The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2
Page 47
Greater access to university education, legal reforms giving women control over their property, and some liberalization of divorce laws owed much to the growing feminist movement, though widespread voting rights for women in national elections were not achieved until after World War I. Perhaps the most significant achievement of the movement, however, was to force the “woman question” onto the public agenda in the West far more extensively than it had ever been before. Novelists and dramatists challenged the institution of marriage. Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) riveted and sharply divided European audiences when the character of Nora abruptly left a confining marriage and her children to “find herself” in the larger world. An increasingly frank and public discussion of sexuality, including homosexuality and birth control, took place in literary, medical, political, and journalistic circles. Socialists debated whether a separate focus on women’s issues might distract from the class solidarity that Marxism proclaimed. Feminists themselves argued about the basis for women’s rights. Did they arise from an emphasis on women as individuals with rights equal to those of men? Or was it rather women’s unique role as mothers and their relationship to family life that provided the strongest case for reform?
Backlash . All of this, not surprisingly, provoked opposition. Some academic and medical experts proclaimed that women had smaller brains and that undue study would cause serious reproductive damage. Others defined feminists as selfish, pursuing their own interests at the expense of the family or even the nation. Public officials in France and elsewhere inveighed against feminism in general and birth control in particular on the grounds that it would depopulate the nation. Some saw suffragists, like Jews and socialists, as “a foreign body in our national life.” Women who worked outside the home were said to neglect their children and to overtax their reproductive capacities. Never before in any society had such a passionate and public debate about the position of women erupted. It was a novel feature of Europe’s modern transformation.
Conclusion:
Modernity as Revolution
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, modern life had become so familiar to people in the West that its unprecedented and revolutionary qualities were easily overlooked. Historical study reminds us how new, how radical, and how relatively recent these transformations have been.
Like all great movements of historical change, the industrial and political revolutions both shattered old ways of life and gave rise to new ones. Technological change unleashed vast new productive forces. Aristocrats lost out to industrialists, who were themselves challenged by workers and socialists. Artisans and peasants declined in numbers as factory workers, salespeople, and typists took their place. Kings whose authority had long rested on “divine right” now had to accommodate elected assemblies based on notions of popular sovereignty and democracy. Children went to school rather than to work, and middle-class women increasingly stayed at home while their husbands went off to the factory or office. Class and especially national loyalties increasingly replaced those of local communities. Individualistic and secular values challenged traditional commitments to family, village, or religion. Military forces achieved immeasurably greater power. Never before in human history had so much changed so quickly.
These transformations certainly brought new freedoms and greater prosperity to many people as living standards slowly rose, education grew, and democratic practice was established. But they did not generate a lasting stability in European societies. Conflicts of class, nation, and gender continued to unsettle European life, and during the first half of the twentieth century, the “proud tower” of European modernity virtually collapsed in war, depression, and genocide. Furthermore, the modern transformation of European society inspired and enabled a new wave of European expansion that encompassed almost the entire planet and brought lasting changes to the rest of the world as well.
Suggested Readings
Anderson, Bonnie S. Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. A history of the beginnings of organized feminism in the West.
Eley, Geoff, and Ronald Grigor Suny. Becoming National: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. A collection of readings about the history of nationalism around the world.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution, 1749-1848. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. A Marxist account of the French and industrial revolutions by a well-known and highly respected scholar.
Landes, David. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton, 1998. A controversial but very readable book that seeks to explain why Europe grew wealthy while other areas of the world did not. Often criticized for being Eurocentric.
Marks, Robert. The Origins of the Modern World. Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. A short account of the beginnings of modernity that draws on much recent scholarship and places Europe in a global perspective.
Palmer, R. R. The Age of Democratic Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. A classic account of the French Revolution that places it in a broader Atlantic context.
Stearns, Peter. The Industrial Revolution in World History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. A global history of industrialization from its eighteenth-century origins through the end of the twentieth century.
Tilly, Louise, and Joan Scott. Women, Work, and Family. London: Routledge, 1987. Explores the changing roles of working-class women in France and England as they participated in the industrial revolution.
Notes
1. William H. McNeill, “The Rise of the West after Twenty-Five Years,” Journal of World History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 7.
2. E. L. Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 119.
3. David Landes, “Clocks: Revolution in Time,” History Today, January 1984, 19-26.
4. Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescence and Economic Growth in World History,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 323-89.
5. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
6. Colin Simmons, “Deindustrialization, Industrialization, and the Indian Economy, 18501947,” Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 3 (1985): 600.
7. Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 7.
8. Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 117-20.
9. Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod, “The World System in the Thirteenth Century,” in Islamic and European Expansion, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 85-97.
10. Jones, The European Miracle, 82
11. Howard Spodek, The World’s History, vol. 2 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 519.
12. R. R. Palmer et al., A History of the Modern World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 556.
13. Clive Pointing, A Green History of the World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 355
14. Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), chaps. 1-4.
15. Spodek, The World’s History, 531.
16. Roy Palmer ed., Poverty Knock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 24.
17. William Dodd, The Factory System Illustrated (London: John Murray, 1842), 108-10.
18. A class of workers and artisans defined by their clothes—long pants (literally without culottes, or breeches, which were worn by the upper classes).
19. French apartment buildings reflected French social structure. The wealthy lived in grand apartments on the first floor, while the lower classes had to climb the stairs to the upper floors.
20. Western France where the proroyalist antirevolutionary movement was strong.
21. Quoted in Mortimer Chambers et al., The Western Experience (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 730.
22. Marquis de Condorcet, Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind. Translated from Marie Jean Antoine Nic
olas Caritat, marquis de Con-dorcet, Esquisse dun tableau historique desprogrès de lesprit humain (Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1970), p. 198.
23. Quoted in C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 295.
24. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Signet Classics, Penguin Group, 1998), 46.
25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
26. Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women’s Movement, 18301860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 14. This paragraph is drawn from Anderson’s book.
27. Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Memory: Historical Collections for the National Digital Library, December 3, 2001, http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/340/solitude.html.
The Great Disturbance
by Global Empires
1750-1940
Imperialism of the Industrial Age
Imperial Motives
The Tools of Empire
Confronting Imperialism
India
Mughul Decline
British Takeover
Rebellion
China
China and the West
Opium for Tea
The Opium Wars
The Taiping Rebellion
The Ottoman Empire
Africa
Patterns of Change in the nineteenth Century
From the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule
Resistance and Cooperation
Russian and American Expansion
Australia and New Zealand
Global Imperial Economies
A Second Wave of Globalization
A Divided World
India and Imperial Globalization
Famine and Free Markets
The Economics of Empire
Africa and Imperial Globalization
Forced Labor
Cash Crops
The Loss of Land
Mining and Migration
Global Migration
Global Imperial Society and Culture
Population Patterns
Slavery and Race
An End to Slavery
The Growth of “Scientific Racism”
Race and Colonial Life
Western Educated Elites
New Identities
Colonized Women
European Reforms
Coping with Colonial Economies
Education and Opportunity
Missionaries and Conversion
Changing Defensively
Trying to Catch Up
Ottoman Modernization
Comparing China and Japan
Chinese Self-Strengthening
Japan’s “Revolution from Above”
Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century
Progress or Exploitation?
Celebrating Western Achievement
Alternative European Voices
Critics from the Colonies
Actors and Re-actors
Change and Persistence
Religious Revival and Consolidation
Powers and Privileges
Conclusion: Toward the Twentieth Century
THE INDUSTRIAL revolution not only transformed the face of Europe, where it originated, but also set in motion dramatic changes—a great disturbance—through-out the entire world. While the world’s various peoples outside the West retained their many differences after 1750, increasingly they had one thing in common—the need to confront the aggressive intrusion of Europeans into their affairs. Europeans of all kinds—soldiers and settlers, missionaries and explorers, businessmen and investors, and colonial administrators and technical specialists—now descended on Asian-Pacific and African societies. Most dramatic perhaps was Western military power, which brought many societies under European political control for the first time, some in formal colonies and others in semi-independent countries heavily influenced by their foreign intruders. With even longer-lasting consequences, European economic penetration confronted Afro-Asian peoples as Western industrializing societies sought raw materials for their factories, markets for their products, and investment opportunities for their profits. Afro-Asian societies also encountered and adapted some of the revolutionary ideas and techniques generated in Europe’s modern transformation, such as socialism, nationalism, railroads, mechanized mining operations, and factory production. They were also exposed to the older features of European civilization, such as Christianity and European languages and literatures. These encounters generated new identities—racial, class, gender, ethnic, national, and religious—in Asian and African societies and provoked many of the world’s peoples into transforming their own societies.
The dilemma that confronted many of the world’s peoples is illustrated by the reaction of a well-educated Egyptian Muslim named Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti as he witnessed Napoleon’s conquest of his country in 1798. On the one hand, al-Jabarti was much impressed with French science and technology and was forced to the disturbing conclusion that a culture he regarded as inferior had superseded the technological and intellectual achievements of his own:
The French installed . . . a large library with several librarians who looked after the books and brought them to the readers who needed them. . . . If a Moslem wished to come in to visit the place he was not in the least prevented from doing so. . . . The French especially enjoyed it when the Moslem visitor appeared to be interested in the sciences. They welcomed him immediately and showed him all sorts of printed books with maps representing various parts of the world and pictures of animals and plants. . . . One was positively astounded at the sight of all these beautiful things.
. . . [T]hey [the French] were great scholars and loved the sciences, especially mathematics and philology. They applied themselves day and night to learning the Arabic language and conversation. . .
An astronomer and his students had very precise astronomical instruments. One saw among them instruments constructed in absolutely remarkable ways and which were obviously very expensive. . . . They also had telescopes which contracted and closed themselves in little boxes. They helped to observe the stars and determine their distances, volumes, conjunctions, and oppositions. They also had all sorts of time devices, including very valuable clocks which indicated the second very precisely, and many other instruments. . .
We also saw a machine in which a glass went around which gave off sparks and crackled whenever a foreign object was brought near it. . .
We had other experiences even more extraordinary then the first ones, and untutored intellects like ours could not conceive how they happened or give any explanations for them.1
But al-Jabarti reacted in a quite different fashion to another “face” of the West encountered during 1798—the arrival of the French occupying army in Egypt:
The French entered the city [Cairo] like a torrent rushing through the alleys and streets without anything to stop them, like demons of the Devil’s army. They destroyed any barricades they encountered. . . . And the French trod in the Mosque of al-Azhar with their shoes, carrying swords and rifles. . . . They plundered whatever they found in the mosque. . . . They treated the books and Quranic volumes as trash. . . . Furthermore, they soiled the mosque, blowing their spit in it, pissing and defecating in it. They guzzled wine and smashed bottles in the central court.2
How to resist aggression, to accommodate superior power, and to appropriate what was useful from the invaders—here was the dilemma faced by growing numbers of people and societies as a changing balance of global power allowed Europeans, for a brief time, to dominate virtually the entire earth.
Imperialism of the
Industrial Age
The most visible though not the most lasting expression of Europe’s global reach after 1750 lay in the wars of conquest by which Europeans extended their milita
ry and political power throughout the world. This process continued patterns of European imperialism that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but this new phase of Western expansion differed in many ways from the earlier one. Now the primary focus lay in African, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Pacific societies rather than the Americas. And the cast of European players changed as well. The Spanish and Portuguese, so prominent in the early conquest of the New World, had only a marginal role in this new era of empire building. The British and French were the most significant European imperialists, while Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States entered the fray on a more modest scale. Late in the nineteenth century, Japan joined the imperialist club as its only non-Western member and began to carve out an empire in East Asia.
Imperial Motives
Most of these countries had begun to industrialize, and that process shaped their imperial expansion even as it changed so much else as well. European motives now included the desire to export their surplus industrial production, to find more profitable investments for their capital, and to secure raw materials needed for their factories. Some Europeans, particularly the wealthy, were aware of the social importance of foreign outlets for their goods and profits. Without them, many feared, prices would fall, unemployment increase, and socialism become more popular. “If you wish to avoid a civil war,” wrote Cecil Rhodes, among the most ardent advocates of the British Empire, “then you must become an imperialist.”3 Older impulses toward imperialism growing out of European rivalries continued and even intensified in the late nineteenth century, as competing nationalisms now fueled Western expansion in Africa and Asia. Religion, however, declined among statesmen and diplomats as a motive for empire, though it remained strong among missionary societies and their supporters at home.