Remaking the Modern World 1900 - 2015

Global Connections and Comparisons

C. A. Bayly

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119268727
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

The sequel and companion volume to C.A. Bayly's ground-breaking The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, this wide-ranging and sophisticated study explores global history since the First World War, offering a coherent, comparative overview of developments in politics, economics, and society at large.

• Written by one of the leading historians of his generation, an early intellectual leader in the study of World History
• Weaves a clear narrative history that explores the themes of politics, economics, social, cultural, and intellectual life throughout the long twentieth century
• Identifies the themes of state, capital, and communication as key drivers of change on a global scale in the last century, and explores the impact of those ideas
• Interrogates whether warfare was really the pre-eminent driving force of twentieth-century history, and what other ideas shaped the course of history in this period
• Explores the causes behind the resurgence of local conflict, rather than global-scale conflict, in the years since the turn of the millennium
• Delves into the narrative of inequality, a story that has shaped and been shaped by the events of the last hundred years

Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series

The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.

[1]
The World Crisis, c.1900–1930: Europe and the “Middle East”

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The World Before War: Idealism, Communitarianism and Radicalism

The First World War: Europe and the American Intervention

The Crucible of War: The Eastern and Western Fronts

Decentring the World Crisis: South-Eastern Europe and the “Middle East”

Reflections, Comparisons and Differences

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THERE could hardly be a more deeply studied or more complex event with which to open any general history than the First World War. The vast range of writing on the conflict has recently been greatly expanded by the many publications and programmes timed to coincide with the centenary of the war's outbreak in 1914 and its course thereafter.¹ This chapter, therefore, is not intended to add further detail on the European war as such. Yet, it does attempt to put the war more firmly into a wider geographical and temporal context. It reemphasises the war's importance for the European empires and beyond, but also places it within a near 40-year span of global developments, beginning in the generation before 1914, with their consequent dramatic impact on society, economy and ideologies.

In regard to the first point – the geographical dimension – it will be useful to outline a typology of different regions and forms of conflict during the war itself, differentiating between the detailed narratives of other historians who have begun to expand its range.² There were, first, areas of mass warfare, mass killing and general mobilisation. Evidently, these included Western Europe, western Russia, the Balkans and parts of the Ottoman Empire, especially its northern and southern borderlands. Next, there were areas of highly disruptive, but less sustained, conflict which did not see mass mobilisation or fundamental economic transformation, for instance much of colonial Africa, where European empires fought out the war. Then again, there were areas, colonised or semi-colonised, which saw significant military and civilian labour recruitment and consequent political turmoil, but did not themselves become the site of direct armed conflict. These included India, French Indochina, the China coast, the United States and the British dominions: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and South Africa. Finally, there were parts of the world which felt the economic and political effects of the war, provided resources for it but did not directly contribute significant manpower to the conflict, such as Central and South America and Japan.

One striking effect of this geographical expansion of the range of warfare was the manner in which it reached small communities distant from the fronts, sometimes advantaging them, sometimes not. So, for instance, New Zealand Maori soldiers were recruited for the British Empire in significant numbers. Early conflicts with white officers gave way to a sense of ethnic and national solidarity after the Gallipoli debacle.³ This helped the Maori communities gain a stronger voice in the country during the 1920s, whereas in the previous century their land and social cohesion had been constantly under threat. By contrast, indigenous peoples in eastern Siberia were suppressed by the White Army and then the Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1922.⁴ This geographical expansion gave a great advantage to the Allied powers, which, unlike the Central Powers, could draw on agrarian as well as manpower resources from four continents.⁵

Figure 1 Maori soldiers. Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 31-A2. Photo by Herman John Schmidt.

In terms of the temporal expansion of focus, this chapter emphasises the major changes that had preceded the European war, especially the conflict between Japan and Russia and the Chinese, Persian and Mexican revolutions. It is difficult to bring these conflicts into a single frame of analysis, particularly one which embraces the war itself. Yet, there were common features and connections. In all cases – and this would also extend to the post-war conflicts in North Africa, the Middle East and China – these events reflected aspects of the last phase of the “new imperialism” of the 1890s, led by an imperialist front which now included Japan. In a limited way, it also included Theodore Roosevelt's United States, which, since the early nineteenth century, had kept European empires at arm's length, but had nevertheless been an indirect supporter of their attempts to divide the world.

Lenin wrote of the war and imperialism of this period as “the highest stage of capitalism”,⁶ and there is, indeed, much analytical power in his argument, as noted in the Introduction. But here the idea of “gentlemanly capitalism” advanced by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, who developed earlier arguments of Joseph Schumpeter, remains significant.⁷ Yet, it was older landowning and military elites, many drawn from rural and non-industrial areas of the competing states, that often sparked off these conflicts and provided atavistic ideologies to support them. These old or declining elites included the Junker class in Germany; the samurai of Japan, which had lost economic power after 1868; families of military and landholding elites from southern France and Corsica; and the imperial governors, judges and naval families of the now-ageing British Empire. Nationalism and a sense of entitlement certainly empowered the spread of intrusive finance capital across the world, but they cannot be reduced to it.

The longer-term causes – and consequences – of the world crisis should also be brought into the picture. Again, a quasi-Leninist interpretation remains useful. Ruling elites, worried by the emerging power of industrial, artisanal and even peasant labour, subjected these new and alarming forces to an “internal reconquest” through aggressive nationalist rhetoric, calls to empire and, in the final analysis, conscription and warfare. New media, mass newspaper circulation, an expanded telegraph and postal system and, later, radio were used to mobilise people for economic progress and patriotism, but also in hostility against a newfound enemy. This form of moral coercion persisted well beyond the end of the Great War itself. Colonial wars in the 1920s and the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s were pre-eminently new wars of propaganda.

In fact, nearly 30 years of conflict created a form of general traumatic psychosis on a global scale. Post-war nightmares which sparked further conflict included the “Jewish conspiracy”, which allegedly brought down Germany; the threat of “Bolshevism” on the River Tyne in England in 1919; and most broadly, the mental crisis of the world's middle classes diagnosed, in their different ways, by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Mohandas Gandhi. Traces of the impact of the world crisis, c.1900–1926, can be found across every subject touched in this book, from the understanding of the twentieth-century person through the trajectory of religion to the nature of modernity in art.

The World Before War: Idealism, Communitarianism and Radicalism

If the First World War had not been such a trauma for much of the human race, the two decades before it would now be seen as a period of radical change and rupture rather than the serene end to the Victorian era,⁸ as it is often portrayed in popular literature, television and film. Unprecedented developments in communication were heralded by Louis Blériot's first air flight, the first radio connection across the Atlantic and even the creation of a new set of time zones across the world. While attention has been concentrated on the treaties which presaged the war itself, international agreements directed to reducing conflict had been implemented for Antarctica and a series of peace conferences, doomed as they later appeared, had been greeted as signs of hope in international affairs. They seemed an appropriate balance to the onward march of European empire. Democratic socialist parties flourished in Western Europe while colonial subjects invoked the spirit of the nation in an age of idealistic spirituality represented by the Chicago World Parliament of Religions of 1893.

Politics changed dramatically at a world level over these years. The so-called Progressive Era in the United States saw attempts to improve popular representation and education along with moves to cut back on the power, influence and corruption of the big corporations, which had emerged as the economy expanded rapidly after 1890.⁹ Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft endorsed these moves in a period when income inequality grew very rapidly. Mexico's revolution predated the Bolshevik revolution by five years. In Britain, governments moved to introduce minimum wages. Yet more dramatic changes took place outside Europe and the Americas. The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the multinational intervention against it undermined the 300-year-old Qing Empire, and presaged the 1911 revolution, which plunged the country into conflict and uncertainty that lasted until 1949. The Persian revolution of the same period gave heart to liberals across the Middle East, but led in the longer term to the installation of a military autocracy. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire both modernised the regime and promoted Arab separatism.

Meanwhile, colonial powers viewed with alarm the rise of Pan-Islamic movements¹⁰ heralded by the Mahdist state in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s. Nationalist agitation in Egypt and India passed into a more militant phase with the Wafd and the Indian National Congress divided between radicals beginning to espouse violence against the British and moderates still loo...