WAR - An "Unsettled World," 1890-1914 (Lesson)
An "Unsettled World," 1890-1914
As the planet entered the Twentieth Century CE, the people on the planet were living in a very "unsettled" time period. The Enlightenment had raised a lot of questions— Who should lead a nation? Who should decide that? Who should be considered citizens of that state? What rights should those citizens have? The Industrial Revolution had raised a lot of questions— Who should own the means of production? Who should protect those who worked for those that owned the means of production? How does a nation compete in an industrialized world? For what should the new technology be used? Imperialism had raised a lot of questions—Can one nation rule another? How should the imperialist nation govern the people of its colonies? Was one group of people really superior to another? And there were lots more questions from where those came.
The problem was that while the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and Imperialism changed the fabric of societies around the planet, no one had yet attempted to answer the questions that were brought up by each. This left the people of the world in a very "unsettled" state that led to a great deal of dissatisfaction over the issues of colonialism, human rights, economics and nationalism. The period between 1890 and 1914 CE was riddled with labor strikes, political assassinations, swelling political and economic movements and a weapons race as nations competed with one another. There were many factors behind this "unsettling."
Movement of People
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, more people moved away from home than at any other previous point in history. Millions left their rural homes to move to urban areas in the hopes of finding work at the new urban factories, thereby aiding their nation's urbanization. Millions left their rural and urban homes to settle new lands within their nations (especially within the United States and Russia,) thereby aiding their nation's territorial expansion. And millions left their home nations to immigrate into new nations in search of better opportunities. Up until 1914 CE, most governments had very few restrictions on immigration or emigration. One could travel within Europe from nation to nation without passports, for example. And only a few nations outside of Europe had exclusionary laws to keep people out. The most famous of these exclusionary laws were the earlier National Seclusion Policy of Japan or the Canton System of China. But the United States attempted its own form of immigration restriction in 1882 CE with the Chinese Exclusion Act—directed at halting Chinese immigration to the U.S. At the turn of the century, global emigration/immigration numbers stepped up for a number of reasons that came from both push and pull factors but also because travel was now faster and cheaper:
And the same came be said for why people chose to continue moving away from...
This veritable tsunami of people moving around the planet stirred up a lot of changes. There were obvious changes for those people who chose to uproot their lives and leave their homes as they adapted to new ways of life. But there were also significant changes to the locations where the people moved. In the cities, housing shortages, sanitation, transportation and crime led to the new field of urban planning. Just before the turn of the century, these urban planners developed models for city layouts to address urban issues. One of the pioneers of this field, Sir Ebenezer Howard of England, published his Tomorrow: The Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 that literally planted the seeds for urban planning throughout the world. His work kicked off the Garden City Movement in England that encouraged the provision of better and more affordable housing for workers, the planting of multiple public gardens, and thoughts on how people would travel within and to the city as issues that all urban planners should consider as they built cities. Of course, by this time, the world's largest cities were already built; but the earlier inventions of urban trams, underground railroads and elevated railroads led to urban sprawl (the uncontrolled expansion of urban areas) and the building of suburbs around the cities. And it was in the construction of these new residential areas that the new urban planners concentrated their efforts. In the United States, their work reflected the concept known as the Neighborhood Unit. Their successes in Great Britain and the United States caused urban planning movements to pop up around the world. Including in areas as remote as the capital of Australia—Canberra—as you can see from the diagram below.
The international movement of people also changed the locations to which they moved. The arrival of new immigrants stirred economic growth where they arrived by providing additional workers as well as additional consumers. The United States' experience with immigration during this time illustrates this growth—
The United States experienced waves of immigration—periods of years when immigration was higher than at other times. One such wave of immigration occurred between 1880 and 1914. The rate of immigration was such that by 1910 CE, roughly 15% of the United States population consisted of foreign-born people AND (more importantly for this section) roughly 24% of the U.S. work force were foreign-born. Now, look at the chart above and ask yourself between what decades did the United States' Gross National Product (GNP) per capita experience its greatest growth between 1870 and 1915? Your answer applies to more than just the economic and immigrant history of the United States. Look at the map on your right. It depicts the percentage of European-born Argentines living in Argentina in 1914 CE.
While the majority of immigrants to Argentina came from Europe, many came from the other five populated continents as well. By 1914, Argentina had the second highest number of immigrants living within its borders—approximately 30% of Argentina's population was foreign-born. Their arrival corresponded with an economic boom in Argentina. By 1914, it was the 10th wealthiest nation of the world. (Not bad for a nation that had won its independence from Spain just one century earlier.) The examples of the United States and Argentina are just two of many that illustrate how the economy was tied to immigration during this period.
These many people from their many different homes brought with them their varied cultures and traditions. The new cultures and traditions influenced the local cultures and traditions even as the immigrants assimilated. Diaspora cultures appeared everywhere as people scattered from their homeland around the world spreading their culture as they went—which is why you can still find distinctly foreign neighborhoods within large cities around the world. (Did "Little Italy" and "China Town" in New York City just pop into your mind?) The diffusion of foreign cultures and the assimilation of foreign peoples into the United States had such an impact that the term "melting pot" started to be popularly used to describe the United States at the turn of the 20th Century.
Despite the economic and cultural advantages of immigration, there was another effect of all of this movement of people—the passage of immigration restriction laws and a rise of Nativism. Throughout the decades of immigration that marked the turn of the 20th Century, Nativists pushed for legislation to protect native interests over those of immigrants. And while their push was not immediately successful (outside of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States,) eventually their voices were listened to by their governments. Following World War I, the United States passed a series of laws restricting immigration and Europe required passports to travel between nations. Even Argentina passed an anti-immigration law that allowed the expulsion of foreigners deemed as political trouble-makers. (At that time, those deemed "trouble-makers" were usually people forming labor unions or anarchists.)
Fragile Economies
Even as nations experienced booming (and, at times, busting) economies as their productivity surged, that wealth did not necessarily trickle down to all of those who worked to make the economy productive. During the 19th Century, governments and businesses experienced many revolts and strikes that were the direct result of the dissatisfaction growing among workers. It was during this time that a political journalist from Germany made his name. Karl Marx, the political journalist, and his friend, Friedrich Engels, published their Communist Manifesto in 1847 CE in which they appealed to workers around the world to overthrow their bosses and governments and to establish a society without ownership or classes. According to Marx, "the history of all...society is the history of class struggle." And that struggle, also according to Marx, came from a capitalist society that protected those that owned the means of production—the bourgeoisie that owned the factories—at the expense of the people who worked within the means of production—the proletariat. As he called for the workers to unite, he declared that "the workers have nothing to lose...but their chains." The next year—1848—saw political revolutions spring up throughout Europe, but none with the intent or result for which Marx longed. In 1867 CE, Karl Marx published another book—Das Kapital—in which he argued that the basis of capitalism was the exploitation of labor and again pushed for a conversion to a communist system. But as Marx neared the end of his life, there was nothing in popular culture to suggest that his work had made the impact he hoped for—his writing was just too intellectual and above the heads of the masses to whom he wrote. However, there was a growing conviction among some revolutionary groups that Marx had proven the inevitability of the end of capitalism. That conviction formed the foundation for Marxism—a political/economic belief system that became the basis for communism.
And while the masses probably didn't read Marx's works, they did experience those pains that he addressed. The economies of the industrialized nations bounced between great booms with long-term cycles of rapid growth and great busts with long-term cycles of economic inactivity. Between 1890 and 1893 CE, 550 banks collapsed in the United States alone. As the world system of borrowing and currencies based on the gold-standard linked nations economically to each other, any time one nation experienced such a financial crisis the rest were soon to follow. Below is a graph that illustrates the number of nations that experienced a banking crisis each year since 1800 CE among 66 selected nations throughout the world. As you can see, the period just before and after the turn of the century experienced spikes in the number of nations that had a banking crisis.
Usually a banking panic is followed by a recession. Always the first to feel the pain from the bust years was the working class. They were the first to lose their jobs and the least likely to have been able to amass any wealth to live off of during the lean years.
During the boom years, the Working Class still received the short end of the capitalist stick. They were not well paid nor were they working in uplifting conditions. During the 1880s and 1890s, manufacturers started incorporating American Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" theory to their factories. In order to improve economic efficiency, scientific management broke down the manufacturing process into a series of smaller jobs, each of which one person would be assigned. While workers did, indeed, become more efficient in their production using this principle, they were further removed from any sense of job satisfaction that resulted from creating something. Instead, workers went home after a busy day feeling more like machines than humans.
The uncertainty of their livelihood coupled with the depressing reality of the actual work led many among the Working Class to grow discontented with their lots in life. This discontentment led to strikes and riots, at times, but also to a movement known as Progressivism as people pushed for social reforms to help settle their world.
As you can see from the previous images, workers in industrialized nations around the world shared similar experiences. Despite social welfare movements, though, the unsettled existence of the Working Class continued and more radical organizations formed—syndicalism (movement for transferring the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution to workers' unions), anarchism (belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion) and revolutionary socialism (the belief that only an actual political revolution would lead to the creation of a government that would protect the workers' rights). With more radical ideologies, members of these organizations fought against the status quo of the free-market system and caused work stoppages around the globe on a daily basis.
Nationalism
In the previous unit, you learned that "Nationalism" was the idea that members of a shared community called a "nation" should have sovereignty within the borders of their state. But there is another definition for this term associated with jingoism. In its extreme form, nationalism goes beyond sovereignty and patriotism to become a concept noted for its sense of superiority over other nationalities and for its willingness to go to any lengths to fight against a perceived threat. In other words, in an extreme form, nationalism can be synonymous with jingoism.
During the end of the 19th Century—a period following several wars on the European continent and an Age of Imperialism outside of Europe—European nationalism looked a lot like jingoism. The previous unifications of Germany and Italy as individual nations came at the expense of France and Austria-Hungary, causing a shift to the earlier balance of power on that continent. Also, by this time, industrialized nations were using steel to build ships, skyscrapers, national landmarks (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris,) and armaments (which is just a fancy word for military weapons and equipment.) It was the use of steel in that last category that sparked something of an arms race between nations at the turn of the 20th Century.
The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain; and for a short period of time, the nation enjoyed a brief cornering of the industrialized market. But rather quickly, Belgium, the United States, and Germany entered into the Industrial Revolution. This new competition, to a British nationalist, would have been okay but not great. But then shortly after that, other nations including Russia, Sweden, France, Italy and Japan experienced their own Industrial Revolutions and the race to compete among industrialized nations became very crowded and they each embarked on a personal path of imperialism. As nations scrambled over the colonizing of Africa, a popular rhyme emerged in Great Britain—
The Maxim gun was the first recoil-operated machine gun and it could fire roughly 600 rounds of ammunition per minute. It was instrumental in the European takeover of the continent of Africa peopled by those who "had not the Maxim gun." Following the Scramble for Africa and the Age of Imperialism, though, all of the industrialized nations had access to that deadly weapon (or one of its successors) and the "comforting" rhyme of British Imperialism no longer applied.
At this point, the industrialized nations embarked in an arms race to preserve their nations from one another. Each mass-produced guns, heavy artillery and tanks. They also expanded their networks of rail lines in order to be able to transport troops quickly should the need ever arise. The stockpiling of these weapons created a very "unsettled" world in which to live as the nations waited, literally, on tinderboxes for a spark to ignite a militarized conflict. That first spark came in Asia and ignited the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. This was the first time the world saw the results of two nations using industrialized weaponry on each other at such a massive scale—and it resulted in a smaller, less-populated state emerging victorious over a European empire. The "unsettling" this caused in Europe increased as did its militarization.
In other parts of the planet, nationalism started to verge on the jingoistic as well. As the United States prepared to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's voyage, Americans began to worry about its status as a "white" nation. The national Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibiting further immigration from China was celebrated in the West. In the South, the Supreme Court legitimized the concept of "separate but equal" and Jim Crow laws piled upon one another segregating black Americans from white Americans. In the North, increased immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe stirred fears over "swarthy" newcomers and inspired nativist rhetoric and, eventually, legislation. In Latin America, movements swept through nations promoting nationalism through the celebration of their ancient peoples even as their governments and economies neglected those peoples' descendants and declared them "decadent and degenerate."
Image to the left: Editorial cartoon showing a Chinese man, surrounded by luggage labeled "Industry", "Order", "Sobriety", and "Peace", being excluded from entry to the "Golden Gate of Liberty". The sign next to the iron door reads, "Notice—Communist, Nihilist, Socialist, Fenian & Hoodlum welcome. But no admittance to Chinamen." At the bottom, the caption reads, "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman—'We must draw the line somewhere, you know."' By Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, vol. 54 (1882 April 1), p. 96. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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