This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions
By the end of the nineteenth century, societies around the globe had been brought within a single, rapidly evolving world system as a result of what we called in the previous chapter the modern revolution. This system linked different regions and peoples economically, politically, and culturally. Within this system, some states and groups accumulated colossal wealth and power, while others fell into economic and political decline.
The world system was dominated by the industrialized states of Europe, which had been weak and marginal powers just a few centuries before. In the nineteenth century, however, rapid industrialization gave European states colossal economic and military power. By 1910, they ruled India and most of Africa and Southeast Asia. Japan controlled Korea and Taiwan, and the United States held the Philippines. Other states, such as China, the Ottoman empire, and several republics of Latin America, fell within the sphere of economic and political influence of one or more of these powers. Still other regions, including North America, parts of Latin America, Siberia, and Australasia had been largely settled by immigrants of European origin. European settler minorities dominated South Africa and Algeria. European culture and science, as well as a characteristically European faith in progress and reason, also exerted a powerful influence outside Europe. Those ideas were particularly attractive to elite groups who wanted to modernize their own societies.
Where industrialization did not take place, integration into the world system often meant greater economic weakness. China, Persia, and the Ottoman empire, for example, lost much of the economic clout they had had in the world between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At the same time, peasants and artisans throughout the world found it harder to compete in international markets against manufacturers and farmers in industrialized regions, who enjoyed the advantages of high productivity and government protection of their interests.
Early in the twentieth century, rapid economic and technological change, increasing competition among powerful states, and resistance to European domination worked together to destabilize the world system. Underlying tensions and weaknesses led to a series of crises that altered the world in several important ways:
Rapid economic growth put increasing pressure on the natural environment.A return to economic protectionism expressed chiefly in high tariffs for imports undermined global economic integration.Two world wars, which unleashed terrible weapons such as the atomic bomb backed by the power of industrial production, devastated Europe, Japan, and other combat zones, and helped undermine European wealth and power.Countries with rising economies, notably the United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union, began to challenge Europe�s economic power.Anti-colonial and nationalist movements began to weaken Europe�s grip on its colonies and spheres of influence.In the sciences and arts, new theories, attitudes, and insights eroded the confidence of late nineteenth-century European thinkers. The horrors of global war provoked new ways of looking at the world and a search for new ideas beyond Europe. At the same time, new technologies of mass communication brought to prominence a modern mass culture that was no longer the preserve of elites.
Despite these wrenching changes, the industrialized regions of Europe, North America, the USSR, and Japan, which accounted together for about 75 percent of the globe�s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), still dominated the system. But it was now split into competing blocs headed by two new superpowers, the US and the USSR. The confident faith in progress, reason, and enlightened liberal government that had dominated the thought of educated people in the later nineteenth century was now gone.
