Chapter 24 Chapter XIX The Significance of This Period for World History

The period from 1763 to 1914, when Europe became the global master directly or indirectly, occupies a prominent place in world history.European hegemony was evident not only in the political sphere - in the form of the great colonial empires - but also in the economic and cultural spheres.But the decade before 1914 also saw serious challenges to European supremacy, the most significant of which was Japan's defeat of Russia.The revolutions in Turkey and Persia and the underground disturbances in the colonies and semi-colonies at that time are also worth noting.We will first examine Europe's political, economic, and cultural advantages, and then examine early challenges to this advantage.

Between 1500 and 1763, Europe had risen from obscurity by controlling the great oceans and the less populated regions of Siberia and North and South America.But for Asia and Africa, European influence was still small at the end of the century.In Africa there were only a few slave-trading posts along the coast, and a small Boer settlement at the southern tip of the continent.Likewise, in India, Europeans were confined to a few trading posts along the coast and had not really begun to influence the vast interior.In East Asia, although Westerners demanded further contacts, they were strictly limited to Canton and Kyushu.Had Europe's relations with Africa and with Asia in the late eighteenth century been abruptly interrupted by some miracle, three centuries of mutual influence would have been fruitless.Almost only a few ruined trading posts and churches recall the raiders who once crossed the sea.Daily life would continue in the traditional way as it has done for thousands of years.

By 1914, the situation had changed radically.European influence has grown enormously in breadth and depth; vast swathes of the world—the United States, Latin America, Siberia, and the British Dominions—have been Europeanized.Europeans migrated to all these areas, displacing the native peoples to varying degrees.Indeed, by 1914, the United States and Latin America had achieved political independence, and the British Dominions had achieved self-government.However, as we know, these areas have become Europeanized because of their close relationship with Europe in terms of ethnic structure, economic relations and cultural institutions.

Large swathes of the continent, including the entire African continent except Liberia and Ethiopia, and most of Asia, were colonized by European powers.Of the 16,819,000 square miles of Asia, at least 9,443,000 square miles were under European rule.Of which 6,496,000 square miles are ruled by Russia, 1,998,000 square miles are ruled by the United Kingdom, 587,000 square miles are ruled by the Netherlands, 248,000 square miles are ruled by France, 11,4000 square miles are ruled by the United States, and 193,000 square miles A small piece of territory was ruled by Germany.In stark contrast to these vast colonial territories, Japan, the only truly independent country in Asia in 1914, had only 161,000 square miles of land.

Apart from these colonies and Europeanized regions, the rest of the world is composed of nominally independent but de facto semi-colonized countries.These included such large states as China and the Ottoman Empire, in addition to smaller states such as Iran, Afghanistan, and Nepal.All of these countries were controlled economically and militarily by Europe; they remained nominally politically independent only because the European powers could not agree on their partition. Thus, by 1914, Europe had dominated the world.It's the remarkable culmination of a long process that began 500 years ago when Portuguese sea captains began groping their way along the coast of Africa.Now, with an unprecedented concentration of power, a peninsula in Eurasia has become the center of the world.

European hegemony in 1914 was unprecedented not only in its breadth but also in its depth; this can be felt in the economic control that Europe exerted.Europe had become the world's banker, providing the funds needed to build transcontinental railroads, dig canals to connect oceans, develop mines, and establish plantations.By 1914, Britain's overseas investment had reached 4 billion pounds, accounting for a quarter of its total national wealth; France's investment had reached 45 billion francs, equivalent to one-sixth of its national wealth; 22 to 25 billion marks, one-fifteenth of its total wealth.

Europe has become not only the banker of the world, but also the industrial workshop of the world. In 1870, Europe's industrial output accounted for 64.7% of the world's total industrial output, while the only rival, the United States, only accounted for 23.3%.By 1913, although the United States had advanced to 35.8%, the output of European factories still accounted for 47.7% of the world's total output that year. The result of the massive export of European capital and technology was an unprecedented unification of the global economy: by 1914, in addition to erecting a huge network of telegraph and telephone lines on the land of the world, more than 516,000 kilometers of cables had been laid on the bottom of the seas.By 1914, more than 30,000 ships with a gross tonnage of 50 million tons were carrying goods to and from all over the world.World trade was facilitated by the construction of several canals, the most important of which were the Suez Canal (1869) and the Panama Canal (1914); the former shortened the distance from Western Europe to India by 4,000 miles, and the latter reduced the distance from New York to San Francisco Nearly 8000 miles away.The completion of several transcontinental railways opened the door to the economic development of the continents. The United States and Canada laid the first railways in 1869 and 1885 respectively; the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1905; Berlin to Baghdad and the Cape of Good Hope The railway to Cairo was basically completed in 1914.

This economic integration of the continents led to an astonishing increase in global productivity. Between 1860 and 1913, the world's total industrial output increased at least 6 times, and between 1851 and 1913, the world trade volume increased 12 times.As might be expected, Europe has benefited the most from this economic boom.Although statistics on the global situation are not available, one economist estimates that the standard of living in the colonial or semi-colonial areas was one-tenth to one-fifth that of the European metropolitan countries.More precisely, we know that the cost of living in Great Britain fell by a third during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, while wages increased slightly by 5% over the same period, leading to higher living standards more than 35%.Other countries in Western Europe have made similar progress during these years.

The transition from the traditional natural economy to the monetary economy has rapidly affected the daily life of the peasants in the colonial areas.Money had been used in earlier times, but only in an auxiliary way; then the farm household produced mainly to meet the needs of the family.There may already be people selling a handful of produce in the local market, but not for money.Instead, the purpose was simply to get some money to pay taxes, or to buy necessities like salt, small pieces of iron, etc.No money changed hands at all, as people often traded and met their tax obligations through simple barter.But with the Europeans and their railroad and machine-made goods, and their insatiable demands for food and industrial raw materials, a new market economy was introduced.Before long the farmers found themselves producing for the international market rather than for themselves and their neighbors, which in turn meant that they were increasingly at the mercy of not only the merchants and moneylenders who by then had become rich in this new economy, but also the Dominated by unpredictable economic fluctuations.The transition from a closed, static natural economy to a dynamic money and market economy was beneficial to productive capacity, but its initial effects were undoubtedly destructive and unpleasant. The following ironic reflections of a farmer in mid-19th century Croatia probably resonated again and again among millions of peasants abroad:

European invasions not only affected the way people lived, but also the way people thought.At this time, however, it was the upper class minority of the colonial world, not the peasantry, that was mainly undergoing intellectual change; it was the tiny minority of the upper class who knew Western languages, read Western newspapers and books, and were acquainted with European history and current politics.The initial reaction to exposure to this foreign culture is often a passionate and uncritical admiration of all things Western, but the subsequent reaction is usually hostile to the West and an attempt to preserve and foster at least some elements of traditional culture.This ambivalent reaction to Western culture is clearly expressed in the following memoir, written in 1925, by a prominent Indian:

Given the political, economic, and cultural dominance of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, it was natural for Europeans to think that their preeminence arose from the superiority of their civilization, which in turn reflected their superiority as a race.They are convinced that God created different kinds of people.It makes the white man smarter, so that the white man can direct the labor and the development of the broad-backed, low-energy inferior race.Hence the notion of “white responsibility”—a homily that cloaked the imperialism of the day under a cloak of idealistic conscientiousness. Rudyard Kipling aptly wrote in his famous short poem at the end of the 19th century (1899): European masters accepted on all continents the allegiance of the "weaker race" as part of the divinity of things—the inevitable consequence of "survival of the fittest."In India they are respectfully addressed as "sir" (sahib), in the Middle East as "sir" (effe ndj), in Africa as "lord" (bwana) and in Latin America as "en". Lord” (Patron).Given these circumstances, it is no surprise that Europeans began to view the world with a myopic, self-centered view that today seems implausible.Arnold Toynbee described the worldview of his countrymen at the end of the nineteenth century: "As far as they were concerned, history had ended for them. In foreign affairs, history had ended with the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; in In domestic affairs history ended in 1832 with the Reform Act; in imperial affairs it ended in 1859 with the crushing of the Mutiny in India. They had every reason for such an end of history. Celebrate the eternal happiness bestowed on them.  … This illusion of the English middle class at the end of the nineteenth century seems pure insanity, but it is also shared by the middle class of other countries in the West." It is true that this illusion is not confined to the British Isles.Across the Atlantic, President Theodore Roosevelt admonished Latin America in a 1904 address to Congress: "... a chronic wrongdoing, a kind of impotence leading to a general loosening of the relations of civilized As elsewhere, it may ultimately be necessary for some civilized nation to intervene." Similarly, in 1904, Henry W. Luce, an American missionary and father of a prominent publisher, reported from China that the conditions there were Their activities are very beneficial, "We can work together for God, for China, and for Yale University." The most amazing thing is Cecil Rhodes' extreme self-confidence and militant psychology; he walked ahead of the times, Dreams of conquering other planets.He said: "The world is almost allotted, and what is left of it is being carved up, conquered, and colonized. Think of the planets you see in the sky at night, the ones we will never reach. Huge worlds! I have often thought that I would swallow these planets if I could. It makes me sad to see them so clear and so far away." Europe's global hegemony seemed solid and eternal in 1914, but as long as people look back more clearly, it is easy to find that the avengers lurking in the colonial world are slowly awakening and are launching the earliest attacks on Western domination. s attack. Throughout history, whenever a weaker society has been threatened by a stronger, warlike one, there have been two opposite reactions: one is to sever all ties with the invading power and retreat to isolation. One seeks consolation in traditional beliefs and customs; the other seeks to adopt many of the peculiar attractions of foreign societies, which are necessary for man to stand against them on an equal footing, and thus to resist them effectively. .The first reaction is manifested as retreat and escape; the second reaction is manifested as adjustment and adaptation.The slogan of the former is "return to the good old days"; the slogan of the latter is "learn from the West to fight the West". During the 19th century there were many examples of both responses to Western invasions, typical examples of this escapist response being the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.We know that the Mutiny in India was started by disaffected Indian soldiers at the instigation of princes and landowners whose interests had been injured by the English and who wished to return to the old way of life.Likewise, the Boxer Rebellion was an uprising by a secret xenophobic society secretly instigated by court officials and local governors who were deeply educated and conservative in traditional Confucianism (see Chapter 15, Section 3 for details). and Chapter XVI, Section V).Both the Indian Mutiny and the Boxer Rebellion were tragic and bloody incidents, but neither of them posed a serious challenge to European hegemony, because they were essentially passive rebellions that only tried to drive out the loathsome Europeans by force, so as to Bring back the good old days.This was clearly utopian and doomed to failure; this approach could neither drive off the Western powers nor prevent their invasion.The military might of the West and the vigor of the economic enterprise of the West were irresistible.But the situation was quite different when indigenous peoples began to adopt Western ideas and technologies in order to use them against the West. The Japanese were the first people in Asia to successfully implement this policy of resistance through adaptation.As mentioned above, due to the accidental combination of various circumstances, the Japanese were able to accept the economic and military technology of the West, and thus were able to free themselves from a series of unequal treaties imposed on them by the West just like it was imposed on the Chinese.Following their European mentors further, the Japanese embarked on a program of overseas expansion: they defeated the weakened Chinese Empire in 1894-1895, and the mighty Russian Empire in 1904-1905 (see Chapter 16, Chapter 16 for details). Sections VII and VIII). This victory of a small kingdom in Asia over a powerful country in Europe was a turning point in the modern history of the world.This event gave great hope and great excitement to the whole colonial world.Equally influential as the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War was the Russian Revolution, which was in part sparked by the Russo-Japanese War (see Chapter 13, Section 4).The news of the impending collapse of the tsarist dictatorship excited the oppressed peoples everywhere as much as the reports from the battlefields in Manchuria.An Englishman in Persia at the time felt an undercurrent of feeling and hope aroused in the colonial countries.In a letter of August 1906 he stated: This analysis proved prescient.Over the next few years, a series of revolutions broke out across Asia, from the Ottoman Empire in the west to the Chinese Empire in the east. These revolutions were more or less inspired by the Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution, although local circumstances and historical traditions Nature is a more fundamental and decisive factor.The outcome of these revolutions was a challenge both to the European powers and to the rotten local dynasties that were often used to disguise foreign control. The revolution that broke out in Persia in December 1905 was an excellent example of the uprisings in colonial and semi-colonial countries at that time.We know that the revolution was primarily a movement against Western economic control and against the incompetent and irresponsible leadership of the country's Qajar dynasty.We also know that the Persian Revolution was essentially brought about by Russia, because the Russian Revolution of 1905 not only provided a contagious example, but also temporarily prevented the tsarist suppression of Persian reformers. The Young Turks revolution of 1908 is also noteworthy; it ended Abdul Hamid's dictatorship in Constantinople.This revolution was clearly influenced by earlier upheavals in Russia and Persia.A British diplomat in Constantinople reported to his government at the time: Even the African provinces of the Ottoman Empire were affected by the Russian and Persian revolutions.For example, a newspaper in Cairo frequently reported on developments in Russia and Persia and urged readers to either realize the "high ideals of the Russian Revolution."Either be "ashamed" in front of Persia's achievements. Russia's influence on the Ottoman Empire was enhanced by the influx of Muslim Tatar refugees fleeing the Russification measures of the tsarist autocratic regime into the Ottoman Empire.Many people came here before the Russian Revolution in 1905, and many more people were exiled here because of the reactionary rule after the failed revolution.The refugees brought with them revolutionary literature, newspapers and pamphlets, which were widely circulated in Turkey. We know that the leaders of the Young Turks unfurled the banner of the uprising in July 1908, and that they did so for reasons very similar to those which had previously impelled the Persian reformers into action.They want to remove from power the aging despot Abdul Hamid, whose staunch opposition to change is jeopardizing the very existence of the empire.Equally important, there was the fear that Britain and Russia would divide the Ottoman Empire into their spheres of influence, as they had divided up Persia. Unlike the revolutionaries in Persia, the revolutionaries in Turkey were successful largely because the European powers could not act as freely and arbitrarily in Constantinople as in Tehran.In Persia, once Britain and Russia acted together, the revolutionary cause was doomed.However, many other powers were also interested in the Ottoman Empire and were able to assert their rights.Thus, the Young Turks were able to overthrow the Sultan and become masters of the Empire.Yet their efforts to Westernize and revive the Empire were frustrated by the irreconcilable nationalism of the subordinate peoples, by a series of wars with Italy, the Balkans, and the Entente.Effective Westernization must wait until the Republic of Turkey emerges from the ashes of World War I. On the other side of Asia, China has also undergone a revolution against Western interference and its own weak leadership.Since this is the case, the tragedy of Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan is particularly exciting, because this war was mainly fought on Chinese soil. In addition, there are a large number of Chinese students studying in Japan: 8,000 in 1905 and 17,860 in 1907 people.It is not surprising, then, that Sun Yat-sen later declared: "We regard Japan's victory over Russia as the East's victory over the West. We regard Japan's victory as our own victory." The Russian Revolution that followed this war also produced China's Great response.In an article written by a Chinese reformer, he saw the events in Russia as a harbinger of events to come in the Manchu dynasty.He pointed out that Tsarist Russia - "the only despotism in the world" - had been unable to avoid revolution.He asserted that since the Romanovs were in a stronger position than the Qing, the latter could save themselves only by immediate reforms. The Manchus ignored this warning, and the result, as prophesied, was a revolution that overthrew the dynasty and established a republic (see Chapter 16, Section 5).No one could have foreseen the decades of chaos and misery that would follow the uprising of 1911.But the point to be pointed out here is that the goal of the Chinese revolution was the same as that of the earlier Persian and Turkish revolutions, which was to adopt Western technology and systems in order to resist the West. India was less affected by these years of turmoil, not only because it was far from the center of the turmoil, but also because of the dampening influence of direct British rule.However, even the moderate leader Dadabai Nauroji posed the following pointed question to the Indian National Congress in 1906: We can conclude that although Europe's global hegemony seemed irresistible and permanent in 1914, it was in fact being challenged in many places and on many fronts.This challenge was sometimes direct, as in India and Central Asia, where some of the earliest nationalists were beginning to demand independence from British and Russian rule.This challenge was sometimes indirect, directed at the enfeebled Ottomans, Qajars, and Manchus for their failure to repel Western incursions.In the period before 1914, the European powers were able to suppress resistance, either by direct recourse to force, or by supporting the Shah of Iran against the Iranian parliament and the conservative Yuan Shikai against the radical Sun Yat-sen.Yet this early revolt was indeed a beginning—the origin of the nationalist movements that would advance with dynamism after World War I, and especially after World War II. Karl Marx believed that the revolutions in the industrialized countries would precede their respective colonies.He pointed out that Western capitalists were constantly investing their surplus funds in the colonies, where they could reap higher profits.Like all social activists of his day, Marx believed that these investments would continue and that the colonies would become capitalist industrialized countries like their Western European parent countries.Marx wrote in his famous work "Das Kapital" (1867): "The industrialized developed countries turned out to show the underdeveloped countries the prospect of their future." Marx also predicted that as the colonies industrialized and prospered, the former manufacturing centers of the West would decline and workers would lose their jobs.This in turn would eventually force the suffering Western working class to rise up and build a socialist society.Thus, Marx concluded that the revolution would break out first in the West.In fact, in a letter to his close friend Engels (October 8, 1858), Marx feared that once socialism was achieved in Europe, the powerful colonies would attack and "strangle" The nascent Western socialist society. Today, more than a century later, we see that what actually happened is the exact opposite of what Marx feared.The revolution broke out not in the West, but in the former Western colonies, which is now the third world.In this way, history has turned Marx's conclusions upside down.What is the cause of this development of world history? One reason is that the working class in the West has won the right to vote and form trade unions, which they use to increase their wages and create a welfare state that provides assistance in the event of an accident, illness or unemployment.As a result, the working class in the West was relatively content, becoming reformers rather than revolutionaries.The second reason is that the colonies or the Third World did not industrialize.Western manufacturers did not want competition from abroad, so they actively prevented the colonies from establishing their own industrial systems.As a result, the colonies remained producers of raw materials for Western factories and importers of manufactured goods.The dilemma created by this pattern was that the international prices of raw materials continued to fall after 1880.International prices of manufactured goods have risen steadily.From 1880 to 1938, the amount of manufactured goods available to third world countries for a given amount of raw materials fell by 40%. This tendency toward excesses in what economists call "trade relations" is a major cause of the severe economic difficulties of Third World countries today.There are other factors also contributing to these difficulties (see Chapter 29, Section 7). The end result is a widening gap between rich and poor countries—that is, between the developed First World and the underdeveloped Third World .The ratio of per capita income between the two worlds grew at the following rates: 3:1 in 1800, 7:1 in 1914, and 12:1 by 1975. These data explain the reason why the development of world history presents the exact opposite of what Marx expected.In the time before Marx, all the major revolutions took place in the West - the British Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution.But in the 20th century, all major revolutions to date have taken place in the Third World: 1917 - Russia, 1949 - China, 1959 - Cuba. 1975 - Indochina, 1976 - Portuguese Africa, 1979 - Iran and Nicaragua, 1980 - Zimbabwe. The development of world history is not that the capitalist third world strangles socialism in Europe, but that the socialist third world exports revolutions to Europe.Example: Some Portuguese military commanders were sent to Portuguese Africa to suppress rebel groups there, only to be won over by the revolutionary ideology of the African guerrillas they were fighting with.These European military officers imported their political views into their home countries, and thus the years of the African colonial wars culminated in the military movement that overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship.If Marx heard Admiral Antonio Rosa Continho say to.He must have been surprised by the speeches of a group of Portuguese business people. He said: "The military movement itself can be regarded as a liberation movement like in Africa. It is not just for formal independence, but for the liberation of the whole people." The course of future world history will depend on whether the gap between rich and poor countries continues to widen or narrows.And so far this gap has been widening. If this situation continues, the third world will still become the center of world revolution. In 1966, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made this point in a speech.He noted that in 1958 there were 58 uprisings in various parts of the world; only one of these occurred in a country with a per capita income of more than $750.McNamara sums it up this way: "There is no doubt that there is an irrefutable link between violence and economic underdevelopment. And the trend of this violence is rising, not falling."