StudySpace: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 2 e.

Violent suppression of rebellions, such as that following the Maji-Maji Revolt, cast shadows over Europe’s imperialist enterprise. Discontent in Europe emerged alongside rebellion in the colonies, causing some to wonder if European dominance would last. Europeans composed almost a third of the world’s population, commanded a higher percentage of its wealth, and shaped most major decisions. By the beginning of the twentieth century, economic, political, and cultural changes provided great opportunities but also tremendous anxiety.

Progress, Upheaval, and Movement

Everywhere, radicals and reformers agitated for political and social change. Economic progress and stratification led many to condemn the division between rich and poor. Urbanization provided new roles for people as old roles were disrupted. Science contributed to “modernist” critiques of traditional worldviews, which in turn affected culture and the arts. In all, the identities of nations and people came to be more strongly redefined, eventually contributing to the devastation brought by World War I.

People in Motion

Seeking better opportunities, land, and livelihoods, Europeans, Indians, and Chinese emigrated in extraordinary numbers. The number relocating to less distant locales also exploded. Cities, frontier, and precious commodities all attracted migrants. Motivation for movement ranged dramatically, but most planned impermanent moves in part due to the terrible risks involved. Before 1914, few restrictions on immigration existed because it was viewed as helping both the countries losing people and those gaining them. Cities swelled, leading to new developments in urban planning to improve conditions. Classes remained largely segregated. Many women found new options, but race, national identity, and mythic history were generally used to justify inequalities.

Discontent with Imperialism

As imperialists relied more and more on harsh repression to maintain control over their colonial holdings, faith in the civilizing influence of Europe gave way to doubt and distress, especially as episodes of colonial rebellion increased.

UNREST IN AFRICA

Fierce uprisings in Africa particularly unsettled Europeans who struggled to understand why Africans would reject the fruits of modernity. Rebellions came at a steady pace, even after areas had been “pacified.” The Afrikaner War, fought between two white states over the gold-laden Transvaal, introduced guerrilla warfare, concentration camps, and modern reporting of the carnage. News of German genocidal policies was just as chilling. Apologists tried to soften the horror by portraying Africans as innocents and other imperialists as the cause of problems.

THE BOXER UPRISING IN CHINA

After facing a humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, China turned to meet expanding Western influence as the powers carved out “spheres of influence.” Although anxious to carry out reform, the Chinese emperor found powerful opponents. Conservative and anti-European to an extreme, these opponents sought a chance to destroy imperialism. Incidents involving missionaries offered imperialists a pretense to make demands on the Chinese government, fostering resentment at all levels of society. From the bottom strata of Chinese society emerged the Boxers—martial arts groups that aimed at ridding China of Christians once and for all. Poverty and natural disaster stimulated the growth of the Boxers, including the female Red Lanterns. Magical tokens and chants gave both groups confidence to act. Unable to check the growth of the Boxers, the conservative court encouraged them to attack foreigners instead of Chinese Christians. Violence led to bloodshed before a multinational force arrived to crush the Boxers and place punishing exactions on the court. The Qing, somewhat humbled, moved to reform the government but only succeeded in alienating its own populace. Although the Boxers failed, they demonstrated how unpopular the foreign presence had become and what a loyal populist movement could accomplish.

Worldwide Insecurities

In Europe and North America, news of distant problems could be explained away, but political and economic signs of disruption at home could not.

IMPERIAL RIVALRIES COME HOME

Expansion and economic competition led to rising military competition across Europe and the rest of the globe. The consolidations of Italy and Germany disrupted the old balance of power and stimulated a massive arms race.

FINANCIAL, INDUSTRIAL, AND TECHNOLOGICAL INSECURITIES

The dominance of huge capitalist firms over small entrepreneurs also gave cause for concern. By the end of the nineteenth century, economies were stuck in a cycle of boom and bust that ruined small operations and favored larger companies that concentrated economic power in the hands of a few. Free market competition dropped as huge industrial magnates came to control more and more of the economy, leading to widening disparities. Organizing to protect themselves, farmers formed cooperatives, while the big industrialists organized cartels. Some called for greater government intervention. Financial crises between 1890 and 1907 led the U.S. Congress to ratify the Federal Reserve Act to better manage financial problems. Economic crises also created ripple effects in Canada, Mexico, and other states relying on American capital. Industrialization spread in places like Russia, but lagged elsewhere, creating a gap in industrial capacity. Factories and railways brought opportunity, but also breaks with the past and, according to some, the reduction of humans to machine-like existences.

THE “WOMAN QUESTION”

The changing roles of women in a modern world produced another source of anxiety. Job and educational opportunities expanded, allowing women to play a more active role in public life. As women found other occupations, birthrates dropped, thus providing more resources for the children that families raised. Political rights came slowly due to male resistance. Radical views stiffened male, and even female, reluctance to support dramatic change. Imperialists liked to claim they assisted women in their plight by attacking suppressing traditions such as footbinding. Colonized women, however, noted that colonization just as often added to their struggles, for example, by taking the men out of the house to work in a factory or mine and leaving the women to labor by themselves on the farm, lose traditional ownership rights, or fall behind in educational opportunities.

CLASS CONFLICT IN A NEW KEY

Closed political systems, loss of confidence in capitalism, and rising inequalities led many radicals to reject the status quo and organize workers in an effort to agitate for change. Regimes successfully expanded the electorate in hopes of deflating support for the radicals, yet many outbursts still occurred among other groups not so favored. In the United States, laborers organized in increasingly greater numbers, leading to strikes such as the Pullman Strike. Although that strike collapsed, disruption from below, as seen in Russia after the Russo-Japanese War, did succeed for a brief time. The Mexican Revolution, in which impoverished people rose up to topple the regime of General Porfirio Díaz and sustain a populist political culture, signified to many what the lower classes could do when sufficiently motivated. Many more bottom-up revolutions, however, did not fare as well. Unable to suppress agitation, some regimes instituted welfare changes to steal thunder from the Socialists. Government regulation and oversight led to the correction of abuses and greater protection of workers and consumers. Reformers cleaned up urban vice, built parks, attacked corruption, and intervened to help the poor, sick, and aged, creating precedent for the modern welfare state.

Cultural Modernism

Intellectuals, artists, and scientists also struggled with the changes of a new age. “Modernism” and its ideas flourished as thinkers sought to reconcile new understandings with older views, explore the cultural expressions of non-Europeans and the lower classes, and challenge the certainty that all things European were best.

POPULAR CULTURE COMES OF AGE

By the turn of the century, education and urbanization had created vast numbers of literate consumers engaging in new forms of popular culture that spanned sports, theater, and art. The “yellow press” appealed to the tastes of the lower classes and provided the proletariat with their own sense of identity even as they drew inspiration from a broader range of cultural experiences.

EUROPE’S CULTURAL MODERNISM

In Europe, attempts to understand social problems, spearheaded by thinkers such as Freud, Durkheim, and Le Bon, led to the gradual formation of the social sciences. Artists questioned the so-called progress of Europe’s modernization, turning to the “primitivism” of Oceania and Africa for inspiration. Classical and Christian art themes gave way to art depicting dreams, machine aesthetics, and antibourgeois forms. Scientists accelerated the collapse of European confidence by concluding that the natural world operated on probabilities, not certainties, ensuring that man would never fully know its mysteries. The belief in rationality also came under fire. Nietzsche and Freud asserted that rational thinking could not motivate or explain the deeper elements of human nature.

CULTURAL MODERNISM IN CHINA

In China, debate centered on modernism took a slightly different turn. Chinese writers began exploring new vistas— self, technology, and sexuality. Numerous visions of modernity, drawing from Chinese tradition and Western mores, competed for the attention of thinking Chinese. Urban centers, with their new wealth, education, and exposure to the West, hosted most activity. Art and literature explored new visions of the future. While many thinking Chinese valued Western science, finding a way to integrate it into Chinese culture presented a problem. What was the role of traditional Chinese beliefs in a modern world?

Rethinking Race and Reimagining Nations

Even as people moved from place to place, their identities became more rigidly defined. Race became a key for determining inclusion or exclusion from a nation and in fixing a cultural identity. Racial hierarchies and biological determinism was used to justify imperialism as well as exclusion of certain people from the mainstream of society. Racial interpretations of global affairs ranged from fear of “impure” racial influence to anticolonial pride in racial difference. Most, however, agreed on racial purity and appealed to powerful arguments for panethnic communities.

NATION AND RACE IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE

America greeted the new century with pride in its technological prowess and fear of the loss of natural resources. Wideopen frontiers had vanished along with the bison. Confessing that markets could not protect the land, Teddy Roosevelt moved to create the National Forest Service to manage public lands and provide future generations a chance to build character by “roughing” it. Concerns about racial division also characterized the early twentieth century. “Jim Crow” laws and Exclusion Acts protected whites from blacks and Asians. Nonwhite immigrants, including those from U.S. territories, raised concerns among whites and led to tighter immigration restrictions. Europeans struggled with the same concerns, particularly as anticolonialism spread through Africa and elsewhere. Whites worried that mixing with nonwhites weakened the nation’s blood stock and deprived the country of its virility. Racial purity, in short, was seen as the solution to national problems.

RACE-MIXING AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIONHOOD IN LATIN AMERICA

In Latin America, races were arranged in a hierarchy that placed Iberian whites at the top, followed by creoles, indigenous peoples, and Africans. The hierarchy did not stick, however, largely because immigrants complicated the picture. Some asserted that mixed racial compositions would only lead to degeneration and that white immigration was the only solution. Others, however, sought to build legacies to the past that combined European and indigenous Aztec roots. In contrast to those condemning multiracial nations, these Latin American thinkers asserted that multiracial integration is what gave their nations vitality and strength.

SUN YAT-SEN AND THE MAKING OF A CHINESE NATION

Chinese thinkers also asserted that a strictly pro-Western view was too narrow. Claiming Han Chinese superiority, they reinvented the past to save it from modernization and westernization. Selective borrowing and adaptation thus became common among nationalist thinkers. In seeking to build a strong Han Chinese nation, Sun Yat-sen attacked the Manchu court of China while calling for democratization, land reform, and a modern economy. Banned from China, Sun found support among the hundreds of thousands of Chinese living and studying abroad. As the Qing weakened, his message grew stronger and, in 1911, most Chinese sided with his revolutionary supporters. The new republic aimed originally to combine the “five races” of China. Modeling his views on concepts learned in the West, however, Sun eventually sought to replace a multiracial empire with a single-race nation.

NATIONALISM AND INVENTED TRADITIONS IN INDIA

British rule in India engendered among Indians a concept of “India” that had not existed before. Anticolonialism, therefore, began to employ nationalistic language and was headed by Western-trained intellectuals. Newspapers contributed to the spread of new identities. Organizing the Indian National Congress in 1885, Indian nationalists argued with the British government for better representation. Nationalism in India was based on culture and sought to find a non-Western modernism that fit India’s specific conditions. To define what was meant by the term “Indian,” intellectuals created a national culture and legacy from the myriad of artistic, historical, linguistic, and cultural possibilities before them. Within this redefinition, Hindu cultural icons dominated while Muslim traditions were largely neglected. Radical agitators of the Swadeshi Movement sought violent means to oust the British and greatly broadened the nationalists’ base of popular support. Successes signaled that the British had lost control. Other ethnic and religious groups also organized, using the same approach employed by Hindu nationalists, except that they placed themselves at the core of “Indian” civilization. Most sought political advancement of their own groups. By the late nineteenth century, anticolonial movements in India had adopted some variety of nationalism.

THE PAN MOVEMENTS

Although also fixated on race, the pan movements sought a different ordering of society. They wanted borders realigned so races across the globe could be united. The pan-Islam movement of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani begged Islamic nations to put differences aside and unite under one banner. Few followed the call. Most Muslims saw little commonality with Afghani’s vision and felt more secure in building their own nation-states. Pan-Germanism, partly a reaction to pan-Slavism and Jewish immigration from Russia, sought to unite all Germanic peoples and strengthen them against Catholic influence, division (between Germany and Austria), and the Jews. Like the others, pan-Slavs also engaged in radical activities designed to weaken national boundaries that kept Slavs apart. Indeed, it was one such agitator that assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne and ushered in the Great War. The First World War did destroy the multinational empires that pannationalists so detested, but did not create the panvision they sought.

 

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