Within the 1800s and the 1900s, the world started to change dramatically and that time frame was the years it changed the most. The 1800s and 1900s may or may not have been the years that some people think history changed the most, but that is what I and many historians think. This is important because, after history changes, it leaves effects on the rest of the world later on in life and since it happened in the last two hundred years, we are seeing the effects nowadays and that is why people should care about what happened in the past, therefore, history does not repeat itself. The 1800s and the 1900s should be considered the centuries of the most changed history of all time because of the European rapid pace change, what it means to say the Europeans “dominated” the world as of 1900 and the expansion of the European countries, the impact of expansion, countries being able to thrive under capitalism and some weakened, some having difficulties industrializing, nation-building being liberating and a destructive force, and the 1900s being known for the United States and the Soviet Union.
The European expansion and the rapid pace change after the 1800s was connected to multiple world events, small and large. In the nineteenth century, Europe had claimed about twenty-five percent of the domestic production of the world. However, by the twentieth century, it jumped to about sixty percent of the world’s production which is over half in just one hundred years or so. China was one reason why Europe had a rapid pace change. Since China’s population keeps growing and not industrializing, they cannot adapt to the new large populations in the country. China also had a big need for silver. “…China’s demand for, and New World supplies of, silver enabled Europeans to enrich themselves by gaining access to Asian commodities and trade networks (Marks, 131).” Which led the Europeans to have access to the Asian trade with all of the silver being brought in between China and India. However, after China’s citizens started getting addicted to opium it led silver out of the country leading Europe to even more wealth.
With the British making the Chinese legalize the drug opium, it allowed more places to open up for it to be sold throughout the country. Some farmers began to grow the drug in their fields that used to have the cotton plant; however, with how addicted the Chinese were to it the farmers decided to grow the drug to make cash or more cash income than they already did. “In many of these places, cash cropping of poppies thus expanded at the expense of crop farmland, giving peasant farmers greater cash income but, heightening their risks if the harvest failed (Marks, 132).” In the end, China was consuming about ninety-five percent of the opium that was being produced throughout the world, but most of the opium that went to China came from India.
Other connections to the rise of the European countries includes Great Britain and India. “The British East India Company acquired its first colonial beachhead in Bengal, and in 1765 it gained the right to collect land taxes from much of Bengal. Which then made India have difficulties selling textiles because the prices increased (Marks, 133).” When the Industrial Revolution took place, it lowered the costs of Great Britain’s manufactured goods, especially the cotton textiles. Also, within the mid-1800s, India was relying on Great Britain’s exported goods because they took India’s own away from them. Therefore, India was starting to become a third world since they were only allowed to export raw materials to other countries. Those are some of the many connections of rapid pace change of European countries, however, now I will discuss what it means to say the Europeans “dominated” the world as of the 1900 and what the environmental impact of expansion was.
The Europeans have dominated the world as of the twentieth century because of multiple reasons that I will discuss. One reason is that of the gap becoming bigger between the wealthiest and the poorest countries of the world and this occurred by the industrialization of some countries including Europe, the United States, and Japan. With the old regime, the size of the fields determined how the economy would be for certain countries. The bigger the harvest was, the more food and the lower the wages were in the industry. However, the crop production all depended on the weather because if there was too little or too much rainfall, it would decrease the number of crops produced. It also has an impact on the people who work because when it was not good weather, the people may not be able to provide their best work which will then mess with the crop production as well.
Furthermore, with the new industrial world in the nineteenth century, “boom and then bust (Marks, 140),” the prices of the product were dropping by cutting wages to be able to sell the product. Some countries stayed with the old regime but when Britain began moving away from it so did European countries because they were afraid they would lose ground to them. Which then Europe began to apply sources of stored energy including coal and oil to their industry. Europe was providing a lot of sources to other countries and was not having certain problems like other countries were. The environmental impact of the Europeans dominating the world was a big one for them.
Latin America and Asia were having some deforestation problems, droughts, and the soil was not staying fertile for them to be able to have good farmland. Which then they are not able to keep up with the societies and will then lea into a future third world. “Eugenics, originally the selective breeding of plants and animals to produce the best stock, came to be applied to the belief that the condition of humans could be improved only through genetic manipulation, by increasing valuable human traits associated with northern Europeans and eliminating those associated with the poor and nonwhite (Marks, 160).” I just discussed why the Europeans dominated the world as of the twentieth century and what the environmental impact was as well, now I will talk about why capitalism did not always work for every country’s advantage and what the most important factors were to be able to thrive.
Capitalism did not always work in every country’s advantage because some people did not want to work with a bad environment or for low wages. The people in charge did not care much about the situations the workers were in, they were just wanting to make money. They only worried about ownership and the wealth they would receive from the profits. “The problem with the capitalist system, according to Marx, was not that people had to work, but that they worked for wages and were ‘alienated’ from the product of their labor, which the capitalist expropriated and sold (Marks, 180).”
The United States thrived under capitalism because they had new sectors that provided consumer goods and not to other businesses. Which Henry Ford invented the assembly line for automobiles and he realized the people that were working for him had to make enough money to purchase the cars for the economies to stay stable. Which in other countries they do not pay the workers enough to buy their own products are made there, they have to go buy other goods that are imported. The United States produced more consumer goods than producer goods which kept the economy thriving. However, with the United States using capitalism, it led them into a war. “In the 20th century, capitalism and socialism will become competing forms of modernization that will produce the most global of all world-historical events: the Cold War (1945-91) (Unit 5).” Which people may think capitalism was not good for them because it ended up putting them in a war with the Soviet Union.
China’s economy thrived as well because they produced eighteen billion more dollars in exported goods than they did with imports. This gave them power because this shows that other countries are needing their products. China is the fastest growing country and that is because they have products cheap, therefore, more and more countries are getting imports from China than anywhere else. China actually was a communist country and switched over to a capitalist country which will help them out in the long run.
Some factors that allowed some countries to thrive under capitalism includes making sure the workers are making enough for them to purchase their own goods to take home to their family or they will lose profit because their own workers cannot even afford it. Also, make sure they are working fast enough but do not push them too much or they may quit because of the work environment is too hard for them to handle for how much they are getting paid. The owners should not only be trying to become wealthy, but they also need to make sure everyone else is safe and has a good wage to survive the world’s economy. Also, with some countries, they were able to use synthetic fertilizer, which it increased the food supply and it additionally increased the number of products that were used in the war.
Some countries could not thrive under capitalism because of the way they were organizing everything. When they tried modernizing, they usually aspired by a political system, education, technology, and/or industry. “But in doing so, they realized that modernization raised the expectations of many people, and that these expectations often went unmet. The ‘gap,’ so to speak, between the fundamental promises of modernization— citizenship and an improved standard of living— and the conditions of everyday life in modernizing societies may be thought of as the ‘Social Question’ (Unit 5).” I have now mentioned why capitalism does not work for every country and factors that allowed some to thrive; however, now I will discuss why some parts of the world had difficultly industrializing in the twentieth century and what the obstacles were to modernization.
The ones that did not have difficulty had “…harnessed their newfound industrial power for the imperialist military and the economic purposes to colonize most of Africa and much of Asia (Marks, 161).” The industrial world started developing new industries. These include oil, cars, television, radio, phones, airplanes, traveling to space, and even electricity. After World War II, our world economy started to connect better, which included the ideas from multiple countries, the capital, and the labor around the world. We have also increased the number of people in this world tremendously by producing more and better fertilizer in the twentieth century to produce more food. However, that is also a bad concept because the more people in this world leads to more space being taken up which will eventually limit the number of fields in the world to produce products.
Europe and the United States struggled in agriculture because of World War I, the prices rose and that meant that the farmers had to increase their production. They had so much food being produced that farmers reduced their process which then led to foreclosures because they could not pay their loans. Which then even led to rural producers in the world to barely be able to afford manufactured products. Some countries even started raising the prices on imported goods, therefore, world trading was less because of the price changes. “American agriculture was suffering hard economic times by the early 1920s, well before the stock market “crash” at the end of the decade (Unit 15).” This then led to the Great Depression because everyone lost faith in the economy and decided to not trust the banks and take all of their money out of the bank. Furthermore, this caused the banks to even crash including everything else failing.
“There is no mystery as to why colonies had not industrialized: with the exception of Japan, policies of the home country mostly forbade it, seeing colonies instead as sources of raw materials and markets for manufactured goods (Marks, 177).” China had a difficult time because they were rural and the landlords were in charge. They, later on, had eliminated the landlords and had the military power to keep them independent. The Europeans controlled most of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, therefore, it was difficult to do what they really wanted to. They needed to create their own states to be able to get the European’s power away from them. The United States also had a hard time because they saw themselves as private ownership of property instead of being state-driven right away. I have spoken about why some parts of the world had difficulty industrializing and what some of the obstacles were, now I will discuss the next point about nation-building being a liberating and a destructive force.
Nation-building was a destructive force for the Ottoman Empire because it was under the rule of the Turks and it was not going well because of multiple ethnicities. The Europeans, on the other hand, found it useful to have nationalism because they would then teach others of their traditions to have the population grow bigger. Some lessons from nationalism would be for them to become states before becoming a nation because parts of the nation would then try to disturb the rest of the nation to become their own state since they never were beforehand and may want to live another way. “Nation-states had become the most successful organization for controlling territory and had been adopted throughout much of Europe and the Americas (Marks, 161).” Nationalism was a traditional strength that focused more on the cultural and religious traits of Europe. But in Asia and Africa, focused more on the social movements. Since Asia and Africa both felt like they were left behind after World War I, they had nationalist independence movements. When they put in the lines for dividing Pakistan and India, they ended up having millions of people on the wrong side and this also includes the dividing line for Africa and the Middle East. Even though that was a big change in the last two hundred years, the twentieth century being known as the American Century and the Soviet Century is just as important to all the changes.
The twentieth century has been known for these because of the dominating of Europe and Japan in World War I and World War II. Also, a big event that destroyed Europe was the Great Depression. With all three of these big events, it overpowered Europe and Japan’s dominance. “That ‘Thirty-Year Crisis’ of the modern world destroyed Europe’s global dominance and Japan’s Asian empire, made way for the rise of two new superpowers (the United States and the Soviet Union) and their ‘Cold War’ and created a host of newly independent former colonies seeking to unlock the secrets of industrial development (Marks, 162).”
The United States took the lead to set up the United Nations to fix world conflict between certain countries and to manage the global economy after the Great Depression. “The United States would seek not to go to war to roll back the Bolshevik Revolution (in today’s language, to seek ‘regime change’) but to ‘contain’ its power and influence in the world (Marks, 178).” During the Cold War, it was more of a battle of economies than anything. “Hence as the U.S. economy developed beyond the ‘smokestack’ industries into advanced computer technologies in the 1980s, the gap between the productivity of the U.S. and Soviet economies grew (Marks, 179).” The United States had the biggest productive economy internationally and it was the most productive. Therefore, they stepped up and took the lead in capitalism. Then, the Soviet Union also had enough resources to beat Germany. After the Cold War with the United States and the Soviet Union, no one wanted to get into a war with either one of them or some countries wanted them to be on their side such as the Vietnam war. However, the United States and the Soviet Union both knew they had strong armies with nuclear power and everything, therefore, they were trying not to start anything after the Cold War.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the most changed ever in history. This is because of the rapid pace change in Europe, the impact of the expansion of the European countries, the countries that thrived and did not thrive under capitalism, certain countries that had trouble industrializing, nationalism being a destructive force or liberating, and why the nineteenth century was known for the American Century and the Soviet Century. With the rapid pace change and the impact of expansion may have not happened if China did not want or have the need for silver, Europe would have never made as big of an impact on the world economy as they actually did. The countries that were able to thrive with capitalism was the ones that understood what the workers needed to keep working hard and not to just have the owner to get wealthier. Some countries, such as Europe, thought nationalism was useful for them but for the Ottoman Empire, it was a destructive force. Lastly, I discussed why the 1900s were known for the American Century and the Soviet Century. The 1800s and the 1900s were the foremost changed history because of all of these events that occurred during this time frame.