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The Crisis of the Imperial Order, 1900–1929
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Origins of the Crisis in Europe and the Middle East
A. The Ottoman Empire and the Balkans
1. By the late nineteenth century the once-powerful Ottoman Empire
was in decline and losing the outlying provinces closest to Europe. The European
powers meddled in the affairs of the Ottoman Empire, sometimes in cooperation,
at other times as rivals.
2. In reaction, the Young Turks conspired to force a constitution
on the Sultan, advocated centralized rule and Turkification of minorities, and
carried out modernizing reforms. The Turks turned to Germany for assistance and
hired a German general to modernize Turkey’s armed forces.
B. Nationalism, Alliances, and Military Strategy
1. The three main causes of World War I were nationalism, the
system of alliances and military plans, and Germany’s yearning to dominate
Europe.
2. Nationalism was deeply rooted in European culture, where it
served to unite individual nations while undermining large multiethnic empires.
Because of the spread of nationalism, most people viewed war as a crusade for
liberty or as revenges for past injustices; the well-to-do believed that war
could heal the class divisions in their societies.
3. The major European countries were organized into two alliances:
the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple
Entente (Britain, France, and Russia). The military alliance system was
accompanied by inflexible mobilization plans that depended on railroads to move
troops according to precise schedules.
4. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, diplomats,
statesmen, and monarchs quickly lost control of events. The alliance system in
combination with the rigidly scheduled mobilization plans meant that war was
automatic.
II. The “Great War” and the Russian Revolutions, 1914–1918.
A. Stalemate, 1914–1917
1. The nations of Europe entered the war in high spirits, confident
of victory. German victory at first seemed assured, but as the German advance
faltered in September, both sides spread out until they formed an unbroken line
of trenches (the Western Front) from the North Sea to Switzerland.
2. The generals on each side tried for four years to take enemy positions
by ordering their troops to charge across the open fields, only to have them
cut down by machine-gun fire. For four years the war was inconclusive on both
land and at sea.
B. The Home Front and the War Economy
1. The material demands of trench warfare led governments to impose
stringent controls over all aspects of their economies. Rationing and the
recruitment of Africans, Indians, Chinese, and women into the European labor
force transformed civilian life. German civilians paid an especially high price
for the war as the British naval blockade cut off access to essential food
imports.
2. British and French forces overran Germany’s African colonies
(except for Tanganyika). In all of their African colonies Europeans
requisitioned food, imposed heavy taxes, forced Africans to grow export crops
and sell them at low prices, and recruited African men to serve as soldiers and
as porters.
3. The United States grew rich during the war by selling goods to
Britain and France. When the United States entered the war in 1917, businesses
engaged in war production made tremendous profits.
C. The Ottoman Empire at War
1. The Turks signed a secret alliance with Germany in 1914. Turkey
engaged in unsuccessful campaigns against Russia, deported the Armenians
(causing the deaths of hundred of thousands), and closed the Dardanelles
Straits.
2. When they failed to open the Dardanelles Straits by force, the
British tried to subvert the Ottoman Empire from within by promising emir
Hussein ibn Ali of Mecca a kingdom of his own if he would lead a revolt against
the Turks, which he did in 1916.
3. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917 the British suggested to the
Zionist leader Chaim Wiezman that they would “view with favor” the
establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Britain also sent
troops into southern Mesopotamia in order to secure the oil pipeline from Iran,
taking Baghdad in early 1917.
D. Double Revolution in Russia, 1917
1. By late 1916 the large but incompetent and poorly equipped
Russian army had experienced numerous defeats and had run out of ammunition and
other essential supplies. The civilian economy was in a state of collapse and
the cities faced shortages of fuel and food in the winter of 1916–1917.
2. In March 1917 (February by the old Russian calendar) the tsar
was overthrown and replaced by a Provisional Government led by Alexander
Kerensky. On November 6, 1917 (October 24 in the Russian calendar) Vladimir
Lenin’s Bolsheviks staged an uprising in Petrograd and overthrew the
Provisional Government.
E. The End of the War in Western Europe, 1917–1918
1. German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare brought the
United States into the war in April 1917. On the Western Front, the two sides
were evenly matched, but in 1918 the Germans were able to break through the
front at several places and pushed within 40 miles of Paris.
2. The arrival of United States forces allowed the Allies to
counterattack in August 1918. The German soldiers retreated, many sick with the
flu; an armistice was signed on November 11.
III. Peace and Dislocation in Europe, 1919–1929
A. The Impact of the War
1. The war left more dead and wounded and caused more physical
destruction than any previous conflict. The war also created millions of
refugees, many of whom fled to France and to the United States, where the
influx of immigrants prompted the United States Congress to pass immigration
laws that closed the doors to eastern and southern Europeans.
2. One byproduct of the war was the influenza epidemic of
1918–1919, which started among soldiers headed for the Western Front and spread
around the world, killing some 30 million people. The war also caused serious
damage to the environment and hastened the build-up of mines, factories, and
railroads.
B. The Peace Treaties
1. Three men dominated the Paris Peace Conference: United States
President Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Premier
Georges Clemenceau. Because the three men had conflicting goals, the Treaty of
Versailles turned out to be a series of unsatisfying compromises that
humiliated Germany but left it largely intact and potentially the most powerful
nation in Europe.
2. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart. New countries were
created in the lands lost by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
C. Russian Civil War and the New Economic Policy
1. In Russia, Allied intervention and civil war extended the
fighting for another three years beyond the end of World War I. By 1921 the
Communists had defeated most of their enemies, and in 1922 the Soviet republic
of Ukraine and Russia merged to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
2. Years of warfare, revolution, and mismanagement had ruined the
Russian economy. Beginning in 1921 Lenin’s New Economic Policy helped to
restore production by relaxing government controls and allowing a return of
market economics. This policy was regarded as a temporary measure that would be
superceded as the Soviet Union built a modern socialist industrial economy by
extracting resources from the peasants in order to pay for industrialization.
3. When Lenin died in January 1924 his associates struggled for
power; the two main contenders were Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Stalin
filled the bureaucracy with his supporters, expelled Trotsky, and forced him to
flee the country.
D. An Ephemeral Peace
1. The 1920s were a decade of apparent progress behind which lurked
irreconcilable tensions and dissatisfaction among people whose hopes had been
raised by the rhetoric of war and dashed by its outcome. The decade after the
end of the war can be divided into two periods: five years of painful recovery
and readjustment (1919–1923) followed by
six years of growing peace and prosperity (1924–1929).
2. In 1923 French occupation of the Ruhr and severe inflation
brought Germany to the brink of civil war. Currency reform and French
withdrawal from the Ruhr marked the beginning of a period of peace and economic
growth beginning in 1924.
IV. China and Japan: Contrasting Destinies
A. Social and Economic Change
1. In the first decades of the twentieth century China was plagued
by rapid population growth, an increasingly unfavorable ration of population to
arable land, avaricious landlords and tax collectors, and frequent devastating
floods of the Yellow River. Japan had few natural resources and very little
arable land, and, while not troubled by floods, Japan was subject to other
natural calamities.
2. Above the peasantry Chinese society was divided among many
groups: landowners, wealthy merchants, and foreigners, whose luxurious lives
aroused the resentment of educated young urban Chinese. In Japan,
industrialization and economic growth aggravated social tensions between
westernized urbanites and traditionalists and between the immensely wealthy
zaibatsu and the poor farmers who still comprised half the population.
3. Japanese prosperity depended on foreign trade and on imperialism
in Asia. This made Japan much more vulnerable than China to swings in the world
economy.
B. Revolution and War, 1900–1918
1. China’s defeat and humiliation at the hands of an international
force in the Boxer affair of 1900 led many Chinese students to conclude that
China needed a revolution to overthrow the Qing and modernize the country. When
a regional army unit mutinied in 1911 Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance
formed an assembly and elected Sun as president of China, but in order to avoid
a civil war, the presidency was turned over to the powerful general Yuan
Shikai, who rejected democracy and ruled as an autocrat.
2. The Japanese joined the Allied side in World War I and benefited
from an economic boom as demand for their products rose. Japan used the war as
an opportunity to conquer the German colonies in the northern pacific and on
the Chinese coast and to further extend Japanese influence in China by forcing
the Chinese government to accede to many of the conditions presented in a
document called the Twenty-One Demands.
C. Chinese Warlords and the Guomindang, 1919–1929
1. At the Paris Peace Conference the great powers allowed Japan to
retain control over seized German enclaves in China, sparking protests in
Beijing (May 4, 1919) and in many other parts of China. China’s regional
generals—the warlords—supported their armies through plunder and arbitrary
taxation so that China grew poorer while only the treaty ports prospered.
2. Sun Yat-sen tried to make a comeback in Canton in the 1920s by
reorganizing his Guomindang party along Leninist lines and by welcoming members
of the newly created Chinese Communist Party. Sun’s successor Chiang Kai-shek
crushed the regional warlords in 1927.
3. Chiang then split with and decimated the Communist Party and
embarked on an ambitious plan of top-down industrial modernization. However,
Chiang’s government was staffed by corrupt opportunists, not by competent
administrators: China remained mired in poverty.
V. The New Middle East
A. The Mandate System
1. Instead of being given their independence, the former German
colonies and Ottoman territories were given to the great powers as mandates.
Class C Mandates were ruled as colonies, while Class B Mandates were to be
given their autonomy at some unspecified time in the future.
2. The Arab-speaking territories of the former Ottoman Empire were
Class A Mandates, a category that was defined in such a way as to lead the
Arabs to believe that they had been promised independence. In practice, Britain
took control of Palestine, Iraq, and Trans-Jordan, while France took Syria and
Lebanon as its mandates.
B. The Rise of Modern Turkey
1. At the end of the war the Ottoman Empire was at the point of
collapse, with French, British, Italian, and Greek forces occupying
Constantinople and parts of Anatolia. The hero of the Gallipoli campaign
Mustafa Kemal formed a nationalist government in 1919 and reconquered Anatolia
and the area around Constantinople in 1922.
2. Kemal was an outspoken modernizer who declared Turkey to be a
secular republic, introduced European laws, replaced the Arabic alphabet with
the Latin alphabet, and attempted to westernize the Turkish family, the roles
of women, and even Turkish clothing and headgear. His reforms spread quickly in
the urban areas, but they encountered strong resistance in the countryside,
where Islamic traditions remained strong.
C. Arab Lands and the Question of Palestine
1. Among the Arab people, the thinly disguised colonialism of the
Mandate System set off protests and rebellions. At the same time, Middle
Eastern society underwent significant changes: nomads disappeared, the
population grew by 50 percent from 1914 to 1939, major cities doubled in size,
and the urban merchant class adopted Western ideas, customs, and lifestyles.
2. The Maghrib (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco) was dominated by the
French army and by French settlers, who owned the best lands and monopolized
government jobs and businesses. Arabs and Berbers remained poor and suffered
from discrimination.
3. The British allowed Iraq to become independent under King Faisal
(leader of the Arab revolt) but maintained a significant military and economic
influence. France sent thousands of troops to crush nationalist uprisings in
Lebanon and Syria. Britain declared Egypt to be independent in 1922 but
retained control through its alliance with King Farouk.
4. In the Palestine Mandate, the British tried to limit the wave of
Jewish immigration that began in 1920, but only succeeded in alienating both
Jews and Arabs.
VI. Society, Culture, and Technology in the Industrialized World
A. Class and Gender
1. Class distinctions faded after the war as the role of the
aristocracy (many of whom had died in battle) declined and displays of wealth
came to be regarded as unpatriotic. The expanded role of government during and
after the war led to an increase in the numbers of white collar workers; the
working class did not expand because the introduction of new machinery and new
ways of organizing work made it possible to increase production without
expanding the labor force.
2. In the 1920s women enjoyed more personal freedoms than ever
before, and women won the right to vote in some countries between 1915 and
1934. This did not have a significant effect on politics because women tended
to vote like their male relatives.
B. Revolution in the Sciences
1. The discovery of sub-atomic particles, quanta, Einstein’s theory
of relativity, and the discovery that light is made up of either waves or
particles undermined the certainties of Newtonian physics and offered the
potential of unlocking new and dangerous sources of energy.
2. Innovations in the social sciences challenged Victorian
morality, middle class values, and notions of Western superiority. The
psychology of Sigmund Freud and the sociology of Emile Durkheim introduced
notions of cultural relativism that combined with the experience of the war to
call into question the West’s faith in reason and progress.
C. The New Technologies of Modernity
1. The European and American public was fascinated with new
technologies like the airplane and lionized the early aviators: Amelia Earhart,
Richard Byrd, and especially Charles Lindbergh. Electricity began to transform
home life, and commercial radio stations brought news, sports, soap operas, and
advertising to homes throughout North America.
2. Film spread explosively in the 1920s. The early film industry of
the silent film era was marked by diversity, with films being made in Japan,
India, Turkey, Egypt, and Hollywood in the 1920s. The introduction of the
talking picture in the United States in 1921, combined with the tremendous size
of the American market, marked the beginning of the era of Hollywood’s
domination of film and its role in the diffusion of American culture.
3. Health and hygiene were also part of the cult of modernity.
Advances in medicine, sewage treatment systems, indoor plumbing, and the
increased use of soap and home appliances contributed to declines in infant
mortality and improvements in health and life expectancy.
D. Technology and the Environment
1. The skyscraper and the automobile transformed the urban
environment. Skyscrapers with load-bearing steel frames and passenger elevators
were built in American cities. European cities restricted the height of
buildings, but European architects led the way in designing simple, easily
constructed inexpensive, functional buildings in what came to be known as the
International Style.
2. Mass-produced automobiles replaced horses in the city streets
and led to the construction of far-flung suburban areas like those of Los
Angeles. On farms, gasoline-powered tractors began replacing horses in the
1920s while dams and canals were used to generate electricity and to irrigate
dry land.
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