in Palestine for persecuted Jews, not apolitical Jewish state. Even settlements were difficultbecause Palestine was then part of the Ottoman Empireand Ottoman authorities were opposed to Jewish immi-

THEODOR HERZL. A journalist for aViennese newspaper, Herzl became anardent advocate of political Zionism. In The Jewish State, he argued for thecreation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Heis seen here in Basel, Switzerland, wherehe was attending an international Zionistcongress that he had helped to organize.


gration. In 1891, one Jewish essayist pointed to the prob-lems this would create:

We abroad are accustomed to believe that Erez Israel [theland of Israel] is almost totally desolate at present . . . but inreality it is not so. . . . Arabs, especially those in towns, seeand understand our activities and aims in the country butkeep quiet and pretend as if they did not know, . . . andthey try to exploit us, too, and profit from the new guestswhile laughing at us in their hearts. But if the time comesand our people make such progress as to displace the peo-ple of the country . . . they will not lightly surrender theplace.16

Despite the warnings, however, 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. In 1900, 1,000 Jews migrated toPalestine. Although 3,000 Jews went annually to Palestinebetween 1904 and 1914, the Zionist dream remained justthat on the eve of World War I.

l The Transformation of Liberalism: Great Britain and Italy

In dealing with the problems created by the new mass pol-itics, liberal governments often followed policies thatundermined the basic tenets of liberalism. This was cer-tainly true in Great Britain, where the demands of the

The Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl wrote TheJewish State in the summer of 1895 in Paris while he wascovering the Dreyfus case for his Vienna newspaper. Dur-ing several weeks of feverish composition, he set out toanalyze the fundamental causes of anti-Semitism anddevise a solution to the “Jewish problem.” In this selection,he discusses two of his major conclusions.

l Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State

I do not intend to arouse sympathetic emotions on ourbehalf. That would be a foolish, futile, and undignifiedproceeding. I shall content myself with putting the fol-lowing questions to the Jews: Is it true that, in countrieswhere we live in perceptible numbers, the position ofJewish lawyers, doctors, technicians, teachers, andemployees of all descriptions becomes daily more intol-erable? True, that the Jewish middle classes are seriouslythreatened? True, that the passions of the mob areincited against our wealthy people? True, that our poorendure greater sufferings than any other proletariat?

I think that this external pressure makes itself felteverywhere. In our economically upper classes it causesdiscomfort, in our middle classes continual and graveanxieties, in our lower classes absolute despair.

Everything tends, in fact, to one and the same con-clusion, which is clearly enunciated in that classic Berlinphrase: “Juden ‘raus!” (Out with the Jews!)

I shall now put the Jewish Question in the curtestpossible form: Are we to “get out” now? And if so, towhat place?

Or, may we yet remain? And if so, how long? Let us first settle the point of staying where we are.

Can we hope for better days, can we possess our soulsin patience, can we wait in pious resignation till theprinces and peoples of this earth are more mercifullydisposed toward us? I say that we cannot hope for achange in the current of feeling. And why not? Were we

as near to the hearts of princes as are their other sub-jects, even so they could not protect us. They wouldonly feed popular hatred of Jews by showing us toomuch favor. By “too much,” I really mean less than isclaimed as a right by every ordinary citizen, or by everyrace. The nations in whose midst Jews live are all, eithercovertly or openly, Anti-Semitic. . . .

The whole plan is in its essence perfectly simple, as itmust necessarily be if it is to come within the compre-hension of all.

Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion ofthe globe large enough to satisfy the rightful require-ments of a nation; the rest we shall manage forourselves.

The creation of a new State is neither ridiculous norimpossible. We have in our day witnessed the process inconnection with nations which were not in the bulk of themiddle class, but poorer, less educated, and consequentlyweaker than ourselves. The Governments of all countriesscourged by Anti-Semitism will be keenly interested inassisting us to obtain the sovereignty we want. . . .

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. Thevery name of Palestine would attract our people with aforce of marvelous potency. Supposing his Majesty theSultan were to give us Palestine, we could in returnundertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. Weshould there form a portion of the rampart of Europeagainst Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed tobarbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in con-tact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee ourexistence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would besafeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorialstatus such as is well known to the law of nations. Weshould form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries,answering for the fulfillment of this duty with our exis-tence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol ofthe solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen cen-turies of Jewish suffering.

The Voice of Zionism: Theodor Herzl and the Jewish State

L

728 C H A P T E R 2 4

working-class movement caused Liberals to move awayfrom their ideals. Although workers were enjoying betterwages and living standards, those improvements were rel-ative to the miseries of the first half of the nineteenth cen-tury. Considerable suffering still remained. Neither Liberalsnor Conservatives were moved to accommodate the work-ing class with significant social reforms until they wereforced to do so by the pressure of two new working-classorganizations: trade unions and the Labour Party.

Trade unions began to advocate more radical changeof the economic system, calling for “collective ownershipand control over production, distribution and exchange.”At the same time, a movement for laborers emerged amonga group of intellectuals known as the Fabian Socialistswho stressed the need for the workers to use their rightto vote to capture the House of Commons and pass leg-islation that would benefit the laboring class. Neither theFabian Socialists nor the British trade unions were Marx-ist oriented. They did not advocate class struggle and revolution but evolution toward a socialist state by democratic means. In 1900, representatives of the tradeunions and Fabian Socialists coalesced to form the LabourParty. Initially, they were not too successful, but by 1906they had managed to elect twenty-nine members to theHouse of Commons.

The Liberals, who gained control of the House ofCommons in that year and held the government from 1906to 1914, perceived that they would have to enact a pro-gram of social welfare or lose the support of the workers.The policy of reform was especially advanced by DavidLloyd George (1863–1945), a brilliant young orator fromWales who had been deeply moved by the misery ofWelsh coal miners. The Liberals abandoned the classicalprinciples of laissez-faire and voted for a series of socialreforms. The National Insurance Act of 1911 providedbenefits for workers in case of sickness and unemploy-ment, to be financed by compulsory contributions fromworkers, employers, and the state. Additional legislationprovided a small pension for those over seventy and com-pensation for those injured in accidents while at work.To pay for the new program, Lloyd George increased thetax burden on the wealthy classes. Though both the ben-efits of the program and the tax increases were modest,they were the first hesitant steps toward the future Britishwelfare state. Liberalism, which had been based on theprinciple that the government that governs least governsbest, had been transformed.

Liberals had even greater problems in Italy. A certainamount of stability was achieved from 1903 to 1914 whenthe liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti served intermittently asprime minister. Giolitti was a master of using trasformismoor transformism, a system in which old political groupswere transformed into new government coalitions by polit-ical and economic bribery. In the long run, however,Giolitti’s devious methods made Italian politics even morecorrupt and unmanageable. When urban workers turnedto violence to protest their living and working conditions,Giolitti tried to appease them with social welfare legisla-

tion and universal male suffrage in 1912. To strengthen hispopularity, he also aroused nationalistic passions by con-quering Libya. Despite his efforts, however, worker unrestcontinued, and in 1914 government troops had to be usedto crush rioting workers.

l Growing Tensions in Germany

The new imperial Germany begun by Bismarck in 1871continued as an “authoritarian, conservative, military-bureaucratic power state” during the reign of EmperorWilliam II (1888–1918). Unstable and aggressive, theemperor was inclined to tactless remarks, as when he toldthe soldiers of a Berlin regiment that they must be pre-pared to shoot their fathers and mothers if he ordered themto do so. A small group of about twenty powerful menjoined William in setting government policy.

By 1914, Germany had become the strongest mili-tary and industrial power on the Continent. New socialconfigurations had emerged as over 50 percent of Germanworkers had jobs in industry while only 30 percent of theworkforce was still in agriculture. Urban centers hadmushroomed in number and size. The rapid changes inWilliam’s Germany helped to produce a society tornbetween modernization and traditionalism.

The growth of industrialization led to even greaterexpansion for the Social Democratic Party. Despite theenactment of new welfare legislation to favor the work-ing classes, William II was no more successful than Bis-marck at slowing the growth of the Social Democrats. By1912, it had become the largest single party in the Reichs-tag. At the same time, the party increasingly became lessrevolutionary and more revisionist in its outlook. Never-theless, its growth frightened the middle and upper classeswho blamed labor for their own problems.

With the expansion of industry and cities camedemands for more political participation and growing sen-timent for reforms that would produce greater democrati-zation. Conservative forces, especially the landowningnobility and representatives of heavy industry, two of thepowerful ruling groups in Germany, tried to block it bysupporting William II’s activist foreign policy (see NewDirections and New Crises later in this chapter). Expan-sionism, they believed, would divert people from furtherdemocratization.

The tensions in German society created by the con-flict between modernization and traditionalism were alsomanifested in a new, radicalized, right-wing politics. Anumber of nationalist pressure groups arose to supportnationalistic goals. Antisocialist and antiliberal, suchgroups as the Pan-German League stressed strong Germannationalism and advocated imperialism as a tool to over-come social divisions and unite all classes. They were also anti-Semitic and denounced Jews as the destroyers ofthe national community. Traditional conservatives, fright-ened by the growth of the socialists, often made commoncause with these radical right-wing groups, giving themrespectability.


l Industrialization and Revolution inImperial Russia

Starting in the 1890s, Russia experienced a massive surgeof state-sponsored industrialism under the guiding handof Sergei Witte (1849–1915), the minister for finance from1892 to 1903. Count Witte saw industrial growth as cru-cial to Russia’s national strength. Believing that railroadswere a very powerful weapon in economic development,Witte pushed the government toward a program of massive railroad construction. By 1900, 35,000 miles of railroads, including large parts of the 5,000-mile trans-Siberian line between Moscow and Vladivostok onthe Pacific Ocean, had been built. Witte also encourageda system of protective tariffs to help Russian industry andpersuaded Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) that foreign cap-ital was essential for rapid industrial development. Witte’sprogram made possible the rapid growth of a modern steeland coal industry in Ukraine, making Russia by 1900 thefourth largest producer of steel behind the United States,Germany, and Great Britain.

With industrialization came factories, an industrialworking class, industrial suburbs around St. Petersburgand Moscow, and the pitiful working and living conditionsthat accompanied the beginnings of industrializationeverywhere. Socialist thought and socialist parties devel-oped, although repression in Russia soon forced them togo underground and become revolutionary. The MarxistSocial Democratic Party, for example, held its first congressin Minsk in 1898, but the arrest of its leaders caused thenext one to be held in Brussels in 1903, attended by Rus-sian émigrés. The Social Revolutionaries worked to over-throw the tsarist autocracy and establish peasantsocialism. Having no other outlet for their opposition tothe regime, they advocated political terrorism andattempted to assassinate government officials and mem-bers of the ruling dynasty. The growing opposition to thetsarist regime finally exploded into revolution in 1905.

/ THE REVOLUTION OF 1905

As had happened elsewhere in Europe in the nineteenthcentury, defeat in war led to political upheaval at home.Russia’s territorial expansion to the south and east, espe-cially its designs on northern Korea, led to a confrontationwith Japan. Japan made a surprise attack on the Russianeastern fleet at Port Arthur on February 8, 1904. In turn,Russia sent its Baltic fleet halfway around the world to theEast, only to be defeated by the new Japanese navy atTsushima Strait off the coast of Japan. Much to the aston-ishment of many Europeans who could not believe that anAsian state was militarily superior to a great Europeanpower, the Russians admitted defeat and sued for peacein 1905.

In the midst of the war, the growing discontent ofincreased numbers of Russians rapidly led to upheaval. Amiddle class of business and professional people longedfor liberal institutions and a liberal political system.Nationalities were dissatisfied with their domination by anethnic Russian population that constituted only 45 per-cent of the empire’s total population. Peasants were stillsuffering from lack of land, and laborers felt oppressedby their working and living conditions in Russia’s largecities. The breakdown of the transport system caused bythe Russo-Japanese War led to food shortages in the majorcities of Russia. As a result, on January 9, 1905, a massiveprocession of workers went to the Winter Palace in St.Petersburg to present a petition of grievances to the tsar(see the box on p. 730). Troops foolishly opened fire on thepeaceful demonstration, killing hundreds and launchinga revolution. This “Bloody Sunday” incited workers to callstrikes and form unions; meanwhile zemstvos demandedthe formation of parliamentary government, ethnic groupsrevolted, and peasants burned the houses of landown-ers. After a general strike in October 1905, the governmentcapitulated. Count Witte had advised the tsar to divide hisopponents: “It is not on the extremists that the existence

NICHOLAS II. The last tsar of Russia hopedto preserve the traditional autocratic waysof his predecessors. In this photograph,Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra areshown returning from a church at Tsarskoe-Selo.

730 C H A P T E R 2 4

and integrity of the state depend. As long as the govern-ment has support in the broad strata of society, a peace-ful solution to the crisis is still possible.”17 Nicholas IIissued the October Manifesto, in which he granted civilliberties and agreed to create a Duma, or legislative assem-bly, elected directly by a broad franchise. This satisfied themiddle-class moderates who now supported the govern-ment’s repression of a workers’ uprising in Moscow at theend of 1905.

But real constitutional monarchy proved short-lived.Under Peter Stolypin, who served as the tsar’s chief adviserfrom late 1906 until his assassination in 1911, importantagrarian reforms dissolved the village ownership of landand opened the door to private ownership by enterpris-ing peasants. Nicholas II, however, was no friend ofreform. Already by 1907, the tsar had curtailed the powerof the Duma, and after Stolypin’s murder he fell back on

the army and bureaucracy to rule Russia. World War Iwould give revolutionary forces another chance to undothe tsarist regime, and this time they would not fail.

l The Rise of the United States

Between 1860 and 1914, the United States made the shiftfrom an agrarian to a mighty industrial nation. Americanheavy industry stood unchallenged in 1900. In that year,the Carnegie Steel Company alone produced more steelthan Great Britain’s entire steel industry. Industrializationalso led to urbanization. While established cities, such asNew York, Philadelphia, and Boston, grew even larger,other moderate-size cities, such as Pittsburgh, grew byleaps and bounds because of industrialization. Whereas20 percent of Americans lived in cities in 1860, over 40percent did in 1900. Four-fifths of the population growth

On January 9, 1905, a massive procession of workers ledby a Russian Orthodox priest loyal to the tsar, FatherGeorge Gapon, carried a petition to present to the tsar athis imperial palace in St. Petersburg. Although the tsarwas not even there, government officials ordered troops tofire on the crowd. “Bloody Sunday,” as it was called, pre-cipitated the Revolution of 1905. This selection is anexcerpt from the petition that was never presented.

l George Gapon and Ivan Vasimov, Petition to the Tsar

Sovereign! We, the workers and the inhabitants of various social

strata of the city of St. Petersburg, our wives, children,and helpless old parents, have come to you, Sovereign,to seek justice and protection. We are impoverished; ouremployers oppress us, overburden us with work, insultus, consider us inhuman, and treat us as slaves whomust suffer a bitter fate in silence. Though we have suf-fered, they push us deeper and deeper into a gulf ofmisery, disfranchisement, and ignorance. Despotismand arbitrariness strangle us and we are gasping forbreath. Sovereign, we have no strength left. We havereached the limit of endurance. We have reached thatterrible moment when death is preferable to the continu-ance of unbearable sufferings.

And so we left our work and informed our employersthat we shall not resume work until they meet ourdemands. We do not demand much; we only want whatis indispensable to life and without which life is nothingbut hard labor and eternal suffering. Our first requestwas that our employers discuss our needs jointly withus. But they refused to do this; they even denied us theright to speak about our needs, saying that the law does

not give us such a right. Also unlawful were our requeststo reduce the working day to eight hours, to set wagesjointly with us; to examine our disputes with lower eche-lons of factory administration; to increase the wages ofunskilled workers and women to one ruble [about$1.00] per day; to abolish overtime work; to providemedical care without insult. . . .

Sovereign, there are thousands of us here; outwardlywe resemble human beings, but in reality neither we northe Russian people as a whole enjoy any human right,have any right to speak, to think, to assemble, to discussour needs, or to take measures to improve our condi-tions. They have enslaved us and they did it under theprotection of your officials, with their aid and with theircooperation. They imprison and send into exile any oneof us who has the courage to speak on behalf of theinterests of the working class and of the people. . . . All the workers and the peasants are at the mercy ofbureaucratic administrators consisting of embezzlers ofpublic funds and thieves who not only disregard theinterests of the people but also scorn these interests. . . .The people are deprived of the opportunity to expresstheir wishes and their demands and to participate indetermining taxes and expenditures. The workers aredeprived of the opportunity to organize themselves inunions to protect their interests.

Sovereign! Is all this compatible with God’s laws, bythe grace of which you reign? And is it possible to liveunder such laws? Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if we,the toiling people of all Russia, died? . . . Sovereign,these are the problems that we face and these are thereasons that we have gathered before the walls of yourpalace. Here we seek our last salvation. Do not refuse to come to the aid of your people.

Russian Workers Appeal to the Tsar

L


in cities came from migration. Eight to 10 million Ameri-cans moved from rural areas into the cities, and 14 millionforeigners came from abroad.

By 1900, the United States had become the world’srichest nation and greatest industrial power. Yet seriousquestions remained about the quality of American life.In 1890, the richest 9 percent of Americans owned anincredible 71 percent of all the wealth. Labor unrest overunsafe working conditions, strict work discipline, and peri-odic cycles of devastating unemployment led workers toorganize. By the turn of the century, one national organi-zation, the American Federation of Labor, emerged aslabor’s dominant voice. Its lack of real power, however,is reflected in its membership figures. In 1900, it includedonly 8.4 percent of the American industrial labor force.

During the so-called Progressive Era after 1900, anage of reform swept through the United States. At the statelevel, reforming governors sought to achieve clean gov-ernment by introducing elements of direct democracy,such as direct primaries for selecting nominees for publicoffice. State governments also enacted economic andsocial legislation, such as laws that governed hours, wages,and working conditions, especially for women and chil-dren. The realization that state laws were ineffective indealing with nationwide problems, however, led to a Progressive movement at the national level. The MeatInspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act provided for a limited degree of federal regulation of corrupt industrialpractices. The presidency of Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921)

witnessed the creation of a graduated federal income taxand the establishment of the Federal Reserve System,which permitted the federal government to play a role inimportant economic decisions formerly made by bankers.Like European nations, the United States was slowlyadopting policies that extended the functions of the state.

l The Growth of CanadaCanada faced problems of national unity at the end of thenineteenth century. At the beginning of 1870, the Domin-ion of Canada had four provinces: Quebec, Ontario, NovaScotia, and New Brunswick. With the addition of two moreprovinces in 1871—Manitoba and Briish Columbia—theDominion of Canada extended from the Atlantic to thePacific.

Real unity was difficult to achieve, however, becauseof the distrust between the English-speaking and French-speaking peoples of Canada. Wilfred Laurier, who becamethe first French-Canadian prime minister in 1896, was ableto reconcile Canada’s two major groups. During his admin-istration, industrialization boomed and immigrants fromEurope helped to populate Canada’s vast territories.

◆ The New Imperialism Beginning in the 1880s, European states engaged in anintense scramble for overseas territory. This revival ofimperialism, or the “new imperialism” as some have calledit, led Europeans to carve up Asia and Africa. But why didEuropeans begin their mad scramble for colonies after1880?

l Causes of the New Imperialism The existence of competitive nation-states after 1870 wasundoubtedly a major determinant in the growth of this newimperialism. As European affairs grew tense, heightenedcompetition led European states to acquire coloniesabroad that provided ports and coaling stations for theirnavies. Colonies were also a source of international pres-tige. Once the scramble for colonies began, failure to enterthe race was perceived as a sign of weakness, totally unac-ceptable to an aspiring great power.

Late nineteenth-century imperialism, then, wasclosely tied to nationalism. After the unification of Italyand Germany in 1871, nationalism entered a new stage ofdevelopment. In the first half of the nineteenth century,nationalism had been closely identified with liberals whohad pursued both individual rights and national unifica-tion and independence. Liberal nationalists maintainedthat unified, independent nation-states could best preserveindividual rights. The new nationalism of the late nine-teenth century, tied to conservatism, was loud and chau-vinistic. As one exponent expressed it: “A true nationalistplaces his country above everything”; he believes in the“exclusive pursuit of national policies” and “the steady

LLLLLLLLLLLLLL

C H R O N O L O G Y

Politics, 1894–1914

Reign of Emperor William II 1888–1918Reign of Tsar Nicholas II 1894–1917Dreyfus affair in France 1895–1899Theodore Herzl’s The Jewish State 1896First Zionist Congress 1897Austrian Christian Socialists under

Karl Lueger 1897–1910First congress of Social Democratic

Party in Russia 1898Beginning of the Progressive Era in the

United States 1900Formation of Labour Party in Britain 1900Pankhursts establish Women’s Social

and Political Union 1903Ministries of Giovanni Giolitti in Italy 1903–1914Russo-Japanese War 1904–1905Revolution in Russia 1905National Insurance Act in Britain 1911Universal male suffrage in Italy 1912Social Democratic Party becomes

largest party in Germany 1912

732 C H A P T E R 2 4

increase in national power—for a nation declines whenit loses military might.”

Then, too, imperialism was tied to Social Darwinismand racism. Social Darwinists believed that in the strug-gle between nations, the fit are victorious and survive.Superior races must dominate inferior races by militaryforce to show how strong and virile they are. As British pro-fessor of mathematics Karl Pearson arrogantly argued in1900: “The path of progress is strewn with the wrecks ofnations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the [slaugh-tered remains] of inferior races. . . . Yet these dead peo-ple are, in very truth, the stepping stones on whichmankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeperemotional life of today.”18 Others were equally blunt. OneEnglishman wrote: “To the development of the WhiteMan, the Black Man and the Yellow must ever remain infe-rior, and as the former raised itself higher and yet higher,so did these latter seem to shrink out of humanity andappear nearer and nearer to the brutes.”19

A more religious-humanitarian approach to imperi-alism was taken by some Europeans when they arguedthat Europeans had a moral responsibility to civilize igno-rant peoples. This notion of the “white man’s burden” (seethe box on p. 734) helped at least the more idealistic indi-viduals to rationalize imperialism in their own minds. Nev-ertheless, the belief that the superiority of their civilizationobligated them to impose modern cities and newmedicines on supposedly primitive nonwhites was yetanother form of racism.

Some historians have emphasized an economic moti-vation for imperialism. There was a great demand for natural resources and products not found in Western coun-tries, such as rubber, oil, and tin. Instead of just trading forthese products, European investors advocated direct con-trol of the areas where the raw materials were found. Thelarge surpluses of capital that bankers and industrialistswere accumulating often encouraged them to seek higherrates of profit in underdeveloped areas. All of these factorscombined to create an economic imperialism wherebyEuropean finance dominated the economic activity of alarge part of the world. This economic imperialism, how-ever, was not necessarily the same thing as colonial expan-sion. Businesses invested where it was most profitable, notnecessarily where their own countries had colonialempires. For example, less than 10 percent of French for-eign investments before 1914 went to French colonies;most of the rest went to Latin American and Europeancountries. It should also be remembered that much of thecolonial territory that was acquired was mere wastelandfrom the point of view of industrialized Europe and costmore to administer than it produced economically. Onlythe search for national prestige could justify such losses.

Followers of Karl Marx were especially eager to arguethat imperialism was economically motivated becausethey associated imperialism with the ultimate demise ofthe capitalist system. Marx had hinted at this argument,but it was one of his followers, the Russian Vladimir Lenin(see Chapter 25), who in Imperialism, the Highest Stage

of World Capitalism developed the idea that capitalismleads to imperialism. According to Lenin, as the capital-ist system concentrates more wealth in ever-fewer hands,the possibility for investment at home is exhausted, andcapitalists are forced to invest abroad, establish colonies,and exploit small, weak nations. In his view, then, the onlycure for imperialism was the destruction of capitalism.

l The Creation of Empires

Whatever the reasons for the new imperialism, it had adramatic effect on Africa and Asia as European powerscompeted for control of these two continents.

/ THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

Europeans controlled relatively little of the African conti-nent before 1880. During the Napoleonic wars, the Britishhad established themselves in South Africa by taking con-

SOAP AND THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN. The concept ofthe “white man’s burden” included the belief that thesuperiority of their civilization obligated Europeans toimpose their practices on supposedly primitive nonwhites.This advertisement for Pears’ Soap clearly communicatesthe Europeans’ view of their responsibility toward otherpeoples.


trol of Capetown, originally founded by the Dutch. Afterthe wars, the British encouraged settlers to come to whatthey called Cape Colony. British policies disgusted theBoers or Afrikaners, as the descendants of the Dutchcolonists were called, and led them in 1835 to migratenorth on the Great Trek to the region between the Orangeand Vaal Rivers (later known as the Orange Free State) andnorth of the Vaal River (the Transvaal). Hostilities betweenthe British and the Boers continued, however. In 1877, theBritish governor of Cape Colony seized the Transvaal, buta Boer revolt led the British government to recognizeTransvaal as the independent South African Republic.These struggles between the British and the Boers did notprevent either white group from massacring and subju-gating the Zulu and Xhosa peoples of South Africa.

In the 1880s, British policy in South Africa waslargely determined by Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902). Rhodesfounded both diamond and gold companies that monop-olized production of these precious commodities and

enabled him to gain control of a territory north of Transvaalthat he named Rhodesia after himself. Rhodes was a greatchampion of British expansion. One of his goals was tocreate a series of British colonies “from the Cape toCairo”—all linked by a railroad. His imperialist ambitionsled to his downfall in 1896, however, when the British gov-ernment forced him to resign as prime minister of CapeColony after he conspired to overthrow the Boer govern-ment of the South African Republic without Britishapproval. Although the British government had hoped toavoid war with the Boers, it could not stop extremists onboth sides from precipitating a conflict. The Boer Wardragged on from 1899 to 1902 when the Boers were over-whelmed by the larger British army. British policy towardthe defeated Boers was remarkably conciliatory. Transvaaland the Orange Free State had representative governmentsby 1907, and in 1910, a Union of South Africa was cre-ated. Like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it becamea fully self-governing dominion within the British Empire.

Nig

er R.

Nile

R.

CongoR.

ZambeziR.

A t l an t i c

Ocean

Mediterranean Sea

Indian

Ocean

OT

TO

MA

NE

MPIR

E

MOROCCORIO

DEORO ALGERIA

TUNIS

LIBYAEGYPT

SUDAN ERITREA

ETHIOPIA

SOMALILAND

KENYAUGANDA

CONGO

CAMEROONS

NIGERIA

TOGORIO

MUNIGOLD

COASTLIBERIA

SIERRALEONE

GUINEAGAMBIA

SENEGALWEST AFRICA

EQUATORIALAFRICA

EQUATORIALAFRICA

ANGOLA

SOUTH

WEST

AFRICA

SOUTHAFRICA BASUTOLAND

SWAZILAND

MADAGASCAR

MOZAMBIQUE

BECHUANALAND

SOUTHERNRHODESIA

NORTHERNRHODESIA

GERMANEAST

AFRICA

Possessions, 1914

Spain

Portugal

Great Britain

France

Germany

Italy

Belgium

Independent

Boer Republic

0 750 1500 Miles

0 750 1500 2250 Kilometers

MAP 24.1 Africa in 1914.

734 C H A P T E R 2 4

Before 1880, the only other European settlements inAfrica had been made by the French and Portuguese. ThePortuguese had held on to their settlements in Angola onthe west coast and Mozambique on the east coast. TheFrench had started the conquest of Algeria in MuslimNorth Africa in 1830, although it was not until 1879 thatFrench civilian rule was established there. The next year,1880, the European scramble for possession of Africabegan in earnest. Before 1900, the French had added thehuge area of French West Africa and Tunisia to theirAfrican empire. In 1912, they established a protectorateover much of Morocco; the rest was left to Spain.

The British took an active interest in Egypt after theSuez Canal was opened by the French in 1869. Believingthat the canal was essential to their lifeline to India, theBritish sought to control the canal area. Egypt was a well-established state with an autonomous Muslim govern-

ment, but that did not stop the British from landing anexpeditionary force there in 1882. Although they assertedthat their occupation was only temporary, they soon estab-lished a protectorate over Egypt. From Egypt, the Britishmoved south into Sudan and seized it after narrowly avert-ing a war with France. Not to be outdone, Italy joined inthe imperialist scramble. Their humiliating defeat by theEthiopians in 1896 only led the Italians to try again in1911 when they invaded and seized Ottoman Tripoli,which they renamed Libya.

Central Africa was also added to the list of Europeancolonies. Popular interest in the forbiddingly dense trop-ical jungles of central Africa was first aroused in the 1860sand 1870s by explorers, such as the Scottish missionaryDavid Livingstone and the British-American journalistHenry M. Stanley. But the real driving force for the colonization of central Africa was King Leopold II

One of the justifications for European imperialism was thenotion that superior white peoples had the moral responsi-bility to raise ignorant native peoples to a higher level ofcivilization. The British poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) captured this notion in his poem, The White Man’sBurden.

l 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 exileto 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—In patience to abide,To veil the threat of terrorAnd check the show of pride;By open speech and simple,An hundred times made plainTo seek another’s profit,And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden—The savage wars of peace—Fill full the mouth of FamineAnd bid the sickness cease;And when your goal is nearestThe end for others sought,Watch sloth and heathen FollyBring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden—No tawdry rule of kings,But toil of serf and sweeper—The tale of common things.The ports ye shall not enter,The roads ye shall not tread,Go mark them with your living,And mark them with your dead.

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 he us from bondage,Our loved Egyptian night?’

Take up the White Man’s burden—Ye dare not stoop to less—Nor call too loud on FreedomTo cloke your weariness;By all ye cry or whisper,By all you leave or do,The silent, sullen peoplesShall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden—Have done with childish days—The lightly proferred laurel,The easy, ungrudged praise.Comes now, to search your manhoodThrough all the thankless years,Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,The judgment of your peers!

The White Man’s Burden

L


(1865–1909) of Belgium, who had rushed enthusiasticallyinto the pursuit of empire in Africa: “To open to civiliza-tion,” he said, “the only part of our globe where it has notyet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which envelopswhole populations, is a crusade, if I may say so, a crusadeworthy of this century of progress.” Profit, however, wasfar more important to Leopold than progress; his treat-ment of the Africans was so brutal that even other Euro-peans condemned his actions. In 1876, Leopold createdthe International Association for the Exploration and Civ-ilization of Central Africa and engaged Henry Stanley toestablish Belgian settlements in the Congo. Alarmed byLeopold’s actions, the French also moved into the terri-tory north of the Congo River.

Between 1884 and 1900, most of the rest of Africawas carved up by the European powers. Germany alsoentered the ranks of the imperialist powers at this time.Initially, Bismarck had downplayed the significance ofcolonies, but as domestic political pressures for a Germanempire intensified, Bismarck became a political convert tocolonialism. As he expressed it: “All this colonial businessis a sham, but we need it for the elections.” The Germansestablished colonies in South-west Africa, the Cameroons,Togoland, and East Africa.

By 1914, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain,and Portugal had divided Africa. Only Liberia, founded byemancipated American slaves, and Ethiopia remained freestates. Despite the humanitarian rationalizations about

The Western justification of imperialism that was based on a sense of moral responsibility, evident in RudyardKipling’s poem, was often hypocritical. Edward Morel, aBritish journalist who spent time in the Congo, pointedout the destructive effects of Western imperialism onAfricans in his book, The Black Man’s Burden.

l 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’soccupation. Indeed . . . Africa has ultimately absorbedwithin itself every Caucasian and, for that matter, everySemitic invader, too. In hewing out for himself a fixedabode in Africa, the white man has massacred theAfrican 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 whiteman has failed to do; what the mapping out of Europeanpolitical “spheres of influence” has failed to do; what theMaxim [machine gun] and the rifle, the slave gang, laborin the bowels of the earth and the lash, have failed todo; what imported measles, smallpox and syphilis havefailed to do; whatever the overseas slave trade failed to do; the power of modern capitalistic exploitation,assisted by modern engines of destruction, may yetsucceed in accomplishing.

For from the evils of the latter, scientifically appliedand enforced, there is no escape for the African. Itsdestructive effects are not spasmodic: they are perma-nent. In its permanence resides its fatal consequences.It kills not the body merely, but the soul. It breaks thespirit. It attacks the African at every turn, from everypoint of vantage. It wrecks his polity, uproots him fromthe land, invades his family life, destroys his naturalpursuits and occupations, claims his whole time,enslaves him in his own home. . . .

In Africa, especially in tropical Africa, which a capi-talistic imperialism threatens and has, in part, alreadydevastated, man is incapable of reacting against unnat-ural conditions. In those regions man is engaged in aperpetual struggle against disease and an exhaustingclimate, which tells heavily upon childbearing; andthere is no scientific machinery for saving the weakermembers of the community. The African of the tropics is capable of tremendous physical labors. But he can-not accommodate himself to the European system ofmonotonous, uninterrupted labor, with its long andregular hours, involving, moreover, as it frequentlydoes, severance from natural surroundings and nostal-gia, the condition of melancholy resulting from separ-ation from home, a malady to which the African isspecially prone. Climatic conditions forbid it. When the system is forced upon him, the tropical Africandroops and dies.

Nor is violent physical opposition to abuse and injus-tice henceforth possible for the African in any part ofAfrica. His chances of effective resistance have beensteadily dwindling with the increasing perfectibility inthe killing power of modern armament. . . .

Thus the African is really helpless against the mate-rial gods of the white man, as embodied in the trinity ofimperialism, capitalistic exploitation, and militarism. . . .

To reduce all the varied and picturesque and stimu-lating episodes in savage life to a dull routine of end-less toil for uncomprehended ends, to dislocate socialties and disrupt social institutions; to stifle nascentdesires and crush mental development; to graft uponprimitive passions the annihilating evils of scientificslavery, and the bestial imaginings of civilized man,unrestrained by convention or law; in fine, to kill thesoul in a people—this is a crime which transcendsphysical murder.

The Black Man’s Burden

L

736 C H A P T E R 2 4

the “white man’s burden,” Africa had been conquered byEuropean states determined to create colonial empires (seethe box on p. 735). Any peoples who dared to resist (withthe exception of the Ethiopians, who defeated the Italians)were simply devastated by the superior military force ofthe Europeans. In 1898, Sudanese tribesmen attemptedto defend their independence and stop a British expedi-tion armed with the recently developed machine gun. Inthe ensuing Battle of Omdurman, the Sudanese were mas-sacred. One observer noted: “It was not a battle but anexecution. . . . The bodies were not in heaps—bodieshardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres andacres. Some lay very composedly with their slippers placedunder their heads for a last pillow; some knelt, cut shortin the middle of a last prayer. Others were torn to pieces.”20

The battle casualties at Omdurman tell the story of theone-sided conflicts between Europeans and Africans: 28British deaths to 11,000 Sudanese. Military superioritywas frequently accompanied by brutal treatment of blacks.Nor did Europeans hesitate to deceive the Africans to gaintheir way. One South African king, Lo Bengula, informedQueen Victoria about how he had been cheated:

Some time ago a party of men came to my country, theprincipal one appearing to be a man called Rudd. Theyasked me for a place to dig for gold, and said they wouldgive me certain things for the right to do so. I told them tobring what they could give and I would show them what Iwould give. A document was written and presented to mefor signature. I asked what it contained, and was told thatin it were my words and the words of those men. I put myhand to it. About three months afterwards I heard fromother sources that I had given by that document the right to all the minerals of my country.21

/ ASIA IN AN AGE OF IMPERIALISM

Although Asia had been open to Western influence sincethe sixteenth century, not much of its immense territoryhad fallen under direct European control. The Dutch wereestablished in the East Indies, the Spanish were in thePhilippines, and the French and Portuguese had tradingposts on the Indian coast. China, Japan, Korea, and South-east Asia had largely managed to exclude Westerners. TheBritish and the Russians, however, had acquired the mostAsian territory.

It was not until the explorations of Australia by Cap-tain James Cook between 1768 and 1771 that Britain tookan active interest in the East. The availability of land forgrazing sheep and the discovery of gold in Australia led toan influx of free settlers who slaughtered many of theindigenous inhabitants. In 1850, the British governmentgranted the various Australian colonies virtually completeself-government, and fifty years later, on January 1, 1901,all the colonies were unified into a Commonwealth of Aus-tralia. Nearby New Zealand, which the British haddeclared a colony in 1840, was also granted dominion sta-tus in 1907.

A private trading company known as the British EastIndia Company had been responsible for subjugatingmuch of India. In 1858, however, after a revolt of thesepoys, or Indian troops of the East India Company’s armyhad been crushed, the British Parliament transferred thecompany’s powers directly to the government in London.In 1876, the title Empress of India was bestowed uponQueen Victoria; Indians were now her colonial subjects.

Russian expansion in Asia was a logical outgrowthof its traditional territorial aggrandizement. Russian explor-ers had penetrated the wilderness of Siberia in the sev-enteenth century and reached the Pacific coast in 1637.In the eighteenth century, Russians established a claim onAlaska, which was later sold to the United States in 1867.Gradually, Russian settlers moved into cold and forbid-ding Siberia. Altogether seven million Russians settled inSiberia between 1800 and 1914; by 1914, 90 percent ofthe Siberian population were Slavs, not Asiatics.

The Russians also moved south, attracted by warmerclimates and the crumbling Ottoman Empire. By 1830, theRussians had established control over the entire north-ern coast of the Black Sea and then pressed on into cen-tral Asia, securing the trans-Caspian area by 1881 andTurkestan in 1885. These advances brought the Russiansto the borders of Persia and Afghanistan where the Britishalso had interests because of their desire to protect theirholdings in India. In 1907, the Russians and British agreedto make Afghanistan a buffer state between RussianTurkestan and British India and to divide Persia into twospheres of influence. Halted by the British in their expan-sion to the south, the Russians moved east in Asia. TheRussian occupation of Manchuria and their attempt tomove into Korea brought war with the new imperialistpower, Japan. After losing the Russo-Japanese War in1905, the Russians agreed to a Japanese protectorate in

LLLLLLLLLLLLLL

C H R O N O L O G Y

The New Imperialism: Africa

Great Trek of the Boers 1835Opening of the Suez Canal 1869Leopold of Belgium establishes

settlements in the Congo 1876British seizure of Transvaal 1877French complete conquest of Algeria 1879British expeditionary force in Egypt 1882Ethiopians defeat the Italians 1896Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan 1898Boer War 1899–1902Union of South Africa 1910Italians seize Tripoli 1911French protectorate over Morocco 1912


Korea, and their Asian expansion was brought to a tem-porary halt.

The thrust of imperialism after 1880 led Western-ers to move into new areas of Asia hitherto largely free ofWestern influence. By the nineteenth century, the rulingManchu dynasty of the Chinese Empire was showing signsof decline. In 1842, the British had obtained (through war)the island of Hong Kong and trading rights in a number ofChinese cities. Other Western nations soon rushed in togain similar trading privileges. Chinese attempts to resistthis encroachment of foreigners led to military defeats andnew demands. Only rivalry among the great powers them-selves prevented the complete dismemberment of the Chi-nese Empire. Instead, Britain, France, Germany, Russia,the United States, and Japan established spheres of influ-ence and long-term leases of Chinese territory. In 1899,urged along by the American secretary of state John Hay,they agreed to an “Open Door” policy in which one coun-try would not restrict the commerce of the other coun-tries in its sphere of influence.

Japan avoided Western intrusion until 1853–1854when American naval forces under Commodore MatthewPerry forced the Japanese to grant the United States trad-ing and diplomatic privileges. Japan, however, managedto avoid China’s fate. Korea had also largely excludedWesterners. The fate of Korea was determined by thestruggle first between China and Japan in 1894–1895 andlater between Japan and Russia in 1904–1905. Japan’s victories gave it a clear superiority, and in 1910 Japan formally annexed Korea.

In Southeast Asia, Britain established control overBurma and the Malay States, and France played an activerole in subjugating Indochina. The city of Saigon wasoccupied in 1858, and four years later Cochin China wastaken. In the 1880s, the French extended “protection” overCambodia, Annam, Tonkin, and Laos and organized theminto a Union of French Indochina. Only Siam (Thailand)remained free as a buffer state because of British-Frenchrivalry.

The Pacific islands were also the scene of greatpower competition and witnessed the entry of the UnitedStates onto the imperialist stage. The Samoan Islandsbecame the first important American colony; the Hawai-ian Islands were the next to fall. Soon after Americans hadmade Pearl Harbor into a naval station in 1887, Americansettlers 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” Americanlives. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898during the era of American nationalistic fervor generatedby the Spanish-American War. The American defeat ofSpain encouraged Americans to extend their empire byacquiring Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the PhilippineIslands. Although the Filipinos hoped for independence,the Americans refused to grant it. As President WilliamMcKinley said, the United States had the duty “to educatethe Filipinos and uplift and Christianize them,” a remark-

able statement in view of the fact that most of them hadbeen Roman Catholics for centuries. It took three yearsand 60,000 troops to pacify the Philippines and estab-lish American control. Not until 1946 did the Filipinosreceive complete independence.

l Asian Responses to Imperialism

When Europeans imposed their culture upon peoples theyconsidered inferior, how did the conquered peoplesrespond? Initial attempts to expel the foreigners only ledto devastating defeats at the hands of Westerners, whoseindustrial technology gave them modern weapons of warwith which to crush the indigenous peoples. Accustomedto rule by small elites, most people simply accepted theirnew governors, making Western rule relatively easy. Theconquered peoples subsequently adjusted to foreign rulein different ways. Traditionalists sought to maintain theircultural traditions, but modernizers believed that adop-tion of Western ways would enable them to reform theirsocieties and eventually challenge Western rule. Mostpeople probably stood somewhere between these twoextremes. Three eventually powerful Asian nations—China, Japan, and India—present different approaches tothe question of how Asian populations responded to for-eign rule.

/ CHINA

The humiliation of China by the Western powers led tomuch antiforeign violence, but the Westerners only usedthis lawlessness as an excuse to extort further concessionsfrom the Chinese. A major outburst of violence against for-eigners occurred in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900–1901.Boxers was the popular name given to Chinese whobelonged to a secret organization called the Society of Har-monious Fists, whose aim was to push the foreigners outof China. The Boxers murdered foreign missionaries, Chi-nese who had converted to Christianity, railroad work-ers, foreign businessmen, and even the German envoy toBeijing. Response to the killings was immediate and over-whelming. An allied army consisting of British, French,German, Russian, American, and Japanese troopsattacked Beijing, restored order, and demanded more con-cessions from the Chinese government. The imperial government was so weakened that the forces of the revo-lutionary leader Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), who adopted aprogram of “nationalism, democracy, and socialism,” over-threw the Manchu dynasty in 1912. The new Republic ofChina remained weak and ineffective, and China’s travailswere far from over.

/ JAPAN

In the late 1850s and early 1860s, it looked as if Japanwould follow China’s fate and be carved up into spheresof influence by aggressive Western powers. A remarkablyrapid transformation, however, produced a very differentresult. Before 1868, the shogun, a powerful hereditary

738 C H A P T E R 2 4

military governor assisted by a warrior nobility known asthe samurai, exercised real power in Japan. The emperor’sfunctions had become primarily religious. After theshogun’s concessions to the Western nations, antiforeignsentiment led to a samurai revolt in 1867 and the restora-tion of the emperor as the rightful head of the govern-ment. The new emperor was the astute, dynamic, young Mutsuhito (1867–1912), who called his reign the Meiji(Enlightened Government). The new leaders who con-trolled the emperor now inaugurated a remarkable trans-formation of Japan that has since been known as the MeijiRestoration.

Recognizing the obvious military and industrialsuperiority of the West, the new leaders decided to mod-ernize Japan by absorbing and adopting Western methods.Thousands of young Japanese were sent abroad to receiveWestern educations, especially in the social and naturalsciences. A German-style army and a British-style navywere established. The Japanese copied the industrial andfinancial methods of the United States and developed amodern commercial and industrial system. A highly cen-tralized administrative system copied from the Frenchreplaced the old feudal system. Initially, the Japaneseadopted the French principles of social and legal equality,

Indus

R.

Ura

l R.

Volg

a

R.

Hu

ang R .

Ch an

g R.

P a c i f i c

O c e a n

I n d i a n

O c e a n

Aral

Bay of

Bengal

Sea ofOkhotsk

Arabian

Sea

SouthChina

Sea

Sea ofJapan

Caspian

Sea

Sea

MarianasIslands

Guam (U.S.)

Caroline Islands

BismarckArch.

Trans–Siberian Rai lroad RUSSIA

INDIA

PERSIAAFGHANISTAN

SIAM

CHINA

MANCHURIA

KOREA

FORMOSA

FRENCH

INDO-

CHINA

MALAYSTATES

AUSTRALIA

TIMOR

NEWGUINEA

CEYLON

PHILIPPINEISLANDS

BHUTANNEPAL

TIBET

SUMATRA

CELEBES

SARAWAK

JAVA

BORNEO

BALI

MONGOLIA

J

AP

AN

DU

TC

HE A S T I N D I E S

DiuDaman

Goa

MahéKarikal

Pondicherry

Yanaon

ChandarnagarKwangchou

MacaoHongKong

Wei–Hai–Wei

Tokyo

Beijing

Kabul

Bombay

Shanghai

Bangkok

Saigon

PortArthur

Himalayan Mts.

Great Britain

United States

Dutch

Japan

Russia

Portugal

Independent

France

Germany

Sphere of influence

Homeland

Chinese border, 1850

0 500 1000 Miles

0 500 1000 1500 Kilometers

MAP 24.2 Asia in 1914.


but by 1890 they had created a political system that wasdemocratic in form but authoritarian in practice.

In imitating the West, Japan also developed a pow-erful military state. Universal military conscription wasintroduced in 1872, and a modern peacetime army of240,000 was eventually established. The Japanese avidlypursued the Western imperialistic model. They defeatedChina in 1894–1895, annexed some Chinese territory, andestablished their own sphere of influence in China. Afterthey had defeated the Russians in 1905, the Japanesemade Korea a colony under harsh rule. The Japanese hadproved that an Asian power could play the “white man’s”imperialistic game and provided a potent example to peo-ples in other regions of Asia and Africa.

/ INDIA

The British government had been in control of India sincethe mid-nineteenth century. After crushing a major revoltin 1858, the British ruled India directly. Under Parliament’ssupervision, a small group of British civil servants directedthe affairs of India’s almost 300 million people.

The British brought order to a society that had beendivided by civil wars for some time and created a rela-tively honest and efficient government. They also brought

Western technology—railroads, banks, mines, industry,medical knowledge, and hospitals. The British introducedWestern-style secondary schools and colleges where theIndian upper and middle classes and professional classeswere educated so that they could serve as trained subor-dinates in the government and army.

But the Indian people paid a high price for the peaceand stability brought by British rule. Due to populationgrowth in the nineteenth century, extreme poverty was away of life for most Indians; almost two-thirds of the pop-ulation were malnourished in 1901. British industrializa-tion brought little improvement for the masses. Britishmanufactured goods destroyed local industries, and Indianwealth was used to pay British officials and a large army.The system of education served only the elite, upper-classIndians, and it was conducted only in the rulers’ Englishlanguage while 90 percent of the population remained illit-erate. Even for the Indians who benefited the most fromtheir Western educations, British rule was degrading. Thebest jobs and the best housing were reserved for Britons.Despite their education, the Indians were never consid-ered equals of the British whose racial attitudes were madequite clear by Lord Kitchener, one of Britain’s foremost mil-itary commanders in India, when he said: “It is this con-sciousness of the inherent superiority of the Europeanwhich has won for us India. However well educated andclever a native may be, and however brave he may provehimself, I believe that no rank we can bestow on himwould cause him to be considered an equal of the Britishofficer.”22 Such smug racial attitudes made it difficult forBritish rule, no matter how beneficent, ever to be ulti-mately accepted and led to the rise of an Indian nation-alist movement. By 1883, when the Indian NationalCongress was formed, moderate, educated Indians werebeginning to seek self-government. By 1919, in responseto British violence and British insensitivity in trying to divide Bengal, Indians were demanding complete independence.

◆ International Rivalry and theComing of War

Before 1914, Europeans had experienced almost fifty yearsof peace. There had been wars (including wars of conquestin the non-Western world), but none had involved thegreat powers. A series of crises had occurred, however, thatmight easily have led to general war. One reason they didnot is that until 1890 Bismarck of Germany exercised arestraining influence on the Europeans.

l The Bismarckian System

Bismarck knew that the emergence of a unified Germanyin 1871 had upset the balance of power established atVienna in 1815. By keeping the peace, he could best

LLLLLLLLLLLLLL

C H R O N O L O G Y

The New Imperialism: Asia

Britain obtains Hong Kong and trading rights from Chinese government 1842

Australian colonies receive self-government 1850

Mission of Commodore Perry to Japan 1853–1854Rebellion of sepoys in India 1857–1858French occupy Saigon 1858Overthrow of the shogun in Japan 1867Emperor Mutsuhito and the Meiji

Restoration 1867–1912Queen Victoria is made Empress of

India 1876Russians in central Asia

(trans-Caspian area) 1881Formation of Indian National Congress 1883Russians in Turkestan 1885Japanese defeat of China 1894–1895Spanish-American War; United States

annexes Philippines 1898“Open Door” policy in China 1899Boxer Rebellion in China 1900–1901Commonwealth of Australia 1901Commonwealth of New Zealand 1907Russian-British agreement over

Afghanistan and Persia 1907Japan annexes Korea 1910Overthrow of Manchu dynasty in China 1912

740 C H A P T E R 2 4

LLLLLLLLLLLLLL

C H R O N O L O G Y

European Diplomacy

Three Emperors’ League 1873Serbia and Montenegro attack the

Ottoman Empire 1876Treaty of San Stefano 1878Congress of Berlin 1878Defensive alliance: Germany and

Austria 1879Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria,

and Italy 1882Reinsurance Treaty: Germany and

Russia 1887Military alliance: Russia and France 1894Entente Cordiale: France and Britain 1904First Moroccan Crisis 1905–1906Triple Entente: France, Britain, and

Russia 1907First Balkan War 1912Second Balkan War 1913

of the alliance.” At the same time, Bismarck sought toremain on friendly terms with the Russians and made aReinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887, hoping to preventa French-Russian alliance that would threaten Germanywith the possibility of a two-front war. The Bismarckiansystem of alliances, geared to preserving peace and thestatus quo, had worked, but in 1890 Emperor William IIdismissed Bismarck and began to chart a new direction forGermany’s foreign policy.

l New Directions and New Crises

Bismarck’s alliances had served to bring the Europeanpowers into an interlocking system in which no one statecould be certain of much support if it chose to initiate awar of aggression. After 1890, a new European diplomacyunfolded in which Europe became divided into two oppos-ing camps that became more and more inflexible andunwilling to compromise.

After Bismarck’s dismissal, Emperor William IIembarked upon an activist foreign policy dedicated toenhancing German power by finding, as he put it, Ger-many’s rightful “place in the sun.” One of his changes inBismarck’s foreign policy was to drop the ReinsuranceTreaty with Russia, which he viewed as being at odds withGermany’s alliance with Austria. Although William II triedto remain friendly with Russia, the ending of the allianceachieved what Bismarck had feared: it brought France andRussia together. Long isolated by Bismarck’s policies,republican France leaped at the chance to draw closer totsarist Russia, and in 1894 the two powers concluded amilitary alliance.

maintain the new status quo and preserve the new Ger-man state. Fearing the French desire for revenge over theirloss of Alsace-Lorraine in the Franco-Prussian War, Bis-marck made an alliance in 1873 with the traditionally con-servative powers Austria-Hungary and Russia. The ThreeEmperors’ League, as it was called, failed to work verywell, however, primarily because of Russian-Austrianrivalry in eastern Europe, specifically, in the Balkans.

The problem in the Balkans was yet another chap-ter in the story of the disintegration of the OttomanEmpire. Subject peoples in the Balkans clamored for inde-pendence, while corruption and inefficiency weakened theOttoman government. Only the interference of the greatEuropean powers, who were fearful of each other’s designson its territories, kept the Ottoman Empire alive. Compli-cating the situation was the rivalry between Russia andAustria, which both had designs on the Balkans. For Rus-sia, the Balkans provided the shortest overland route toConstantinople and the Straits. Austria viewed the Balkansas fertile ground for Austrian expansion. Both Britain andFrance feared the extension of Russian power into theMediterranean and Middle East. Although Germany hadno real interests in the Balkans, Bismarck was fearful ofthe consequences of a war between Russia and Austriaover the Balkans and served as a restraining influenceon both powers. Events in the Balkans, however, precipi-tated a new crisis.

In 1876, the Balkan states of Serbia and Montene-gro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Both weredefeated, but Russia, with Austrian approval, attacked anddefeated the Ottomans. By the Treaty of San Stefano in1878, a large Bulgarian state, extending from the Danubein the north to the Aegean Sea in the south, was created.As Bulgaria was viewed as a Russian satellite, this Russiansuccess caused the other great powers to call for a congressof European powers to discuss a revision of the treaty.

The Congress of Berlin, which met in the summerof 1878, was dominated by Bismarck. The congress effec-tively demolished the Treaty of San Stefano, much to Russia’s humiliation. The new Bulgarian state was considerably reduced, and the rest of the territory wasreturned to Ottoman control. The three Balkan states ofSerbia, Montenegro, and Romania, until then nominallyunder Ottoman control, were recognized as independent.The other Balkan territories of Bosnia and Herzegovinawere placed under Austrian protection; Austria couldoccupy but not annex them. Although the Germansreceived no territory, they believed they had at least pre-served the peace among the great powers.

After the Congress of Berlin, the European powerssought new alliances to safeguard their security. Angeredby the Germans’ actions at the congress, the Russians hadterminated the Three Emperors’ League. Bismarck thenmade an alliance with Austria in 1879 that was joined bya third party—Italy—in 1882. The Triple Alliance of 1882committed Germany, Austria, and Italy to support theexisting political order while providing a defensive allianceagainst France or “two or more great powers not members


The attitude of the British now became crucial.Secure in their vast empire, the British had long pursueda policy of “splendid isolation” toward the Continent. TheBritish were startled, however, when many Europeanscondemned their activity in the Boer War (1899–1902) inSouth Africa. Fearful of an anti-British continentalalliance, they saw the weakness of “splendid isolation”and sought an alliance with a continental power. Initially,neither France nor Russia seemed a logical choice.Britain’s traditional enmity with France had only inten-sified because of their imperialistic rivalries in Africa andAsia. Likewise, British and Russian imperialistic interestshad frequently collided.

Germany, therefore, seemed the most likely poten-tial ally. Certainly, some people in both Britain and Ger-many believed that their common German heritage(Anglo-Saxons from Germany had settled in Britain in the Early Middle Ages) made them “natural allies.” ButBritain was not particularly popular in Germany, nor didthe British especially like the Germans. Industrial andcommercial rivalry had created much ill feeling, andWilliam II’s imperial posturing and grabbing for coloniesmade the British suspicious of Germany’s ultimate aims(see the box on p. 742). Especially worrisome to the Britishwas the Germans’ construction of a large navy, includinga number of battleships advocated by the persistent Admiral von Tirpitz, secretary of the German navy. TheBritish now turned to their traditional enemy, France, and

in 1904 concluded the Entente Cordiale by which the twosettled all of their outstanding colonial disputes.

German response to the Entente was swift, creat-ing what has been called the First Moroccan Crisis in1905. The Germans chose to oppose French designs onMorocco in order to humiliate them and drive a wedgebetween the two new allies—Britain and France. Refusingto compromise, the Germans insisted upon an interna-tional conference to settle the problem. Germany’s foolishsaber rattling had the opposite effect of what had beenintended and succeeded only in uniting Russia, France,Great Britain, and even the United States against Ger-many. The conference at Algeciras, Spain, in January 1906awarded control of Morocco to France. Germany came outof the conference with nothing.

The First Moroccan Crisis of 1905–1906 had impor-tant repercussions. France and Britain drew closer togetheras both began to view Germany as a real threat to Euro-pean peace. German leaders, on the other hand, began tospeak of sinister plots to encircle Germany and hinderits emergence as a world power. Russia, too, grew moreand more suspicious of the Germans and signed an agree-ment in 1907 with Great Britain. By that year, Europe’sdivision into two major blocs—the Triple Alliance of Ger-many, Austria-Hungary, and Italy and the Triple Entente,as the loose confederation of Russia, France, and GreatBritain was called—grew increasingly rigid at the sametime that the problems in the Balkans were heating up.

IonianSea

Aegean

Sea

BlackSeaAdriatic Sea

Danube R.

ITALY

GREECE

BULGARIA

OTTOMANEMPIRE

ROMANIA

RUSSIA

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

GERMANY

SERBIA

BOSNIA

Trieste

Belgrade

BudapestVienna

Sofia

Bucharest

Salonika

Athens

Smyrna

Constantinople

MONTENEGRO

Sicily

Crete

HERZE-GOVINA

EASTRUMELIA

MACEDONIA

TOSERBIA

Sarajevo

ALBANIA

MOLDAVIA

CarpathianMts.

B

a lkanMts .

Ottoman Empire

Bulgaria as amended byCongress of Berlin, 1878

0 100 200 Miles

0 100 200 300 Kilometers

IonianSea

Aegean

Sea

BlackSeaAdriatic Sea

Danube R.

ITALY

GREECE

BULGARIA

OTTOMANEMPIRE

ROMANIA

RUSSIA

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

GERMANY

SERBIA

BOSNIA

Trieste

Belgrade

BudapestVienna

Sofia

Bucharest

Salonika

Athens

Smyrna

Constantinople

SanStefano

MONTENEGRO

Sicily

Crete

HERZE-GOVINA

ALBANIA

MOLDAVIA

Sarajevo

CarpathianMts.

Ba lkanMts .

Ottoman Empire

Bulgaria as proposed byTreaty of San Stefano, 1878

0 100 200 Miles


MAP 24.3 The Balkans in 1878.

742 C H A P T E R 2 4

Between 1908 and 1913, a new series of crises over thecontrol of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in theBalkans set the stage for World War I.

/ CRISES IN THE BALKANS (1908–1913)

The Bosnian Crisis of 1908–1909 initiated a chain ofevents that eventually went out of control. Since 1878,Bosnia and Herzegovina had been under the protection ofAustria, but in 1908, Austria took the drastic step of annex-ing these two Slavic-speaking territories. Serbia becameoutraged at this action because it dashed the Serbs’ hopesof creating a large Serbian kingdom that would include

most of the south Slavs. This was why the Austrians hadannexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the Austrians, alarge Serbia would be a threat to the unity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with its large Slavic population. TheRussians, as protectors of their fellow Slavs and with theirown desire to increase their authority in the Balkans, sup-ported the Serbs and opposed the Austrian action. Backedby the Russians, the Serbs prepared for war against Aus-tria. At this point William II intervened and demanded thatthe Russians accept Austria’s annexation of Bosnia andHerzegovina or face war with Germany. Weakened fromtheir defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–1905, the

Emperor William II’s world policy, which was aimed atfinding Germany’s “place in the sun,” created considerableill will and unrest among other European states, especiallyBritain. Moreover, the emperor had the unfortunate ten-dency to stir up trouble by his often tactless publicremarks. In this 1908 interview, for example, William IIintended to strengthen Germany’s ties with Britain. Hiswords had just the opposite effect and raised a storm ofprotest in both Britain and Germany.

l Daily Telegraph Interview, October 28, 1908

As I have said, his Majesty honored me with a longconversation, and spoke with impulsive and unusualfrankness. “You English,” he said, “are mad, mad, madas March hares. What has come over you that you areso completely given over to suspicions quite unworthyof a great nation? What more can I do than I havedone? I declared with all the emphasis at my command,in my speech at Guildhall, that my heart is set uponpeace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live onthe best of terms with England. Have I ever been false tomy word? Falsehoods and prevarication are alien to mynature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, butyou listen not to them but to those who misinterpret anddistort them. That is a personal insult which I feel andresent. To be forever misjudged, to have my repeatedoffers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jeal-ous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I havesaid time after time that I am a friend of England, andyour Press—or, at least, a considerable section of it—bids the people of England to refuse my proffered hand,and insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can Iconvince a nation against its will?”

“I repeat,” continued his Majesty, “that I am a friendof England, but you make things difficult for me. Mytask is not of the easiest. The prevailing sentimentamong large sections of the middle and lower classes of

my own people is not friendly to England. I am, there-fore, so to speak, in a minority in my own land, but it isa minority of the best elements as it is in England withrespect to Germany. That is another reason why I resentyour refusal to accept my pledged word that I am thefriend of England. I strive without ceasing to improverelations, and you retort that I am your arch-enemy. Youmake it hard for me. Why is it? . . .”

“But, you will say, what of the German Navy? Surely,that is a menace to England! Against whom but Englandare my squadrons being prepared? If England is not inthe minds of those Germans who are bent on creating apowerful fleet, why is Germany asked to consent to suchnew and heavy burdens of taxation? My answer is clear.Germany is a young and growing Empire. She has aworld-wide commerce, which is rapidly expanding, andto which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germansrefuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have apowerful fleet to protect that commerce, and her mani-fold interests in even the most distant seas. She expectsthose interests to go on growing, and she must be ableto champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe.Germany looks ahead. Her horizons stretch far away.She must be prepared for any eventualities in the FarEast. Who can foresee what may take place in thePacific in the days to come, days not so distant as somebelieve, but days, at any rate, for which all EuropeanPowers with Far Eastern interests ought steadily to pre-pare? Look at the accomplished rise of Japan; think ofthe possible national awakening of China; and thenjudge of the vast problems of the Pacific. Only thosePowers which have great navies will be listened to withrespect, when the future of the Pacific comes to besolved; and, if for that reason only, Germany must havea powerful fleet. It may even be that England herself will be glad that Germany has a fleet when they speaktogether on the same side in the great debates of thefuture.”

The Emperor’s “Big Mouth”

L


Russians were afraid to risk war and backed down. Humil-iated, the Russians vowed revenge.

European attention returned to the Balkans in 1912when Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Greece organizeda Balkan League and defeated the Ottomans in the FirstBalkan War. When the victorious allies were unable toagree on how to divide the conquered Ottoman provincesof Macedonia and Albania, the Second Balkan Warerupted in 1913. Greece, Serbia, Romania, and theOttoman Empire attacked and defeated Bulgaria. As aresult, Bulgaria obtained only a small part of Macedo-nia, and most of the rest was divided between Serbia andGreece. Yet Serbia’s aspirations remained unfulfilled. Thetwo Balkan wars left the inhabitants embittered and cre-ated more tensions among the great powers.

One of Serbia’s major ambitions had been to acquireAlbanian territory that would give it a port on the Adriatic.At the London Conference arranged by Austria at the end

of the two Balkan wars, the Austrians had blocked Serbia’swishes by creating an independent Albania. The Germans,as Austrian allies, had supported this move. In their frus-tration, Serbian nationalists increasingly portrayed theAustrians as evil monsters who were keeping the Serbsfrom becoming a great nation. As Serbia’s chief support-ers, the Russians were also upset by the turn of events inthe Balkans. A feeling had grown among Russian leadersthat they could not back down again in the event of a con-frontation with Austria or Germany in the Balkans. OneRussian military journal even stated early in 1914: “Weare preparing for a war in the west. The whole nation mustaccustom itself to the idea that we arm ourselves for a warof annihilation against the Germans.”

Austria-Hungary had achieved another of its aims,but it was still convinced that Serbia was a mortal threatto its empire and must at some point be crushed. Mean-while, the French and Russian governments renewed their

DanubeR.

M e d i t e r r a n e a n S e a

A d r i a t i cS e a

BlackSea

Pruth

R.

GERMANY

ITALY

GREECE

MACEDONIA

(ANNEXED 1913)

SERBIA

ALBANIA

MONTENEGROBULGARIA

ROMANIA

RUSSIAAUSTRIA - HUNGARY

TRANSYLVANIA

BOSNIA

HERZE-GOVINA

OT

TO

MA

NE

MPIR

E

Tirana

Vienna

Belgrade

Sarajevo

Budapest

Athens

Constantinople

Bucharest

Sofia

Gallipoli

Carpathian

Mts.

Sicily

Crete0 100 200 Miles


MAP 24.4 The Balkans in 1913.

744 C H A P T E R 2 4

1894 1898 1902 1906 1910 1914

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams Einstein’s special theory of relativity

Picasso, first Cubist painting Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring

Dreyfus affair in France Women’s Social and Political Union in Britain

Revolution in Russia Social Democratic Party as largest party in Germany

“Open Door” Policy in China Russo-Japanese War

Triple Entente: France, Britain, and Russia First Balkan War

OTTOMAN ARMY IN RETREAT.In 1912, a coalition of Serbia, Bulgaria,Montenegro, and Greece defeated theOttomans and took possession of theOttoman provinces of Macedonia andAlbania. This picture shows the Otto-man army in retreat, pursued byBulgarian forces.

alliance and promised each other that they would not backdown at the next crisis. Britain drew closer to France. Bythe beginning of 1914, two armed camps viewed eachother with suspicion. An American in Europe observed,“The whole of Germany is charged with electricity. Every-

body’s nerves are tense. It only needs a spark to set thewhole thing off.” The German ambassador to France notedat the same time that “peace remains at the mercy of anaccident.” The European “age of progress” was about tocome to an inglorious and bloody end.


Conclusion LLLLLLLLLLLL

What many Europeans liked to call their “age ofprogress” in the decades before 1914 was also an era ofanxiety. Frenzied imperialist expansion had createdvast European empires and spheres of influence aroundthe globe. This feverish competition for colonies, how-ever, had markedly increased the existing antagonismsamong the European states. At the same time, theWestern treatment of non-Western peoples as racialinferiors caused educated, non-Western elites in thesecolonies to initiate movements for national indepen-dence. Before these movements could be successful,however, the power that Europeans had achievedthrough their mass armies and technological superior-ity had to be weakened. The Europeans inadvertentlyaccomplished this task for their colonial subjects bydemolishing their own civilization on the battlegroundsof Europe in World War I and World War II.

The cultural revolutions before 1914 had alsoproduced anxiety and a crisis of confidence in Euro-pean civilization. A brilliant minority of intellectualshad created a modern consciousness that questionedmost Europeans’ optimistic faith in reason, the rationalstructure of nature, and the certainty of progress. Thedevastating experiences of World War I turned thisculture of uncertainty into a way of life after 1918.

NOTES LLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

1. Quoted in Arthur E. E. McKenzie, The Major Achieve-ments of Science (New York, 1960), 1:310.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York, 1972), pp. 117–118.

3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in ThePhilosophy of Nietzsche (New York, 1954), p. 6.

4. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (New York, 1896), pp. 146–150.

5. Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War,trans. Allen H. Powles (New York, 1914), pp. 18–19.

6. Quoted in Edward R. Tannenbaum, 1900: The Genera-tion before the Great War (Garden City, N.Y., 1976), p. 337.

7. Quoted in Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of theEuropean Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,1975), p. 125.

8. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out(London, 1890), p. 45.

9. Quoted in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism(New York, 1961), pp. 456–458.

10. Quoted in Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images ofWomen (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. 19.

11. Paul Klee, On Modern Art, trans. Paul Findlay (London,1948), p. 51.

12. Quoted in Craig Wright, Listening to Music (St. Paul,Minn., 1992), p. 327.

13. Quoted in Catherine M. Prelinger, “Prelude to Con-sciousness: Amalie Sieveking and the Female Associa-tion for the Care of the Poor and the Sick,” in John C.Fout, ed., German Women in the Nineteenth Century: ASocial History (New York, 1984), p. 119.

14. Quoted in Bonnie Smith, Changing Lives: Women inEuropean History since 1700 (Lexington, Mass., 1989), p. 379.

15. Quoted in Paul Massing, Rehearsal for Destruction: AStudy of Political Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany(New York, 1949), p. 147.

16. Quoted in Abba Eban, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews(New York, 1984), p. 249.

17. Quoted in Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitu-tional Experiment, 1907–1914 (Cambridge, 1973), p. 5.

18. Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Sci-ence (London, 1905), p. 184.

19. Quoted in John Ellis, The Social History of the MachineGun (New York, 1975), p. 80.

20. Quoted in ibid., p. 86.21. Quoted in Louis L. Snyder, ed., The Imperialism Reader

(Princeton, N.J., 1962), p. 220.22. Quoted in K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance

(London, 1959), p. 116.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING LLLL

A well-regarded study of Freud is P. Gay, Freud: A Life for OurTime (New York, 1988). Also, see J. Neu, ed., The CambridgeCompanion to Freud (New York, 1991). Nietzsche is examinedin R. C. Holub, Friedrich Nietzsche (New York, 1995). On theimpact of Nietzsche, see R. H. Thomas, Nietzsche in GermanPolitics and Society, 1890–1918 (Dover, N.H., 1983). On Bergson, see A. E. Pilkington, Henri Bergson and His Influence(Cambridge, 1976). The basic study on Sorel is J. J. Roth, TheCult of Violence: Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley, 1980). Auseful study on the impact of Darwinian thought on religion is J. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of theProtestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in GreatBritain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979). Studies of the popular religion of the period include T. A. Kselman,Miracles and Prophesies in Nineteenth-Century France (NewBrunswick, N.J., 1983); and J. Sperber, Popular Catholicism inNineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, N.J., 1984). Veryvaluable on modern art are M. Powell-Jones, Impressionism(London, 1994); B. Denvir, Post-Impressionism (New York,1992); and T. Parsons, Post-Impressionism: The Rise of Mod-ern Art (London, 1992). On literature, see R. Pascal, FromNaturalism to Expressionism: German Literature and Society,1880–1918 (New York, 1973). The intellectual climate ofVienna is examined in C. E. Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna:Politics and Culture (New York, 1980).

The rise of feminism is examined in J. Rendall, TheOrigins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and theUnited States (London, 1985). The subject of modern anti-Semitism is covered in J. Katz, From Prejudice to Destruction(Cambridge, Mass., 1980); and A. S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears:Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (New York,

746 C H A P T E R 2 4

1997). European racism is analyzed in G. L. Mosse, Toward theFinal Solution (New York, 1980); German anti-Semitism as apolitical force is examined in P. J. Pulzer, The Rise of PoliticalAnti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964). Anti-Semitism in France is the subject of E. Cahm, The DreyfusAffair in French Society and Politics (New York, 1996). Theproblems of Jews in Russia are examined in J. Frankel,Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism and the RussianJews, 1862–1917 (Cambridge, 1981). For a recent biography ofTheodor Herzl, see J. Kornberg, Theodor Herzl: From Assimila-tion to Zionism (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). The beginnings ofthe Labour Party are examined in H. Pelling, The Origins of the Labour Party, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1965). There are good introductions to the political world of William II’s Germany in T. A. Kohut, Wilhelm II and the Germans: A Study in Leadership(New York, 1991); and J. C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court:Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (New York, 1994).An important study on right-wing German politics is G. Eley,Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and PoliticalChange after Bismarck (New Haven, Conn., 1980). On Russia,see T. H. Von Laue, Sergei Witte and the Industrialization ofRussia (New York, 1963); and A. Ascher, The Revolution of1905: Russia in Disarray, 2 vols. (Stanford, 1988–1992).

For broad perspectives on imperialism, see the works by T. Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism (Cambridge, 1981); M. W. Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); and P. Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870–1970 (New Haven, Conn., 1987).Different aspects of imperialism are covered in R. Robinsonand J. Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, 2d ed. (New York,

1981); A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, IndianWomen, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,1994); M. Strobel, European Women and the Second BritishEmpire (Bloomington, Ind., 1991); P. J. Marshall, ed., TheCambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire (Cambridge,1996); and T. Pakhenham, The Scramble for Africa (New York,1991).

Two fundamental works on the diplomatic history of theperiod are W. L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments, 2d ed. (New York, 1966); and The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 2d ed. (New York, 1965). Also valuable are G. Kennan, TheDecline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Prussian Rela-tions, 1875–1890 (Princeton, N.J., 1979); and the masterfulstudy by P. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism,1860–1914 (London, 1982).

For additional reading, go to InfoTracCollege Edition, your online research

library at http://web1.infotrac-college.com

Enter the search term Nietzsche using Key Terms.

Enter the search terms Sigmund Freud using Key Terms.

Enter the search terms Social Darwinism using Key Terms.

Enter the search term imperialism using Subject Guide.

CHAPTER 24dennis/106/106-Bkgr/24-Fin-de-Siecle.pdf · The cultural life of Europe in the decades...

Documents

Transcript of CHAPTER 24dennis/106/106-Bkgr/24-Fin-de-Siecle.pdf · The cultural life of Europe in the decades...