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Now we’ll turn our attention to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries and examine some of the major changes and key figures and events of this time period.
In the previous sections, we touched on some of the major features of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.
An increasing desire for cultural, religious, and economic gain motivated the colonization efforts in the Age of Exploration as nations and explorers expanded their reach beyond their borders and took cues from Greek and Roman empire builders. The imperialism and colonialism of the nineteenth century also had roots in discovery and innovation, as nations enjoyed the first profitable years of the Industrial Revolution and scrambled for natural resources in Africa, Southeast Asia, China, India, Latin America, and the Philippines.
Nineteenth-century colonialism divided the world into allies and enemies, with European nations shifting control of the resources across the world. It was only a matter of time until these shifting alliances reached their own boiling point. The catalyst was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and the result was a mass of countries calling on alliances and declaring war.
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, World War I was an increasingly mechanized battle. The invention of, and improvement upon, new tactics and technologies (such as machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, submarines, trench warfare, and tanks) cost thousands more lives than previous methods of warfare. The machines allowed troops to move quickly, but natural geography also proved to be a factor in warfare.
Machine guns were no match for bad terrain; many battles were lost or won as a direct result of one side’s proximity to a river or the inhospitable nature of wintry mountains in the infantry’s way. Most clashes across the Carpathian mountain range in the eastern front ended in stalemates.
Trench warfare was a hallmark of World War I. Without the benefit of antibiotics, soldiers in the trenches often died of disease
Nationalism, the love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it, rose to great heights prior to the first World War and fueled the fires of warfare. Conflicts turned from political to personal as patriotic zealotry brought simple ideological and ethnic differences into sharp relief throughout the European theater.
The war started on July 28, 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Germany got into the act next and, during the first four days of August 1914, declared war on Russia, occupied Luxembourg, declared war on France, and invaded Belgium, which prompted Great Britain to declare war on Germany.
In September, France, Britain, and Russia, the three opponents to German aggression, signed the Unity Pact. The next month, the Ottoman Empire joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The London Pact promised Italy territorial gains if it joined with France, Britain, and Russia; Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary less than a month after the pact was signed and joined the fight against Germany fifteen months later.
The Zimmermann note (shown below), along with other factors, prompted the United States to declare war on Germany four months after the secret telegram was received. Over the next four months, Greece, China, and Brazil joined in on the side of the Triple Entente against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) were defeated, and an armistice ended the war in November 1918. The Treaty of Versailles was signed six months later, and the Great War came to an official close.
For its own reasons, Russia had pulled out of the fighting before the November 11 armistice. The October Revolution changed forever the face of Russian politics, replacing the tsarist kingdom with a communist state. Civil war followed, assisted on the tsarist side by capitalist nations interested in containing and perhaps eliminating communism. The Bolsheviks won, however, and the Soviet Union was created at the end of December 1922.
Its code cracked by the British, the Zimmermann telegram spurred the United States to enter World War I.
Around the same time the Bolsheviks fought in Russia, a workers’ revolution was taking place in Germany. The rapid unfolding of German revolutionary events led to the Weimar Republic, an unstable parliamentary democracy whose failings, combined with the difficult terms of the Treaty of Versailles, led to the establishment of a totalitarian state under Chancellor Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. Hitler and his party, the Nazis, blamed the November Criminals and Jews worldwide for the hardships befalling the German citizenry. The Nazis initiated increasingly cruel measures against Jews, culminating in the Final Solution, which came to be known as the Holocaust.
The most common date given for the start of the Second World War is September 1, 1939, the date of the German invasion of Poland. Hitler had made a pact the previous month with Josef Stalin of Russia that the two states would not antagonize one another in their pursuit of respective empires. Poland was one of the territories that would be divided between the aggressors. Hitler violated the terms of that pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by invading the Soviet Union in June of 1941.
Six months passed between the Polish invasion and the involvement of the Western allies in the Second World War. Past treaties dictated that France and Great Britain declare war on the German invaders, but no actual military action was taken until a campaign in Norway in the spring of 1940.
In December 1941, Japanese forces bombed Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. This event spurred the United States to get involved in the new world war. The United States joined the Allies, in their fight against the Axis. In 1943, Benito Mussolini was decommissioned as dictator by the king of Italy, and Italy surrendered to Allied forces under General George Patton shortly thereafter.
In June of the following year, the war swung decisively in favor of the Allies. The Allies landed troops on the beaches of German-controlled Normandy and suffered only a momentary setback at the Battle of the Bulge in mid-winter of 1944. Germany surrendered in May of 1945. In August, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, the first on Hiroshima and the second on Nagasaki. These bombings, concurrent with a Soviet declaration of war on Japan, led the Japanese to surrender in mid-August. The second World War ended. Both the First and Second World Wars had taken place within a thirty-year time span.
Following World War II, there was a great deal of work to be done to put the world back in order. Individuals were put on trial in the German city of Nuremberg for various atrocities committed during the war; U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall put through a plan to send billions of dollars in military and economic aid to European countries damaged by the fighting, including West Germany; the United Nations created a Jewish state; and President Harry Truman initiated preferential treatment to countries resisting the spread of communism. The fight against the spread of communism would be the target of the longest war in U.S. history.
Communism was viewed as a threat to the commercial way of life that western societies had become accustomed to leading. An ideological conflict between capitalism and communism, called the Cold War, began. Where the Second World War was one of direct military action and brute force, the Cold War was waged mainly by means of economic pressure, propaganda, assassination, and diplomacy. The Cold War included fifty years of gains and losses on both sides. Beginning in 1985, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced social reforms that led to the end of the Cold War and ultimately the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Two major Cold War figures: Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro
The speedy surrender of Japan in 1945 came as a shock to China. Civil war had ravaged the Chinese provinces since the Chinese Nationalist party split into left- and right-wing factions. The depletion of Kuomintang troops during the second Sino-Japanese war left the country ill-prepared to prevent a communist takeover after Russian troops withdrew from China.
A tentative truce between the nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communists did not even last a year. With Soviet backing for the communists and the United States supporting the nationalists, an all-out war raged within China. The political and economic chaos facilitated Mao Zedong’s proclamation that China was officially a People’s Republic. Communism in China endured throughout the Cold War until a pro-democratic enlightenment took hold there. This movement reached a peak at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, when over seven thousand reform protesters were killed, solidifying the worldwide, unfavorable reputation of the government of the People’s Republic of China.
Uprisings in Communist strongholds such as China and the USSR were foreshadowed by smaller revolutions in Poland (1952), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). The desire for independence from Soviet control drove protectorate countries to resurge throughout the 1970s and ’80s. Many formed new free market economies. Not every consequence of the slow slip away from imperial communism was a good one. Some states had roguish tendencies and despite the Anti-Proliferation Treaty of 1968 became potential nuclear threats. Many of the freshly sprung republics needed much foreign aid to achieve domestic stability.
Nation building was the order of the century in the 1900s. On a platform of nonviolence and civil disobedience, Mohandas K. Gandhi fanned fires set by British oppression to bring independence to India and Pakistan. Nelson Mandela crusaded against apartheid in South Africa from his prison cell from 1964 until 1990. Revolutions sprang up in the Middle East, Latin America, and China. Socialist, anarchist, and nationalist conflicts powered the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1928. The Mexican Constitution of 1917 recognized the labor rights and social orders of the people. The rise of democracy in Latin America was challenged by years of civil war, political repression, and social as well as ethnic divisions.
The United States and nations surrounding Iran opposed the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The revolution, a struggle between extravagant monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the populist theocratic dictatorship of Ayatollah Khomeini, left Iran isolated from the capitalist world and beleaguered by U.S. trade sanctions. The 1980 Iran-Iraq War was a result of concern around the world. People worried that Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic regime might affect the tenuous balance of alliances within the Muslim world. Revolutionaries in Afghanistan were inspired by the movements, and the radical Taliban was funded by the United States in the effort against the Iranian Revolution.
What was one of the reasons for the 1980 Iran-Iraq War?
Answer C is correct. The Iran-Iraq War was backed by countries around the world concerned for the delicate political, economic, and religious situation in the Middle East.
Many territories in the Middle Eastern region suffered political vulnerability due to a wealth of natural resources. In 1990, Iraq invaded the small nation of Kuwait for its oil, which kicked off a war that lasted seven months and terminated in mass arson of oil wells that cost over five billion U.S. dollars to fix. Terrorism asserted itself as a force in the Middle East, affecting geopolitical climates the world over. Afghanistan, having had its last period of stability from 1933 to 1973, was invaded by the Soviets in 1979. Afghanistan became a communist country, which led the United States, Pakistan, and other countries to fund antigovernment forces, particularly militant Islamic groups. This financial assistance led to the end of communist rule in 1989.
There was no shortage of conflict throughout the world in the twentieth century. Armed conflict between the former Yugoslav republics in the early 1990s beset the Balkan Peninsula. Factionalism within Islam plagued the African country of Sudan. Gulfs between established social classes in Rwanda and Sri Lanka led to decades of fighting. The state of Kashmir, situated directly at the crossfire point of aggression between India and Pakistan, was torn by sporadic conflict during the latter half of the century.