This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
The Battles Begin
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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
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À partir de la leçon
The Great Acceleration (1890-1910)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi, welcome back. Make yourself comfortable.
In this presentation, I want to go around the world and give you five examples
of the kinds of battles that were being waged over the shape of revolutionary
Nation states. The first example, let's look at Chicago,
Illinois.
In the 1890s, Chicago was deeply divided by battles that, you could say, were between
factions of what I've called National Conservatives,
these were folks who were modernizers, supporters of big business,
and they're against workers who tend to be
either Liberals, or one or another kind of socialist.
Remember, the folks who broke the Pullman strike in 1894 used
the power of the national government to beat the strike breakers.
Politics in Chicago is becoming extremely polarized,
and it'll stay pretty rough.
But one important factor in Chicago's political development
is an emergence of a very powerful strand of centrist
liberalism that's represented, above all, by this man, John Dewey.
Here's a picture of John Dewey, when he's been hired at the new
University of Chicago, where he spent the late 1890s up to about 1904.
Dewey was interested in many things.
As a scholar, he's mainly known for his work on psychology and education.
But he's also sometimes thought of as the father of American liberalism.
What was really distinctive about Dewey's ideas then, his form of centrism?
I'll pull out a few things that stand out to me.
First, a very practical man. He's one of the names most associated
with Pragmatism as a political philosophy: a constant
interest in experiment, just to figure out what works.
That might make him sound a lot like that early liberal, Jeremy Bentham.
And you'd be right.
But one of the things that's different about Dewey from Bentham
is Dewey's not so much about
top-down modernization and big top-down experiments.
Instead, Dewey is constantly interested in grassroots democracy,
democracy from the ground up.
Small-scale, local experiments, democratically organized,
where a group of people get together
and, in a democratic process, try something out.
For example, try out a new way to do a school.
For instance, at the University of Chicago, a group of people
get together and create a set of schools called Laboratory Schools.
In fact, the descendants of that Dewey- sponsored school
at the University of Chicago is still around today,
President Barack Obama's children went to that school.
And another distinctive feature then about Dewey's
political philosophy is a huge emphasis on education,
at all levels, as a key for the way to reshape society from the ground up.
These kinds of centrist ideas
don't eliminate class conflict in America. But they help to ameliorate it.
Now let's tick forward a few years, from Chicago in the late 1890s and
early 1900s to the Russian Empire in the early 1900s.
This empire is the epitome of that family of beliefs I called National Tradition,
supported by some National Conservatives, a
group of modernizing politicians who want to do what they can from the top-down,
though they sometimes feel hobbled by the traditionalists at the top.
Not to say that the traditionalists aren't changing things.
Oh they are. Russia is bringing in railroads.
It's borrowing French money to build
new industries; that's changing Russian life.
It's creating a working class.
It's creating a peasantry that feels more and more threatened.
This Russian Empire makes a fetish out being exceptionally anti-Jewish.
They single out the Jews in the Empire as being enemies of the state.
The state looks the other way as scores of
communities are rocked by anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms.
One result of that then is that millions
of people flee the Russian Empire, mostly Jews.
This map gives you a sense of the Jewish emigration from Russia;
and millions of these inhabitants, from places that might have been in
historic Poland or Ukraine or White Russia, are now in the Russian Empire,
and the Russian Empire's revolutionary nationalism is
driving them out in the millions.
Whose opposing the ruling elite standing up
for National Traditions with their National Conservative allies?
The answer is just about everybody else.
There are Russian revolutionaries of every stripe:
liberal, socialist, and more.
Their turning point comes when a ruling class that's built
on its appeals to national power suffers the worst defeat
it can possibly suffer. It loses a national war.
And the Russian Empire, which so prided itself
on its pan-Slav purity, loses it to the Japanese.
This is a map of the decisive naval battle.
You'll remember the earlier presentations where I set
the scene about these rivalries in Northeast Asia.
The Russians sent their fleet all the way from the Baltic Sea, around the world,
to this point between Korea and Japan,
where it was intercepted by the Japanese Combined Fleet and was utterly destroyed,
even as the Japanese were also
waging sustained, bloody, and ultimately successful
war against the Russian position in Manchuria, in the siege of Port Arthur.
All of the dissident factions in Russia begin to explode.
This is one famous painting that
shows the Russian people gathering in protest,
some of them already laid low by the forces of the Tsar.
This map gives you some sense of the enormous scale of peasant revolts in
Russia but also strikes in urban areas
between 1905 and 1907, even including military mutinies.
The entire Russian state was shaken right down to its core.
It
survives.
It survives because the ruling elite compromises, reaching out
above all to the National Conservatives, to the modernizers,
but also to the Liberals,
creating a parliament and making other gestures towards constitutional rule.
That's enough to get them by for a while, during a
period in which Russia still has a great deal of economic growth
and a basic
instinctive loyalty to the tsar runs deep.
Turn the clock forward a few years to 1908, and there's another upheaval.
This one to decide whether to create a nation state at all.
Constantinople is the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
Today we call this city Istanbul.
By 1908, the ruling elite, which represents that National Tradition
faction, have run out of steam. Their weakness is too evident.
Their rule is toppled by a group of National Conservatives.
They call themselves Young Turks.
Remember how the Nationalists in the 1800s in places like
Italy had called themselves Young Italy? Notice the emphasis on that term young.
They were organized actually
in a group called the Committee
for Union and Progress: Union through return
of the constitution adopted during the Tanzimat reform period of the 1850s
and then discarded during the crises of the 1870s,
bring back the constitution that allows representation
of national minorities. But above all, progress:
that's what defines them as National Conservatives,
people who want to take the state
from the very top and modernize it if it's the last thing they do.
Also secularize it.
Some of those hopes from bringing back
the constitution are expressed here in this painting.
The painting was put together by a member of
one of those national minorities, the Greek speaking minority.
In this paining the Pashas, who lead the
Young Turks movement, are shown here in the foreground.
And those Pashas are heroes:
they're freeing liberty, breaking her chains
by the restoration of the constitution.
You see the people celebrating in the background.
Viva la constitution.
Moving back to the other side of Europe, let's visit Barcelona again.
The year, the year is 1909. In charge in Spain: National
Conservatives, aligned with the Spanish king,
also aligned with the Catholic Church, trying
to modernize the country from the top- down.
But times are still tough in Barcelona,
and what really sets the people off in
the summer of 1909 is their bitter resentment:
first, over issues of education.
They can't get a decent education for their children in the Catholic schools,
and the government
won't support public schools for the poor.
And then what really sets off the powder keg is the government
starts calling up ordinary citizens to go back into the Spanish army.
Why?
To fight an imperial war in Morocco
to protect big business interests involved in the mining concerns there.
The result is a week of riots in Barcelona.
And where are the riots focused?
They're focused above all against the Church.
First, they attack the convents, then they attack the Catholic schools.
Here are some of the results.
The thing to notice: pillars of smoke rising from fires in
carefully selected pieces of Church and Church property all over the city.
The army responds, finally puts down the unrest.
A politician is singled out as
responsible, even though he wasn't particularly involved,
and is lined up and executed.
Memories of this run deep.
Barcelona is more polarized than ever.
People in the propertied classes, God-fearing people, are horrified by
what's been done to the churches and the Church property.
The working class on the other hand, bitterly
remembers and resents the way the army has put
them down once again. The fuel is there for future fires.
Now, flash to the other side of the world. Year is 1911.
The Qing Empire, exemplifying National Tradition, is just barely holding on.
It reaches out more and more to National Conservatives who support the monarchy.
Finally, again the military
has enough.
It mutinies, and the Empire collapses almost without violence.
Into this void, a Chinese Republic is declared.
The exiled leader Sun Yat-sen is named as its new president.
He comes back to China, and, in 1912, the first Chinese Republic is established.
The
first all-Chinese elections are held
by the end of 1912; the electorate are to be people of property.
About 5 or 6% of the total population is eligible to vote,
but it's the first and in some ways the
only free election ever held in the history of China.
The two leading vote getters coming out of the elections are
1) a group of Liberals, who are mainly republican, that is,
no restoration of the monarchy,
combined with national conservatives, and 2) a group of national conservatives
open to the restoration of the monarchy, but a constitutional monarchy.
They call in the help of that old warlord, Yuan Shikaiâ,
the most powerful general in the Chinese army.
Yuan-Shikai looks around.
This is the group (#2) he wants
to align with. This group (#1) got the most votes;
its man is likely to become the next prime minister.
But their political leader, a man Song Jiaoren, is
assassinated in Shanghai, while on his way up to Peking.
Yuan Shikai assumes power and very quickly becomes China's president
and then, by 1915, declares himself
the new emperor of China. So here's Yuan Shikai:
general in the imperial Chinese army in the late 1800s.
Here's Yuan Shikai: now the new military dictator of China and would be emperor.
The contrast in the uniform says it all.
As the last illustration for you of how
these battles are being engaged all over the world,
let's go to Latin America, to Mexico. The year 1910.
Mexico is ruled by
National Conservatives. Indeed, they have their dictator;
they've had their dictator for about 40 years, a man named Porfirio DÃaz,
who brought order out of the chaos of the middle parts of the 1800s.
But by 1910, he's ready to move off the scene, he wants a replacement.
Again, these National Conservatives are not
really conservatives in the sense of preferring
the status quo;
these are people who were trying to modernize Mexico.
They're people who control large estates in the northern part of the country.
They control mines. They control
plantations growing sugar in Central and Southern Mexico.
They control the railroads that link them all together.
They produce the scientists who are working out the
best ways to produce more of these cash crops.
And all of them are working closely with foreign
investors, and other partners, to help realize their dreams.
But in doing all of this, they're transforming the Mexican countryside.
The revolution against Diaz will be dominated by liberal politicians,
like a man named Madero, who became president after Diaz and
was then executed by some of the ruthless generals still in power.
Or this man from the North, Pancho Villa, leading
a revolution against the large landowners and the government.
Or this man, from the South, this is a familiar image,
Emiliano Zapata,
coming from the province of Morelos in Mexico.
Zapata's case is an interesting one.
Zapata's not a radical revolutionary. He's not a socialist.
Indeed, in some ways, the campesinos, the people of
the land in Morelos, just want to be left alone.
They in a way are really the small âcâ conservative ones.
They don't want to have change their traditional lifestyle.
It's the sugar
plantation owners who are trying to convert all
of their plots into parts of agricultural industries,
make them workers in sugar factories,
in effect, turning their villages into factory towns.
They're the ones who are trying to transform the Mexican countryside.
And it's, Zapata who ends up leading them in a revolution against these forces.
By the early 1920s,
Villa is dead. Zapata is dead.
Millions of Mexicans have died in more
than ten years of war and political turmoil.
Mexico begin settling down again in the
1920s, under a ruling group of National Conservatives
that will eventually give way to a
balance between the National Conservatives and the socialists.
But by the 1930s,
Mexico will move more towards socialism,
a strong government dedicated to taking
away the property interest from the foreigners,
breaking up to some of the larger estates,
standing up more for the people, in part
to avoid a resumption of a Mexican civil war.
So we've looked at six cases, going all around the world,
very different circumstances and situations,
but a few things stand out.
Always change.
Every one of these situations, even the so-
called conservative governments are involved in changing things,
and people are fighting over the direction of it.
The issues look like domestic issues.
But in fact, the domestic issues are deeply intertwined with foreign issues,
political, economic, even the influence of foreign ideas.
In every case, the state is getting stronger as a result of these fights.
Often you see, it's the National Conservatives that
seem to reflect the wave of the future,
with their emphasis on modernization, national power, empire.
Some of those clashing aspirations are going to bring the world even
faster towards the crackup point we'll be discussing next week.
But before we get to that, in the next presentation I want to try to
pull together what we've looked at so far in the whole first half of this course.
We've covered an awful lot of ground.
Talk to you soon.
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