Page 105 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

this fleeting world / our world: the modern era tfw-45

History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition.We don’t want tradition.We want to live in the present and the
only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today. • HENRY FORD (1863–1947)

spread in North America, in other parts of Europe, and China, and the Ottoman empire. While the machine-
in Russia and Japan. Military humiliation at the hands of produced textiles of the European and Atlantic powers
Western nations forced the governments of Russia and undercut local products in other regions, their modern-
Japan to realize that they had to encourage industrial- ized armies conquered much of the world.
ization if they were to survive because industrial power During the late nineteenth century interregional dis-
clearly enhanced military power. Steel, chemicals, and parities in wealth and power increased sharply. Between
electricity were the most important new technologies dur- 1820 and 1913 China’s share of world GDP fell from 33
ing this wave of the industrial revolution, and new forms percent to 9 percent and that of India from 16 percent to
of organization brought banks and factories together in 8 percent, while the share of the United Kingdom rose
large corporate enterprises, the largest of which were in from 5 percent to more than 8 percent and that of the
the United States. In Germany and the United States sys- United States from almost 2 percent to more than 19 per-
tematic scientific research began to play an important role cent. By the end of the nineteenth century India was ruled
in technological innovation, as did large corporations, by Britain; China was dominated commercially and
and innovation began to be institutionalized within the even, to an extent, militarily by a conglomerate of Euro-
structures of modern business and government. pean and Atlantic powers together with Japan; the Amer-
By the end of the nineteenth century Britain was los- icas and Australasia were largely populated by migrants
ing its industrial primacy to Germany and the United of European origin; much of Latin America was under the
States: In 1913 the United States accounted for almost financial and commercial domination of Europe; and
19 percent of the world’s GDP, Germany for 9 percent, most of Africa and southeastern Asia had been incorpo-
and the United Kingdom for just more than 8 percent. rated within European empires. For the first time in
human history political and economic inequalities
Economic Developments between countries were becoming as striking as inequal-
The first three waves of industrialization transformed lev- ities within countries. Global imperialism and the Third
els of productivity. Between 1820 and 1913 the GDP of World are creations of the late nineteenth century.
the United Kingdom increased by more than six times;
that of Germany by nine times, and that of the United Democratic Revolution
States by forty-one times. During the same period GDP Economic changes were accompanied by profound
per capita increased by 2.9 times in the United Kingdom, social, political, and cultural changes. The peasant pop-
by 3.4 times in the lands that became Germany, and by ulations of agrarian societies were largely self-sufficient,
4.2 times in the United States. No earlier era of human but the urbanized wage-earning populations of industri-
history had witnessed such astonishing increases in alized societies, like the entrepreneurial classes that
productivity. employed them, depended much more on structures of
These growth rates were not matched in the rest of the law and order and economic regulation that only states
world. On the contrary, the increasing economic and mil- could provide. Governments, in turn, depended more on
itary might of the regions that industrialized first under- the cooperation of large sections of society as their tasks
mined the traditional agrarian economies of India, became more varied and complex.These changes explain
the often violent renegotiation of relations between gov-
For more on these topics, please see the following articles:
ernments and subjects. The first modern democratic
Colonialism p. 381 (v2)
political systems emerged in the United States and west-
Economic Growth, Extensive and Intensive p. 610 (v2)
ern Europe during the turbulent second half of the eigh-
Imperialism p. 952 (v3)
teenth century, which the historian Robert Palmer called
Liberalism p. 1133 (v3)
the “age of the democratic revolution.” More democratic