History of the Twentieth Century

Martin Gilbert

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780795337321
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

A chronological compilation of twentieth-century world events in one volume—from the acclaimed historian and biographer of Winston S.Churchill. The twentieth century has been one of the most unique in human history. It has seen the rise of some of humanity's most important advances to date, as well as many of its most violent and terrifying wars. This is a condensed version of renowned historian Martin Gilbert's masterful examination of the century's history, offering the highlights of a three-volume work that covers more than three thousand pages. From the invention of aviation to the rise of the Internet, and from events and cataclysmic changes in Europe to those in Asia, Africa, and North America, Martin examines art, literature, war, religion, life and death, and celebration and renewal across the globe, and throughout this turbulent and astonishing century.

CHAPTER ONE

The First Decade
1900–09

As the twentieth century opened, wars were being fought on two continents: in Africa and in Asia. In South Africa, the Boer War was entering its eleventh week, the Boers, in their two independent republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, having taken on the might of the British Empire in neighbouring Cape Colony and Natal. The first battle of 1900 in South Africa took place on January 6, when Boer forces tried to drive the British from their positions inside the town of Ladysmith, where 20,000 British troops had defended the besieged town for more than two months. Within a month Ladysmith was relieved, 500 British cavalrymen breaking through the Boer ring and galloping through the main street shouting, ‘We are here!’

Another besieged town, Mafeking, was relieved in May. The rejoicing in London when this news reached the capital was so vociferous and enthusiastic that the verb ‘to Maffick’—to celebrate without inhibition—entered the language and remained there for several decades. A month later, Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal, was occupied. Britain had asserted its imperial power.

***

In China, ‘Boxer’ rebels, their full name meaning ‘Righteous harmonious fists’, acting in defiance of the Chinese imperial Government, were attacking foreigners and Christian missions wherever they could. In May 1900 they marched towards Peking under the slogan, ‘Death and destruction to the foreigner and all his works’. On the last day of that month an international force of 365 marines reached Peking, with troops from the United States, Britain, Russia, Italy, France and Japan. Two weeks later the Boxers entered the city, destroying most of the foreign-owned buildings that were not within the protective zone of the foreign Legations. The city’s Roman Catholic Church was burnt to the ground and Chinese Christians living near it were massacred. Austrians at their Legation managed to rescue a Chinese Christian woman who was being burned to death near their Legation wall. After the Third Secretary of the Japanese Legation was set upon and murdered, Japan announced that she could have ‘no more communication with China—except war’.

Foreigners who could reach the security of their respective Legations were protected by the marines, and an international naval force was on its way. On July 28 the German Kaiser, William II, was present at the North Sea port of Bremerhaven when 4,000 German soldiers set sail for China. Wishing them good fortune, he declared: ‘When you meet the foe you will defeat him. No quarter will be given, no prisoners will be taken. Let all who fall into your hands be at your mercy. Just as the Huns, a thousand years ago, under the leadership of Attila, gained a reputation in virtue in which they will live in historical tradition, so may the name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.’

In the European Legations, under siege for three weeks, sixty-two Europeans were killed. Brought to China by sea, a combined force of 36,000 British, Russian, German, French and Japanese troops advanced on Peking. American troops also took part. On August 14, Russian and American troops attacked the central gates of Peking. British Indian troops were the first to reach the besieged Legations. Fighting continued around the Legations for another two days, when Japanese troops entered the Forbidden City. The siege of the Legations was over. In the subsequent savage battle for the nearby Roman Catholic Cathedral and the compound around it 400 Europeans were killed, 200 of them children from the orphanage inside the compound.

News of the scale of the killings in China took time to reach those who had despatched the expeditionary force. It was not until late in September that it was learned that at one Catholic mission far from Peking, four priests and seven nuns had been killed, and 1,000 Chinese Christians beheaded.

***

The twentieth century opened with working men in all industrialized countries determined to improve their situation by direct participation in the political process. In London on February 27, representatives of all the British working-class organizations founded the Labour Representation Committee. Its aim was to bring about ‘the independent representation of working people in Parliament’. A quarter of a century later, the secretary of the committee, Ramsay MacDonald, became Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister. At the end of the century, a sixth Labour government was in power, and with a substantial parliamentary majority.

In Austria-Hungary in 1900, the internal divisions of the Habsburg Empire—with its mixture of Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenes, Poles, Hungarians, Roumanians, Serbs, Croats and Italians—were much in evidence. During a meeting of the Austrian Parliament that summer the Czech opposition members disrupted the proceedings by blowing penny trumpets, beating cymbals, and producing an array of catcalls. After seven hours of disruption the Prime Minister closed the session. In December 1900, after a ten-year absence, the Italian deputies resumed their seats in the Austrian regional Parliament in the Tyrol, having boycotted the assembly on the grounds that they could always be outvoted by the German-speaking deputies. On their return they insisted that their speeches and interjections, which they would only make in Italian, should be translated into German, and read out in full.

Not only in his Austrian dominions, but also in his Hungarian kingdom—the twin pillars of his Dual Monarchy—the Emperor Franz-Josef faced disaffection. Speaking in the Hungarian Parliament in Budapest, the Hungarian Prime Minister said he was prepared to take the necessary measures ‘to assert the rights of Hungary and its independence’. Until the time came to do so, he added, ‘let us husband our strength and keep our powder dry’.

The Russian Empire also faced internal strife. On April 23 a secret meeting was held in the Empire’s Georgian province to celebrate May Day, and with it the hopes of the workers for an end to autocracy. In the previous year’s gathering, seventy workers had attended. In 1900 the number was 200. One of the speakers that day was Josef Dzhugashvili, a Georgian who had just been expelled from the Tiflis Theological Seminary, after five years studying to be a priest. He was in charge that year of Marxist propaganda among the Tiflis railway workers, and had indeed already made contact with them while at the seminary. Later he took the name Stalin—Man of Steel.

The leaders of the small, largely exiled, Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which had been founded in 1898, were convinced that the nineteenth-century Marxist analysis, whereby the collapse of the hated capitalist system could only come about through class conflict, made revolution inevitable in the highly industrialized States. The Party’s leader, Vladimir Ulyanov, known by his underground name of Lenin, had left Russia in 1900 after three years in exile in Siberia. From his exile in Switzerland, he built a centralized Party structure, determined to see the day when the Tsarist Empire would be no more.

In July the Senate of Finland, a Russian province since 1808, rejected an imperial manifesto making Russian the official language of Finland, a country in which only 8,000 out of 2,700,000 people spoke Russian as their native tongue. Only two years had passed since the suppression of a measure of Finnish autonomy and the exile of many Finnish national leaders. Despite this rebuff by the Finnish Senate, the power of St Petersburg seemed unchallengeable.

The Ottoman Empire was likewise troubled by political agitation and civil war among its non-Turkish and non-Muslim nationalities. In the province of Macedonia, whose ethnic mix of peoples gave its name to the French salad Macédoine de fruits, more than a hundred ethnic Bulgarians were murdered by local Greeks during 1900. The small, landlocked province was home to Turks, Serbs, Bulgarian Christians, Bulgarian Muslims (known as Pomaks), Roumanians (known as Vlachs, some of them Greek Orthodox, others Muslim), Greeks, Albanians (Christian and Muslim), and Albanianized Serbs (known as Arnauts).

Within Turkish Macedonia, the Bulgarian Christians actively resorted to the forcible conversion of the Muslim Pomaks to Christianity. In the neighbouring Turkish province of Albania, a local Muslim chief ordered the murder of more than 200 Christians. A Christian village was set on fire and several Christians who had been taken hostage were murdered because no ransom was paid for them. In the distant eastern regions of the Ottoman Empire, Kurdish villagers attacked and murdered at least sixty Armenians, and possibly as many as 400, in 1900. Britain, one of its consular representatives in the region having been assaulted, protested vigorously. Nor was Britain itself untroubled by dissent. In September, Phoenix Park in Dublin saw a large Irish nationalist demonstration demanding Home Rule for Ireland, the abolition of ‘landlordism’ and the withdrawal of Irish political representation in the Westminster Parliament. But far more than political unrest, disease cursed the British Empire in 1900. In Hong Kong a hundred people a week were dying of bubonic plague that spring and summer. In India, during the course of a two-year famine, two million people died.

***

The year 1900 saw national rivalries in the realms of both sport and invention. The first modern Olympic Games to be held outside Athens was held that year in Paris. The table of gold medal winners was headed by France with twenty-nine, the United States with twenty, and Britain with seventeen. Austria-Hungary won four, Germany three and Russia none.

Inventions could both inspire enthusiasm and foreshadow conflict. In Britain, William Crookes found the means of separating uranium. In the United States, the revolver was invented. In Germany, on the evening of July 2, the first airship, the creation of Count Zeppelin, made its trial flight, travelling a distance of thirty-five miles. Man had found a means of powered travel through the air.

***

On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died. She had reigned for sixty-one years. At her funeral procession in London, five sovereigns, nine crown princes or heirs apparent, and forty other princes and grand dukes rode on horseback to pay their respects. In southern Africa the British conquest of the two Boer republics was almost complete, but Boer guerrilla fighters continued to evade capture, fought on, and refused to surrender. In an attempt to force the guerrillas to give up, the British military authorities seized thousands of Boer women and children, whose menfolk were still fighting, and detained them in seventeen special camps, known as ‘concentration camps’. Conditions in the camps were bad, with almost no medical facilities, and little food. A further thirty-five camps were set up for black Africans who worked on the farms of the absent fighters, so they too would be unable to plant or harvest crops, or look after livestock. The death toll in the camps was high, and was denounced in Britain by the Liberal Party leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman. ‘When is a war not a war?’ he asked, and gave the answer: ‘When it is carried on by methods of barbarism in South Africa.’ The government instituted improvements and the death rate fell, but 28,000 Boer women and children died in the camps, as did 50,000 Africans.

Britain clashed with Turkey in 1901, when the Turkish Sultan tried to extend his control to the small sheikhdom of Kuwait, in the Persian Gulf. When he tried to land a Turkish military force, the Sheikh of Kuwait, who had made a treaty with Britain two years earlier, appealed for help to his new ally. A British warship arrived in the Persian Gulf and announced it would open fire if the Turkish forces tried to land. This naval threat was effective; and the Sultan abandoned his claim to sovereignty over Kuwait. Ninety years later, Britain was among a coalition of powers which made war on Iraq for having overrun the small, and by then oil-rich, sheikhdom.

In Europe, the rivalries of the great Empires were still in embryo, as were some of the weapons of war. In 1901 Britain launched its first submarine: within ten years, fifty-six had been built. The motor car, also in its infancy, was likewise to transform war, with the evolution within fifteen years of the armoured car and the tank. Another development with significance for the whole century, both in peace and war, took place on 11 December 1901 when, in Newfoundland, the electronics engineer and inventor Guglielmo Marconi received by wireless telegraphy what he called ‘faint but conclusive’ signals from his transmission station in Cornwall. It was henceforth possible, The Times reported, to solve ‘the problem of telegraphing across the Atlantic without wires’.

***

On 6 September 1901 the President of the United States, William McKinley, who was visiting a Pan-American Exhibition at Buffalo, was shot by an anarchist with whom he was shaking hands. McKinley, who died eight days later, was a veteran of the American Civil War. Under his administration America had defeated Spain and acquired the Philippines. It was he who had agreed to the annexation of Hawaii by the United States, and the effective control of the United States over Cuba.

McKinley was succeeded as President by Theodore Roosevelt, his forty-three-year-old Vice-President, who three years earlier had raised and commanded a volunteer cavalry regiment of cowboys and college graduates, the Rough Riders, in the Spanish-American War. ‘Great privileges and great powers are ours,’ the new President declared on taking the oath of office, ‘and heavy are the responsibilities that go with these privileges and these powers. According as we do well or ill, so shall mankind in the future be raised or cast down.’

In the Philippines, the United States was hunting down the leaders of the national movement which was fighting in the hills. On March 23 the rebel leader and his staff were captured, but fighting continued, forcing the Americans to maintain an army of 50,000 men in the Philippines. As in South Africa it was the tactics of guerrilla fighting that proved impossible for even the most disciplined army to master. The guerrilla forces could melt away into the undergrowth, forest and jungle as soon as they made their strike, and then regroup whenever they decided to strike again. During one such attack, three American officers and forty-eight of their men were killed.

On January 10, oil was discovered in Texas, a historic moment for the future wealth and power of the United States. That same year, also in the United States, the mass production of motor cars began. American industrial power was becoming as great as that of all the industrial nations combined. When the United States Steel Corporation was formed in 1901 it was popularly known as the Billion-Dollar Corporation. Its capital was in fact even larger: $1.3 billion. America’s wide-ranging overseas possessions included the Philippines, the home of seven million Filipinos—almost ten per cent of the population of the continental United States. Puerto Rico, acquired from Spain in 1898, had almost a million inhabitants. But the great demographic change in the United States was taking place not through acquisition but through immigration. During one year, 1901, almost 500,000 immigrants arrived from Europe, a figure which was to be maintained year after year for the next decade. The largest single group that year were Italians, 135,996 in all. Russian Jews made up more than 80,000.

The Russia from which so many immigrants came was in constant turmoil. During a student protest in St Petersburg proclamations were distributed with revolutionary slogans, among them ‘Down with the Tsar’, and the red flag of revolution was flown on the steps of the cathedral. During riots in the Georgian capital, Tiflis, fourteen demonstrators were injured and fifty arrested. ‘This day marks the beginning’, wrote Lenin from his exile in Switzerland, ‘of an open revolutionary movement in the Caucasus.’ Among those who took part in this confrontation was Josef Stalin.

Count Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer and thinker, then aged seventy-three, was an active supporter of the student protests in Moscow. His sympathy with the demonstrators led to his excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church. In an appeal to the Tsar to protect civil liberties in Russia, he wrote: ‘Thousands of the best Russians, sincerely religious people, and therefore such as constitute the chief strength of every nation, have already been ruined, or are being ruined, in prison and in banishment.’ Dissent should not be punished as a crime. It was quite wrong to believe that the salvation of Russia could only be found ‘in a brutal and antiquated form of government’.

Neither the internal nor the imperial policies of Russia were to change. Throughout 1901 the Russification of Finland continued with vigour, and Finnish citizens were forced to serve against their will in Russian regiments. Local resistance to Russian policy was constant. In Helsinki, in 1902, of 857 men summoned to the army only fifty-six obeyed. When a vast crowd demonstrated against army service, the Tsar’s Cossack troops used their knotted whips to disperse the demonstrators. Across the Gulf of Finland, other subjects of the Tsar, the people of Estonia, were also seeking some means of national expression. In 1901 a group of young Estonians started a newspaper aimed at raising national consciousness.

In the German province of Alsace-Lorraine, acquired by conquest from France thirty years earlier, there was discontent when a new German Secretary of State was appointed for the province. He had hitherto ruled the Danish majority in North Schleswig, another German imperial conquest of the nineteenth century, and had been hated for his hostility to the Danes under his control, where he had placed restrictions on the use of the Danish language on all those living in the province. The swift growth of the Polish population in those parts of East Prussia which at the end of the eighteenth century had been part of the Polish sovereign lands partitioned by Germany, Austria and Russia, was also a cause of internal dissent. In December 1901 twenty Polish schoolchildren who refused to say their prayers in German, a language they did not understand, were flogged. When the mother of one of the children was asked by the president of the court what language she supposed Christ to have spoken, she replied without hesitation, ‘In Polish.’ The German Government bought considerable tracts of land in the predominantly Polish region and settled Germans on it, further exacerbating Polish hostility.

The German Government was determined to suppress Polish national sentiment. The Polish language was not allowed to be taught in schools—though it could not be forbidden in homes—and Poles were excluded from the civil service, which included the teaching professions. During a raid on several Polish-language newspaper offices, documents were found which confirmed the desire of the Poles inside the German Empire for a national future for Poland. Several editors, and thirteen Polish students, were arrested and imprisoned. The crisis was exacerbated when the German Chancellor, Count von Bülow, characterized Germans as hares and Poles as rabbits, telling a journalist: ‘If in this park I were to put ten hares and five rabbits, next year I should have fifteen hares and a hundred rabbits. It is against such a phenomenon that we mean to defend German national unity in the Polish provinces.’

***

A peace agreement between the Great Powers and China was signed on 7 September 1901. In the first peace treaty of the new century the Chinese Government recognized the right of eleven foreign Powers to establish garrisons along the land and river communications between Peking and the sea. China also agreed to pay a cash indemnity for the loss of European life and property. In South Africa, despite overwhelming British numerical strength, the Boers refused to give up their struggle, and in a raid on Christmas Day 1901 attacked a British army camp, killing six officers and fifty men. The British army erected 8,000 blockhouses throughout the countryside, linked by 3,700 miles of barbed wire, to prevent the Boers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction
• Author’s Note
• 1 The First Decade, 1900–09
• 2 The Paths to War, 1910–14
• 3 First World War, 1914–18
• 4 Aftermath of Armageddon, 1919–25
• 5 Between Two Storms, 1926–32
• 6 Towards the Abyss, 1933–39
• 7 Second World War, 1939–45
• 8 Recovery and Relapse, 1946–56
• 9 Hopes Raised, Hopes Dashed, 1957–67
• 10 Challenges of Modernity, 1968–79
• 11 Renewed Expectations, 1980–89
• 12 Brave New World, 1990–99
• Maps
• Index