Making Sense of World History

Rick Szostak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000201673
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Making Sense of World History is a comprehensive and accessible textbook that helps students understand the key themes of world history within a chronological framework stretching from ancient times to the present day.

To lend coherence to its narrative, the book employs a set of organizing devices that connect times, places, and/or themes. This narrative is supported by:

• Flowcharts that show how phenomena within diverse broad themes interact in generating key processes and events in world history.
• A discussion of the common challenges faced by different types of agent, including rulers, merchants, farmers, and parents, and a comparison of how these challenges were addressed in different times and places.
• An exhaustive and balanced treatment of themes such as culture, politics, and economy, with an emphasis on interaction.
• Explicit attention to skill acquisition in organizing information, cultural sensitivity, comparison, visual literacy, integration, interrogating primary sources, and critical thinking.
• A focus on historical "episodes" that are carefully related to each other.

Through the use of such devices, the book shows the cumulative effect of thematic interactions through time, communicates the many ways in which societies have influenced each other through history, and allows us to compare and contrast how they have reacted to similar challenges. They also allow the reader to transcend historical controversies and can be used to stimulate class discussions and guide student assignments.

With a unified authorial voice and offering a narrative from the ancient to the present, this is the go-to textbook for World History courses and students.

The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

VI The nineteenth and twentieth centuries

23Key thematic transformations of the long nineteenth century

Guiding questions

Can we observe common trends across multiple regions in the century and a bit after about 1790 ce, and if so why, and what effects did they have?

Why, how, where, and when did European powers –​ and Japan –​ colonize during this time period? What were some of the key effects of colonization?

How, why, and when were transport costs decreased and transport speeds increased during this period? What effects did these changes have?

Why, how, where, and when did working and middle classes emerge? Who constituted these classes? What political, cultural, and economic influences did they exert?

How, why, where, and when did science come to exert a much stronger influence on technology than before? What were the key developments in scientific understanding?

How, why, where, and when was agriculture transformed such that a much more substantial non-​agricultural population could be supported across an expanding number of countries?

Relationship to other chapters: Chapter 23 follows most obviously from chapter 18 in its discussion of transport. We have devoted attention throughout this book to expanded trade links and information flows, for these serve to connect the regions of the world. The dramatic change in this period involves a reduction of both travel times and costs with the introduction of railways and steamships (and new canals and bridges). These advances are best understood in comparison with preceding transport technology and infrastructure. We have traced political developments through many preceding chapters; for the nineteenth century, we address two critical transformations: colonization in this chapter and revolution in chapter 25. Colonization will exert important influences on both colonizers and colonized in later chapters; we will return most explicitly to the causes and effects of colonization when we discuss decolonization in chapter 30. We can best appreciate the dramatic change in speed of scientific discovery and its impact on the wider world by comparing nineteenth-​century science to the science of earlier centuries. Likewise, we can best appreciate unprecedented increases in agricultural productivity comparatively. Transport times continue to drop and agricultural productivity continues to rise in the twentieth century; we thus resume discussion of these trends, and their effects, in later chapters. Our discussion of working and middle classes suggests that something qualitatively new emerges during this period; this new world can be contrasted to earlier societies characterized by a large peasantry, small elite, and much lower proportions of workers or merchants or managers. These new classes remain important in the twentieth century: They encourage political, cultural, and social changes that many later chapters address.

Historians have long spoken of a “long nineteenth century” stretching from the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century to World War I in the twentieth century. Such a characterization is a little bit Euro-​centric. Within Europe, the period from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War I is mostly peaceful: The wars associated with the unification of Germany and Italy (chapter 21) were far less severe than the wars of the preceding and succeeding centuries. However, the late nineteenth century would witness a European scramble for colonies in Africa and parts of Asia: From the perspective of these regions, then, the later nineteenth century is an entirely different time period from the earlier nineteenth century. This epoch of colonization will be one of our main concerns in this chapter.

We discussed the Great Divergence in chapter 22. Whatever one’s view of the difference between average incomes in Europe and other continents in 1800, it is clear that these were radically different by 1914. We trace the technological and institutional (and transport infrastructure and technology) trajectory of European economic growth from the late eighteenth century, and how this slowly spread to other continents, in chapter 24. Here again, the long nineteenth century appears not as a century of stability but of significant transformations within some regions and resulting transformations of relations between regions. There is, not surprisingly, a connection between Europe’s rising economic influence and its increased political control.

We will in chapter 25 place the American and French Revolutions in a global context. We will note important differences between the influences on, the course of, and the effects of the two. We will engage with a series of revolutions that followed in other countries over the nineteenth century.

These revolutions, though of considerable importance, may not be the most important political changes of the nineteenth century. We have discussed the institutions of slavery and serfdom in several preceding chapters. Through much of human history, some humans were either enslaved or enserfed. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both slavery and serfdom were abolished throughout almost the entire world. Though illegal slavery continues to this day in some parts of the world, the end to legal slavery and serfdom must qualify as one of the most important transformations in human history. It is the subject of chapter 26.

The nineteenth century marks important transformations in areas such as gender roles, the environmental impact of human activity, the role of the state, and population growth. Since each of these transformations continues into and generally accelerates in the twentieth century, we will discuss nineteenth-​ and twentieth-​century developments together in chapters 27 and 31. In this chapter, we will investigate remarkable nineteenth-​century changes in the organization of work, transport systems, the world of science, and agriculture.

We will address a diverse range of themes in this chapter. Colonization was a rather intense form of societal interaction. Transport improvements also intensified contact between societies. We will later discuss how institutions governing both work and science were transmitted across societies. With respect to agriculture, natural fertilizers became an important trade item in the late nineteenth century. We consider how technologies, institutions, and scientific insights built on what had gone before, but do not employ formal evolutionary analysis; we do, though, have cause more than once to mention the emergence of evolutionary theory itself.

Colonization

We discussed in chapter 19 how European countries came to colonize the Americas and parts of Africa and Asia from the fifteenth century. While Europe had colonized almost all of the Americas at one time, most of Africa and Asia remained independent as the nineteenth century began. Europeans had found it relatively easy to colonize the Americas as epidemic disease decimated local populations. Smallish trading posts had long served European trading interests in Asia and Africa; European countries had only slowly expanded their territorial holdings over time to secure supplies of raw materials. In Africa, European susceptibility to tropical disease had long discouraged movement beyond coastal trading posts.

By 1914, though, European states had colonized most of Asia and almost all of Africa. Indeed Europe –​ or former European colonies in the Americas –​ controlled an astounding 84 per cent of the earth’s surface by 1914. In Asia, the Europeans faced and conquered large states. The British took Malaya (for tin and rubber) and Burma (now Myanmar, for rice, timber –​ especially teak, jade, ivory, and oil). The French expanded in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos (for rice and rubber). The Dutch extended their hold on Indonesia (adding rubber, tin, and tobacco to long-​standing spice, sugar, coffee, and tea exports). The Germans came later and took eastern New Guinea and some Pacific Islands. Europeans did not officially conquer China but the Qing Empire, after a series of military engagements with European gunboats, would grant European powers spheres of influence in which they could trade unimpeded. Thailand also managed to retain its independence by skilfully playing European powers against each other: The French and British came to accept it as a useful buffer between their respective colonies.

Map 23.1
European colonies in 1914

Map by Andrew0921, CC BY 3.0

Illustration 23.1
The Submission of Diepo Negoro to Lieutenant-​General Hendrik Merkus Baron de Kock, 28 March 1830, which ended the Java War (1825–​30), Nicolaas Pieneman, 1835, Rijksmuseum

Illustration 23.2
The European Factories, Canton, William Daniell, 1806, Yale Center for British Art. These were the official trading outposts of European countries in China before most gained larger spheres of influence

In Africa, Europeans generally had to deal with a larger number of small polities. They also had to face desert, rainforest, and un-​navigable rivers. Intrepid explorers had only mapped the interior of the continent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As late as 1875, Europeans held just a few coastal enclaves. Europeans were attracted inland by ivory (used mainly for piano keys and billiard balls), peanuts, and tropical woods, but would then develop coffee, sugar, and rubber plantations. (Africa had grown peanuts for centuries, but these expanded in importance after Columbus; in the nineteenth century, peanut oil was an important lubricant and ingredient in soap before synthetic lubricants replaced it.) Cloves were important in eastern Africa. Southern Africa might have declined when its role in supporting shipping between Asia and Europe was eclipsed by the Suez Canal after 1869 (see below), but substantial deposits of gold and diamonds were discovered from the 1870s. The British attempted to link their colonies in South Africa and Egypt (aspiring to an all-​British Cape to Cairo route). The French would come to dominate West Africa and hoped to link possessions there with the small French outpost on the Red Sea to the east. The French and British almost fought a war in central Africa in 1898 because of their competing east–​west versus north–​south visions, but the French backed down. It should be noted that neither vision made a great deal of economic sense since the vast bulk of colonial trade moved directly to the coast rather than overland across the continent. The Portuguese expanded their holdings in Angola and Mozambique that dated from the time of early Portuguese exploration (chapter 19). Again, the Germans came late and occupied what are now Namibia and Tanzania. The Italian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I Organizing world history
• II Prehistory and ancient history
• III Classical history
• IV The Middle Ages
• V The Early Modern period
• VI The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• VII Drawing lessons
• Index