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The Twentieth Century
A World History
By Clive Ponting Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1998 Clive Ponting
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7643-9
CHAPTER 1
1900
The idea of the twentieth century is a Western, Christian concept. For most of the world's people 1 January 1900 was not the start of a new century. For many 1 January was not even the start of a new year in their calendars. In China the calendar was still based on the emperor's reign, as it had been for at least two millennia. In the Muslim world the calendar started in the early seventh century of the Christian era. For Jews 1900 was the year 5661, in Thailand 2443 and according to one of the Hindu religious calendars it was the year 5002. Nine out of ten people in the world lived in the countryside as peasants. They had their own rituals and calendars which were often only vaguely based on the official version. Even the western world was not agreed about the calendar. Although purists might argue that the new century did not begin until 1 January 1901, there were differences over what calendar to use. Russia and Greece still kept to the Julian calendar, which was twelve days behind the commonly used Gregorian version and which led to many misunderstandings. The Russian shooting team, for example, arrived too late to take part in the 1908 Olympics in London because they forgot to allow for the different calendar, Russia finally abandoned the Julian calendar during the 1917 Revolution, Greece did so in 1923.
However, the idea of the twentieth century as a significant historical period is justified by the importance of the states of western Europe and North America, not just in 1900, but throughout the century. By 1900 a process that had begun in the early sixteenth century with the expansion of Europe into other regions of the world was almost complete. Until the late eighteenth century there was little difference in the relative wealth of the different parts of the world; indeed, only a few centuries earlier China had been by far the wealthiest and most powerful state in the world. As late as 1800 about two-thirds of the world's industrial output was produced outside Europe and North America. However, the expansion of Europe and rapidly growing industrialization in western Europe and North America in the nineteenth century had produced a massively unequal world by the early twentieth century. It was a world in which a handful of states dominated a global economy, from which they obtained nearly all the benefits and in which they had gradually restructured the remaining economies and societies so that these were in dependent, subordinate positions. The dominant states also directly controlled a large part of the world as their colonies. For them the nineteenth century had been a period of immense technological, economic and social progress.
The best way to analyse the structure of the world in 1900, and throughout the twentieth century, is to divide it into three very unequal parts – the core, the semi-periphery and the periphery. In 1900, just four major states – the United States, Britain, Germany and France – dominated the core. Between them they had only one-eighth of the world's population, but they produced more than three-quarters of world's industrial output, provided the same proportion of its trade and even more of its foreign investment. They had changed greatly in the nineteenth century. From rural, agricultural societies dominated, in Europe, by a landed elite, they had been transformed into industrial, mainly urban societies with a large working class and a developed infrastructure in which over 90 per cent of the population was literate and enjoyed a standard of living far in advance of the rest of the world. The United States was the most industrialized country in the world, with Britain close behind. The core states controlled over 400 million people (about a quarter of the world's population) directly in their colonies and hundreds of millions more indirectly, through their 'informal empires' of economic influence. Within the core there were also a number of smaller, less powerful, but still wealthy states, such as Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The semi-periphery was made up of three types of state. The first was in south and eastern Europe – Russia, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Austria-Hungary and the Balkan states. They were still largely agricultural, less wealthy and developed than the core states though often important militarily. Some, like Russia and Italy, appeared to be developing into economies and societies more like the core states, while others, such as Spain, appeared to be in decline. The second type of semi-peripheral state was found outside Europe – the European settlement colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Latin America, such as Argentina and Uruguay. These were relatively prosperous societies with economies built on the export of primary products, in particular food, to the core states. They had varying degrees of political independence. The third type consisted of just one state – Japan. It was the only state to have escaped European political control and to have embarked on a process of industrialization. That process had not gone far by 1900 (industrial output per head was one-fifteenth of the level in the United States) but, although still overwhelmingly a rural nation, Japan was already an important regional power capable of challenging the core powers in east Asia.
The overwhelming majority of the world (comprising nearly two-thirds of the world's people) constituted the periphery. Most of Asia and Africa had been divided up by the core states as colonies. Two major states were outside the control of the core – China and the Ottoman empire – but they were in what appeared to be terminal decline and it seemed unlikely that they could survive much longer as independent entities as core pressure on them mounted. Whatever its exact political status, all the periphery was overwhelmingly rural and nearly all its population were illiterate peasants condemned to short lives of grinding poverty. (Industrial output per head in India, one of the more developed peripheral economies, was at 1 per cent of the level in the United States.) Most of the peasants were largely self-sufficient and had little, if any, contact with the wider economy or core values, although colonial authorities everywhere were trying to force them into a money economy. Where they had succeeded peripheral economies were often dominated by a single crop – over 80 per cent of Egypt's exports was raw cotton – and this was the basis for the small modern sector of the economy. A few traders (often foreigners – Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East and South Africa) and a small urban elite were linked to the culture of the core states (hence the huge opera house built deep in the Amazon jungle at Manaus, the centre of the rubber trade). Such 'development' as there was in the periphery was linked almost entirely to the needs of the core and was therefore highly unbalanced and localized. In Africa and Latin America the interior was linked to the coast in a few places by railways, but there were few, if any, cross-country links. In Brazil the railways in the north-east were a different gauge from those in the south (the coffee-growing area), and although there was a labour surplus in the north it was easier for the coffee producers to attract immigrant labour from Europe. In Colombia it was cheaper to bring goods to Medellin from London than from the capital Bogotá, which, although it was only 200 miles away, was cut off by two mountain ranges.
During 1900 Paris was a major focus of attention in the core states – the Universal Exposition opened on 15 April and attracted 48 million visitors. Three weeks earlier one event seemed to symbolize the industrial power of the core states and the emerging new technology of electricity. Two 275-foot-high chimneys, garlanded in flowers, let out the first smoke from 92 boilers, which drove turbines producing 40,000 horse-power of electricity to power the Exposition: the machines, a train, a 'moving staircase', and a great wheel with 80 cabins. Another major technological achievement took place a few hundred miles to the east. Internal combustion engines had only just begun to power cars (there were only 8,000 vehicles in the whole of the United States), but on 2 July the first Zeppelin airship took off from the German side of Lake Constance for a twenty-minute flight, during which it climbed to nearly a thousand feet. It was clear that aircraft would be flying soon as the power-to-weight ratio of petrol engines steadily increased.
Although the core states were the most advanced in the world industrially, they still had major social problems. At least a third of their populations lived in poverty, often on the margins of subsistence, in poor housing and social conditions. In Britain, the most industrialized country in the world, the census defined 'overcrowded' as a household of at least 2 adults and 4 children living in 2 rooms without their own water supply and sanitation. Even by this restrictive definition 8 per cent of the population were officially designated as being overcrowded and in the areas of the greatest deprivation the figure was far higher: in London the average was 16 per cent, in Glasgow it was 55 per cent and in Dundee it was 63 per cent. On 24 August a Dr Thomas Colvin was called to a family living in one room of a tenement block in Glasgow. One person was already dead and three others were seriously ill with what he thought was enteric fever. The next day the local Belvedere Hospital discovered that they were actually suffering from bubonic plague. Public health measures were able to contain the outbreak, but not before there were 27 cases, half of whom died. At the same time the British army was trying to find recruits for the war against the Boers in South Africa. In Manchester 11,000 men volunteered – all but 1,000 of them were rejected as medically unfit.
For the political, social and intellectual elites in the core states, these social conditions were only one of a series of problems they felt their states and societies had to face. The set of assumptions and opinions they brought to these problems and the solutions they suggested tell us much about the vital trends that were to influence much of the twentieth century. From the eighteenth-century Enlightenment they inherited the idea of progress. In 1793 the Marquis de Condorcet published his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. It was a statement of his belief in the unlimited scope for human progress:
The perfectibility of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectibility, from now onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has cast us ... this progress ... will never be reversed as long as the earth occupies its present place in the system of the universe.
Had Condorcet known that he was to die the next year in jail during the period of terror in the French Revolution he might have taken a less sanguine view of human nature and history. The great eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon took a similar view. Although he thought that history was 'little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind', towards the end of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire he set out his belief in future progress:
The experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be assumed that no people, unless the force of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.
These ideas remained common throughout the nineteenth century. In 1875 Larousse's entry for 'Progress' stated:
Humanity is perfectible and it moves incessantly from less good to better, from ignorance to science, from barbarism to civilization ... The idea that humanity becomes day by day better and happier is particularly dear to our century. Faith in the law of progress is the true faith of our century.
In 1883 the British historian J. R. Seeley wrote in The Expansion ofEngland, 'No one can long study history without being haunted by the idea of development, of progress.' That most nineteenth-century belief – Marxism – was based on the idea of progress, with the inevitable march of human society from feudalism to capitalism and finally to the material abundance and social harmony of Communism. The idea of progress seemed to be enshrined in the growing scientific, technical and industrial advance of western Europe and the United States. The century saw the development of steam power, the production of iron and steel, the construction of railways, steamships and new forms of communication. By the end of the century newer technologies, in particular electricity, seemed to point the way to even greater progress. Such progress seemed to legitimate the right of Europeans and Americans to rule the rest of the world.
However, it was the beliefs developed in western Europe in the later half of the nineteenth century, such as Marxism and racism, together with those based on long-standing prejudices, such as anti-Semitism, which produced some of the greatest barbarisms of the twentieth century. By the early part of the century it was possible to detect a much darker set of beliefs among the elite of the core states, which existed alongside their belief in progress and their own superiority. It was made up of a number of elements – social Darwinism, eugenics, racism and the fear of degeneration. Social Darwinism marked the final scientific acceptance of Charles Darwin's ideas, published in The Origin of Species in 1859 but transformed, mainly by Herbert Spencer and, in Germany, by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, into a theory about how human societies function. Human life was seen as a struggle for existence in which only the fittest survived – this applied not just to individuals but also to the competition between states. In many ways this doctrine provided a pseudo-scientific justification for the reassertion of power by the old ruling class (the fittest, since they had risen to the top of society), for elitism rather than democracy, and for failing to intervene to save the weakest in society since this could only damage the overall health of the organism. One of the best statements of these beliefs came from Karl Pearson, later a professor at the University of London, in National Life from the Standpoint of Science published in 1901:
the scientific view of the nation is that of the organised whole, kept up to a pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply.
Such views were widespread. For example, William Beveridge, then an academic and prominent social reformer but later one of the architects of the British welfare state, told his brother-in-law, the socialist R. H. Tawney: 'The well-to-do represent on the whole a higher level of character and ability than the working class because in the course of time the better stocks have come to the top.' At a conference at the London School of Economics in 1906 he declared that those working in industry should retain all their civic rights, but:
Those who through general defects are unable to fill such a 'whole' place ... must become the acknowledged dependants of the state ... with the complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood. To those moreover, if any, who may be born personally efficient, but in excess of the number for whom the country can provide, a clear choice will be offered: loss of independence by entering a public institution, emigration or immediate starvation.
At the time these ideas seemed 'modern' and 'progressive' and they spread widely, not just in the core states but across the world. In China such ideas were introduced by Yan Fu, who had spent two years in Britain and who translated Spencer into Chinese. One of the best examples of social Darwinism's influence on politics came in a speech delivered in Germany at Kulmbach some years into the century:
The idea of struggle is as old as life itself for life is only preserved because other living things perish through struggle ... In this struggle the stronger, the more able, win, while the less able, the weak, lose. Struggle is the father of all things ... It is not by the principles of humanity that man lives or is able to preserve himself above the animal world, but solely by means of the most brutal struggle.
The speaker was Adolf Hitler.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Twentieth Century by Clive Ponting. Copyright © 1998 Clive Ponting. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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