The Crisis of theImperial Order,1900–1929

CHAPTER OUTLINEOrigins of the Crisis in Europe and the Middle East

The “Great War” and the Russian Revolutions, 1914–1918

Peace and Dislocation in Europe, 1919–1929

China and Japan: Contrasting Destinies

The New Middle East

Society, Culture, and Technology in the Industrialized World

DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: The Middle East After World War I

ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Cities Old and New

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On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heirto the throne of Austria-Hungary, was riding in

an open carriage through Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province Austria had annexed six yearsearlier. When the carriage stopped momentarily,Gavrilo Princip, member of a pro-Serbian conspiracy,fired his pistol twice, killing the archduke and his wife.

Those shots ignited a war that spread throughoutEurope, then became global as the Ottoman Empirefought against Britain in the Middle East and Japanattacked German positions in China. France andBritain involved their empires in the war and broughtAfricans, Indians, Australians, and Canadians to Eu-rope to fight and labor on the front lines. Finally, in1917, the United States entered the fray.

The next three chapters tell a story of violence andhope. In this chapter, we will look at the causes of warbetween the great powers, the consequences of thatconflict in Europe, the Middle East, and Russia, andthe upheavals in China and Japan. At the same time,we will review the accelerating rate of technologicalchange, which made the first half of the twentiethcentury so violent and so hopeful. Industrializationcontinued apace. Entirely new technologies, and theorganizations that produced and applied them, madewar more dangerous, yet also allowed far more peopleto live healthier, more comfortable, and more inter-esting lives than ever before.

As you read this chapter, ask yourself the follow-ing questions:

● How did the First World War lead to revolution inRussia and the disintegration of several once-powerful empires?

● What role did the war play in eroding Europeandominance in the world?

● Why did China and Japan follow such divergentpaths in this period?

● How did European and North American society andtechnology change in the aftermath of the war?

ORIGINS OF THE CRISIS IN EUROPE

AND THE MIDDLE EAST

When the twentieth century opened, the worldseemed firmly under the control of the great

powers that you read about in Chapter 26. The firstdecade of the twentieth century was a period of relativepeace and economic growth in most of the world. Tradeboomed. Several new technologies—airplanes, automo-biles, radio, and cinema—aroused much excitement.The great powers consolidated their colonial conquestsof the previous decades. Their alliances were so evenlymatched that they seemed, to observers at the time,likely to maintain peace. The only international war ofthe period, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), endedquickly with a decisive Japanese victory.

However, two major changes were undermining theapparent stability of the world. In Europe, tensionsmounted as Germany, with its growing industrial andmilitary might, challenged Britain at sea and France inMorocco. The Ottoman Empire grew weaker, leaving adangerous power vacuum. The resulting chaos in theBalkans, the unstable borderlands between a predomi-nantly Christian Europe and a predominantly MuslimMiddle East, gradually drew the European powers into aweb of hostilities.

From the fifteenth to the nine-teenth centuries the OttomanEmpire was one of the world’srichest and most powerfulstates. By the late nineteenth

century, however, it had fallen behind economically,technologically, and militarily, and Europeans referredto it as the “sick man of Europe.”

As the Ottoman Empire weakened, it began losingoutlying provinces situated closest to Europe. Mace-donia rebelled in 1902–1903. In 1908 Austria-Hungaryannexed Bosnia. Crete, occupied by European “peace-keepers” since 1898, merged with Greece in 1909. A yearlater Albania became independent. In 1912 Italy con-quered Libya, the Ottomans’ last foothold in Africa. In1912–1913 in rapid succession came two Balkan Wars inwhich Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece chased theTurks out of Europe, except for a small enclave aroundConstantinople.

The European powers meddled in the internal af-fairs of the Ottoman Empire, sometimes cooperativelybut often as rivals. Russia saw itself as the protector of

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the Slavic peoples of the Balkans. France and Britain,posing as protectors of Christian minorities, controlledOttoman finances, taxes, railroads, mines, and publicutilities. Austria-Hungary coveted Ottoman lands inhab-ited by Slavs, thereby angering the Russians.

In reaction, the Turks began to assert themselvesagainst rebellious minorities and meddling foreigners.Many officers in the army, the most Europeanized seg-ment of Turkish society, blamed Sultan Abdul Hamid II(r. 1876–1909) for the decline of the empire. The groupknown as “Young Turks” began conspiring to force aconstitution on the Sultan. They alienated other anti-Ottoman groups by advocating centralized rule and theTurkification of ethnic minorities.

In 1909 the parliament, dominated by Young Turks,overthrew Abdul Hamid and replaced him with hisbrother. The new regime began to reform the police,the bureaucracy, and the educational system. At thesame time, it cracked down on Greek and Armenianminorities. Galvanized by their defeat in the BalkanWars, the Turks turned to Germany, the Europeancountry that had meddled least in Ottoman affairs, and

hired a German general to modernize their armedforces.

The assassination of Franz Fer-dinand triggered a chain ofevents over which military andpolitical leaders lost control.The escalation from assassina-

tion to global war had causes that went back many years.One was nationalism, which bound citizens to their eth-nic group and led them, when called upon, to kill peoplethey viewed as enemies. Another was the system of al-liances and military plans that the great powers had de-vised to protect themselves from their rivals. A third wasGermany’s yearning to dominate Europe.

Nationalism was deeply rooted in European culture.As we saw in Chapter 26, it united the citizens of France,Britain, and Germany behind their respective govern-ments and gave them tremendous cohesion and strengthof purpose. Only the most powerful feelings could inspire millions of men to march obediently into battle

Nationalism,Alliances, andMilitary Strategy

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C H R O N O L O G YEurope and North America Middle East East Asia

1904 British-French Entente1907 British-Russian Entente

1912–1913 Balkan Wars1914 Assassination of Archduke

Franz Ferdinand sparks WorldWar I

1916 Battles of Verdun and theSomme

1917 Russian Revolutions;United States enters the war

1918 Armistice ends World War I1918–1921 Civil war in Russia1919 Treaty of Versailles1920 First commercial radio

broadcast (United States)1921 New Economic Policy in

Russia

1927 Charles Lindbergh fliesalone across the Atlantic

1909 Young Turks overthrowSultan Abdul Hamid

1912 Italy conquers Libya, lastOttoman territory in Africa

1915 British defeat at Gallipoli

1916 Arab Revolt in Arabia

1917 Balfour Declaration

1919–1922 War between Turkeyand Greece

1922 Egypt nominally independent1923 Mustafa Kemal proclaims

Turkey a republic

1900 Boxer Rebellion in China1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War

1911 Chinese revolutionaries ledby Sun Yat-sen overthrow Qingdynasty

1915 Japan presents Twenty-OneDemands to China

1919 May Fourth Movement inChina

1927 Guomindang forces occupy Shanghai and expelCommunists

1900

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and could sustain civilian populations through years ofhardship.

Nationalism could also be a dividing force. The largebut fragile multinational Russian, Austro-Hungarian,and Ottoman Empires contained numerous ethnic andreligious minorities. Having repressed them for cen-turies, the governments could never count on their fullsupport. The very existence of an independent Serbiathreatened Austria-Hungary by stirring up the hopesand resentments of its Slavic populations.

Because of the spread of nationalism, most peopleviewed war as a crusade for liberty or as long-overdue re-venge for past injustices. In the course of the nineteenthcentury, as memories of the misery and carnage causedby the Napoleonic Wars faded, revulsion against wargradually weakened. The few wars fought in Europe after1815, such as the Crimean War of 1853–1856 and theFranco-Prussian War of 1871, had been short and causedfew casualties or long-term consequences. And in thewars of the New Imperialism (see Chapter 27), Euro-peans almost always had been victorious at a small costin money and manpower. The well-to-do began to be-lieve that only war could heal the class divisions in theirsocieties and make workers unite behind their “natural”leaders.

What turned an incident in a small town in theBalkans into a conflict involving all the great powers wasthe system of alliances that had grown up over the previ-ous decades. At the center of Europe stood Germany, themost heavily industrialized country in Europe. Its armywas the best trained and equipped. It challenged GreatBritain’s naval supremacy by building “dreadnoughts”—heavily armed battleships. It joined Austria-Hungaryand Italy in the Triple Alliance in 1882, while France al-lied itself with Russia. In 1904 Britain joined France in anEntente˚ (“understanding”), and in 1907 Britain andRussia buried their differences and formed an Entente.Europe was thus divided into two blocs of roughly equalpower (see Map 28.1).

The alliance system was cursed by inflexible militaryplanning. In 1914 western and central Europe had highlydeveloped railroad networks but very few motor vehi-cles. European armies had grown to include millions ofsoldiers and more millions of reservists. To mobilizethese forces and transport them to battle would be anenormous project requiring thousands of trains runningon precise schedules. As a result, once under way, acountry’s mobilization could not be canceled or post-poned without causing chaos.

In the years before World War I, military planners inFrance and Germany had worked out elaborate railroad

timetables to mobilize their respective armies in a fewdays. Other countries were less prepared. Russia, a largecountry with an underdeveloped rail system, neededseveral weeks to mobilize its forces. Britain, with a tinyvolunteer army, had no mobilization plans, and Germanplanners believed that the British would stay out of a waron the European continent. So that Germany couldavoid having to fight France and Russia at the same time,German war plans called for German generals to defeatFrance in a matter of days, then transport the entirearmy across Germany to the Russian border by train be-fore Russia could fully mobilize.

On July 28, emboldened by the backing of Germany,Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Diplomats,statesmen, and monarchs sent one another frantictelegrams, but they had lost control of events, for thedeclaration of war triggered the general mobilizationplans of Russia, France, and Germany. On July 29 theRussian government ordered general mobilization toforce Austria to back down. On August 1 France honoredits treaty obligation to Russia and ordered general mobi-lization. Minutes later Germany did likewise. Because ofthe rigid railroad timetables, war was now automatic.

The German plan was to wheel around through neu-tral Belgium and into northwestern France. The GermanGeneral Staff expected France to capitulate before theBritish could get involved. But on August 3, when Ger-man troops entered Belgium, Britain demanded theirwithdrawal. When Germany refused, Britain declaredwar on Germany.

THE “GREAT WAR” AND THE

RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS,1914–1918

Throughout Europe, people greeted the outbreak ofwar with parades and flags, expecting a quick vic-

tory. German troops marched off to the front shouting“To Paris!” Spectators in France encouraged marchingFrench troops with shouts of “Send me the Kaiser’s mous-tache!” The British poet Rupert Brooke began a poemwith the line “Now God be thanked Who has matched uswith His hour.” The German sociologist Max Weberwrote: “This war, with all its ghastliness, is neverthelessgrand and wonderful. It is worth experiencing.” Whenthe war began, very few imagined that their side mightnot win, and no one foresaw that everyone would lose.

In Russia the effect of the war was especially devas-tating, for it destroyed the old society, opened the doorto revolution and civil war, and introduced a radical new

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political system. By clearing away the old, the upheavalof war prepared Russia to industrialize under the leader-ship of professional revolutionaries.

The war that erupted in 1914was known as the “Great War”until the 1940s, when a fargreater one overshadowed it.

Its form came as a surprise to all belligerents, from thegenerals on down. In the classic battles—from Alexan-der’s to Napoleon’s—that every officer studied, the ad-vantage always went to the fastest-moving army led bythe boldest general. In 1914 the generals’ carefully drawnplans went awry from the start. Believing that a spiritedattack would always prevail, French generals hurledtheir troops, dressed in bright blue-and-red uniforms,against the well-defended German border and suffered acrushing defeat. In battle after battle the much largerGerman armies defeated the French and the British. By

Stalemate,1914–1917

early September the Germans held Belgium and north-ern France and were fast approaching Paris.

German victory seemed assured. But German troops,who had marched and fought for a month, were ex-hausted, and their generals wavered. When Russia at-tacked eastern Germany, troops needed for the finalpush into France were shifted to the Russian front. A gapopened between two German armies along the MarneRiver, into which General Joseph Joffre moved France’slast reserves. At the Battle of the Marne (September 5–12,1914), the Germans were thrown back several miles.

During the next month, both sides spread out untilthey formed an unbroken line extending over 300 miles(some 500 kilometers) from the North Sea to the border ofSwitzerland. All along this Western Front, the opposingtroops prepared their defenses. Their most potentweapons were machine guns, which provided an almostimpenetrable defense against advancing infantry butwere useless for the offensive because they were too heavyfor one man to carry and took too much time to set up.

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To escape the deadly streams of bullets, soldiersdug holes in the ground, connected the holes to formshallow trenches, then dug communications trenches tothe rear. Within weeks, the battlefields were scarred bylines of trenches several feet deep, their tops protectedby sandbags and their floors covered with planks. De-spite all the work they put into the trenches, the soldiersspent much of the year soaked and covered with mud.Trenches were nothing new. What was extraordinary wasthat the trenches along the entire Western Front wereconnected, leaving no gaps through which armies couldadvance (see Map 28.2). How, then, could either sideever hope to win?

For four years, generals on each side again and againordered their troops to attack. They knew the casualtieswould be enormous, but they expected the enemy to runout of young men before their own side did. In battle af-ter battle, thousands of young men on one side climbedout of their trenches, raced across the open fields, andwere mowed down by enemy machine-gun fire. Hopingto destroy the machine guns, the attacking force wouldsaturate the entrenched enemy lines with artillery bar-rages. But this tactic alerted the defenders to an impend-ing attack and allowed them to rush in reinforcementsand set up new machine guns.

The year 1916 saw the bloodiest and most futile bat-tles of the war. The Germans attacked French forts at Ver-dun, losing 281,000 men and causing 315,000 Frenchcasualties. In retaliation, the British attacked the Ger-mans at the Somme River and suffered 420,000 casual-ties—60,000 on the first day alone—while the Germanslost 450,000 and the French 200,000.

Warfare had never been waged this way before. Itwas mass slaughter in a moonscape of mud, steel, andflesh. Both sides attacked and defended, but neither sidecould win, for the armies were stalemated by trenchesand machine guns. During four years of the bloodiestfighting the world had ever seen, the Western Frontmoved no more than a few miles one way or another.

At sea, the war was just as inconclusive. As soon aswar broke out, the British cut the German overseas tele-graph cables, blockaded the coasts of Germany andAustria-Hungary, and set out to capture or sink all en-emy ships still at sea. The German High Seas Fleet, builtat enormous cost, seldom left port. Only once, in May1916, did it confront the British Grand Fleet. At the Battleof Jutland, off the coast of Denmark, the two fleets lostroughly equal numbers of ships, and the Germans es-caped back to their harbors.

Britain ruled the waves but not the ocean below thesurface. In early 1915, in retaliation for the British navalblockade, Germany announced a blockade of Britain by

submarines. Unlike surface ships, submarines could notrescue the passengers of a sinking ship or distinguish be-tween neutral and enemy ships. German submarines at-tacked every vessel they could. One of their victims wasthe British ocean liner Lusitania. The death toll from thatattack was 1,198 people, 139 of them Americans. Whenthe United States protested, Germany ceased its subma-rine campaign, hoping to keep America neutral.

Other than machine guns and submarines, militaryinnovations had only minor effects. Airplanes were usedfor reconnaissance and engaged in spectacular but in-consequential dogfights above the trenches. Poison gas,introduced on the Western Front in 1915, killed andwounded attacking soldiers as well as their intended vic-tims, adding to the horror of battle. Primitive tanks aided,but did not cause, the collapse of the German army inthe last weeks of the war. Although these weapons wereof limited effectiveness in World War I, they offered aninsight into the future of warfare.

Trench-bound armies de-manded ever more weapons,ammunition, and food, so civil-ians had to work harder, eatless, and pay higher taxes. Tex-

tiles, coal, meat, fats, and imported products such as teaand sugar were strictly rationed. Governments graduallyimposed stringent controls over all aspects of theireconomies. Socialists and labor unions participated ac-tively in the war effort, for they found government regula-tion more to their liking than unfettered free enterprise.

The war economy transformed civilian life. In Franceand Britain food rations were allocated according toneed, improving nutrition among the poor. Unemploy-ment vanished. Thousands of Africans, Indians, andChinese were recruited for heavy labor in Europe. Em-ployers hired women to fill jobs in steel mills, mines, andmunitions plants vacated by men off to war. Somewomen became streetcar drivers, mail carriers, and po-lice officers. Others found work in the burgeoning gov-ernment bureaucracies. Many joined auxiliary militaryservices as doctors, nurses, mechanics, and ambulancedrivers; after 1917, as the war took its toll of young men,the British government established women’s auxiliaryunits for the army, navy, and air force. Though clearlyintended “for the duration only,” these positions gavethousands of women a sense of participation in the wareffort and a taste of personal and financial indepen-dence.

German civilians paid an especially high price forthe war, for the British naval blockade severed their

The Home Frontand the WarEconomy

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overseas trade. The German chemical industry devel-oped synthetic explosives and fuel, but synthetic foodwas not an option. Wheat flour disappeared, replacedfirst by rye, then by potatoes and turnips, then by acornsand chestnuts, and finally by sawdust. After the failure ofthe potato crop in 1916 came the “turnip winter,” whenpeople had to survive on 1,000 calories per day, half thenormal amount that an active adult needed. Women,children, and the elderly were especially hard hit. Sol-diers at the front went hungry and raided enemy lines toscavenge food.

When the war began, the British and French over-ran German Togo on the West African coast. The much

larger German colonies of Southwest Africa and GermanCameroon were conquered in 1915. In Tanganyika theGermans remained undefeated until the end of the war.

The war also brought hardships to Europe’s Africancolonies. The Europeans requisitioned foodstuffs, im-posed heavy taxes, and forced Africans to grow exportcrops and sell them at low prices. Many Europeans sta-tioned in Africa joined the war, leaving large areas withlittle or no European presence. In Nigeria, Libya, Nyasa-land (now Malawi), and other colonies, the combinationof increased demands on Africans and fewer Europeanofficials led to uprisings that lasted for several years.

Over a million Africans served in the various armies,and perhaps three times that number were drafted asporters to carry army equipment. Faced with a shortageof young Frenchmen, France drafted Africans into itsarmy, where many fought side by side with Europeans.The Senegalese Blaise Diagne˚, the first African electedto France’s Chamber of Deputies in 1914, campaignedfor African support of the war effort. Put in charge of re-cruiting African soldiers, he insisted on equal rights forAfrican and European soldiers and an extension of thefranchise to educated Africans. These demands wereonly partially met.

One country grew rich during the war: the UnitedStates. For two and a half years the United States stayedtechnically neutral—that is, it did not fight but did aroaring business supplying France and Britain. When theUnited States entered the war in 1917 businesses engag-ing in war production made spectacular profits. Civil-ians were exhorted to help the war effort by investingtheir savings in war bonds and growing food in backyard“victory gardens.” Facing labor shortages, employershired women and African-Americans. Employment op-portunities created by the war played a major role in themigration of black Americans from the rural south to thecities of the north.

On August 2, 1914, the Turkssigned a secret alliance withGermany. In November theyjoined the fighting, hoping to

gain land at Russia’s expense. But the campaign in theCaucasus proved disastrous for both armies and for thecivilian populations as well. The Turks deported the Ar-menians, whom they suspected of being pro-Russian,from their homelands in eastern Anatolia to Syria andother parts of the Ottoman Empire. During the forcedmarch across the mountains in the winter, hundreds ofthousands of Armenians died of hunger and exposure.

The OttomanEmpire at War

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This massacre was a precedent for even ghastliertragedies still to come.

The Turks also closed the Dardanelles, the strait be-tween the Mediterranean and Black Seas (see Map 28.2).Seeing little hope of victory on the Western Front, Britishofficials tried to open the Dardanelles by landing troopson the nearby Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. Turkish troopspushed the invaders back into the sea.

Having failed at the Dardanelles, the British tried tosubvert the Ottoman Empire from within by promisingthe emir (prince) of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali, a kingdom ofhis own if he would lead an Arab revolt against the Turks.In 1916 Hussein rose up and was proclaimed king of He-jaz˚ (western Arabia). His son Faisal˚ led an Arab army insupport of the British advance from Egypt into Palestineand Syria. The Arab Revolt of 1916 did not affect thestruggle in Europe, but it did contribute to the defeat ofthe Ottoman Empire.

The British made promises to Jews as well as Arabs.For centuries, Jewish minorities had lived in eastern andcentral Europe, where they developed a thriving culturedespite frequent persecutions. By the early twentiethcentury a nationalist movement called Zionism, led byTheodore Herzl, arose among those who wanted to re-turn to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. The con-cept of a Jewish homeland appealed to many Europeans,Jews and gentiles alike, as a humanitarian solution to theproblem of anti-Semitism.

By 1917 Chaim Weizmann˚, leader of the BritishZionists, had persuaded several British politicians that aJewish homeland in Palestine should be carved out ofthe Ottoman Empire and placed under British protec-tion, thereby strengthening the Allied cause (as the En-tente was now called). In November, as British armieswere advancing on Jerusalem, Foreign Secretary SirArthur Balfour wrote:

His Majesty’s Government view with favor the estab-lishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewishpeople and will use their best endeavours to facilitatethe achievement of that object, it being clearly under-stood that nothing shall be done which may prejudicethe civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewishcommunities in Palestine.

The British did not foresee that this statement, known asthe Balfour Declaration, would lead to conflicts be-tween Palestinians and Jewish settlers.

Britain also sent troops to southern Mesopotamia tosecure the oil pipeline from Iran. Then they movednorth, taking Baghdad in early 1917. The officers for the

Mesopotamian campaign were British, but most of thetroops and equipment came from India. Most Indians,like other colonial subjects of Britain, supported the wareffort despite the hardships it caused. Their involvementin the war bolstered the movement for Indian indepen-dence (see Chapter 30).

At the beginning of the war Rus-sia had the largest army in theworld, but its generals were in-competent, supplies were lack-ing, and soldiers were poorly

trained and equipped. In August 1914 two Russianarmies invaded eastern Germany but were thrown back.The Russians defeated the Austro-Hungarian army sev-eral times, only to be defeated in turn by the Germans.

In 1916, after a string of defeats, the Russian armyran out of ammunition and other essential supplies. Sol-diers were ordered into battle unarmed and told to pickup the rifles of fallen comrades. With so many men in thearmy, railroads broke down for lack of fuel and parts, andcrops rotted in the fields. Civilians faced shortages andwidespread hunger. In the cities food and fuel becamescarce. During the bitterly cold winter of 1916–1917 fac-tory workers and housewives had to line up in front ofgrocery stores before dawn to get food. The court ofTsar˚ Nicholas II, however, remained as extravagant andcorrupt as ever.

In early March 1917 (February by the old Russian cal-endar) food ran out in Petrograd (St. Petersburg), the cap-ital. Housewives and women factory workers staged massdemonstrations. Soldiers mutinied and joined strikingworkers to form soviets (councils) to take over factoriesand barracks. A few days later the tsar abdicated, andleaders of the parliamentary parties, led by AlexanderKerensky, formed a Provisional Government. Thus beganwhat Russians called the “February Revolution.”

Revolutionary groups formerly hunted by the tsar’spolice came out of hiding. Most numerous were the So-cial Revolutionaries, who advocated the redistributionof land to the peasants. The Social Democrats, a Marxistparty, were divided into two factions: Mensheviks andBolsheviks. The Mensheviks advocated electoral politicsand reform in the tradition of European socialists andhad a large following among intellectuals and factoryworkers. The Bolsheviks, their rivals, were a small buttightly disciplined group of radicals obedient to the willof their leader, Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924).

Lenin, the son of a government official, became arevolutionary in his teens when his older brother was ex-

DoubleRevolution inRussia, 1917

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ecuted for plotting to kill the tsar. He spent years in exile,first in Siberia and later in Switzerland, where he devotedhis full attention to organizing his followers. He pro-fessed Marx’s ideas about class conflict (see Chapter 26),but he never visited a factory or a farm. His goal was tocreate a party that would lead the revolution rather thanwait for it. He explained: “Classes are led by parties andparties are led by individuals. . . . The will of a class issometimes fulfilled by a dictator.”

In early April 1917 the German government, hopingto destabilize Russia, allowed Lenin to travel fromSwitzerland to Russia in a sealed railway car. As soon ashe arrived in Petrograd, he announced his program: im-mediate peace, all power to the soviets, and transfers ofland to the peasants and factories to the workers. Thisplan proved immensely popular among soldiers andworkers exhausted by the war.

The next few months witnessed a tug-of-war be-tween the Provisional Government and the various revo-lutionary factions in Petrograd. When Kerensky orderedanother offensive against the Germans, Russian soldiersbegan to desert by the hundreds of thousands, throwingaway their rifles and walking back to their villages. As theGermans advanced, Russian resistance melted, and thegovernment lost the little support it had.

Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were gaining supportamong the workers of Petrograd and the soldiers andsailors stationed there. On November 6, 1917 (October 24in the Russian calendar), they rose up and took over thecity, calling their action the “October Revolution.” Theirsudden move surprised rival revolutionary groups thatbelieved that a “socialist” revolution could happen onlyafter many years of “bourgeois” rule. Lenin, however,was more interested in power than in the fine points ofMarxist doctrine. He overthrew the Provisional Govern-ment and arrested Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries,and other rivals.

Seizing Petrograd was only the first step, for the restof Russia was in chaos. The Bolsheviks nationalized allprivate land and ordered the peasants to hand overtheir crops without compensation. The peasants, havingseized their landlords’ estates, resisted. In the cities theBolsheviks took over the factories and drafted the work-ers into compulsory labor brigades. To enforce his ruleLenin created the Cheka, a secret police force with pow-ers to arrest and execute opponents.

The Bolsheviks also sued for peace with Germanyand Austria-Hungary. By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk,signed on March 3, 1918, Russia lost territories contain-ing a third of its population and wealth. Poland, Finland,and the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) be-came independent republics. Russian colonies in Cen-tral Asia and the Caucasus broke away temporarily.

Like many other Americans,President Woodrow Wilsonwanted to stay out of the Euro-pean conflict. For nearly threeyears he kept the United Statesneutral and tried to persuade

the belligerents to compromise. But in late 1916 Ger-man leaders decided to starve the British into submis-sion by using submarines to sink merchant shipscarrying food supplies to Great Britain. The Germansknew that unrestricted submarine warfare was likely tobring the United States into the war, but they were will-ing to gamble that Britain and France would collapsebefore the United States could send enough troops tohelp them.

The submarine campaign resumed on February 1,1917, and the German gamble failed. The British organ-ized their merchant ships into convoys protected bydestroyers, and on April 6 President Wilson asked theUnited States Congress to declare war on Germany.

On the Western Front, the two sides were so evenlymatched in 1917 that the war seemed unlikely to end un-til one side or the other ran out of young men. Losinghope of winning, soldiers began to mutiny. In May 1917,before the arrival of U.S. forces, fifty-four of one hundredFrench divisions along the Western Front refused to at-tack. During the summer Italian troops also mutinied,panicked, or deserted.

Between March and August 1918 General Erich vonLudendorff launched a series of surprise attacks thatbroke through the front at several places and pushed towithin 40 miles (64 kilometers) of Paris. But victoryeluded him. Meanwhile, every month was bringing an-other 250,000 American troops to the front. In August theAllies counterattacked, and the Germans began a retreatthat could not be halted, for German soldiers, many ofthem sick with the flu, had lost the will to fight.

In late October Ludendorff resigned, and sailors inthe German fleet mutinied. Two weeks later Kaiser Wil-helm fled to Holland as a new German governmentsigned an armistice. On November 11 at 11 A.M. the gunson the Western Front went silent.

PEACE AND DISLOCATION

IN EUROPE, 1919–1929

The Great War lasted four years. It took almost twiceas long for Europe to recover. Millions of people

had died or been disabled; political tensions and re-sentments lingered; and national economies remained

The End of the War inWestern Europe,1917–1918

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depressed until the mid-1920s. In the late 1920s peaceand prosperity finally seemed assured, but this hopeproved to be illusory.

The war left more dead andwounded and more physicaldestruction than any previousconflict. It is estimated that be-

tween 8 million and 10 million people died, almost all ofthem young men. Perhaps twice that many returnedhome wounded, gassed, or shell-shocked, many of theminjured for life. Among the dead were about 2 millionGermans, 1.7 million Russians, and 1.7 million French-men. Austria-Hungary lost 1.5 million, the British Empirea million, Italy 460,000, and the United States 115,000.

Besides ending over 8 million lives, the war dislo-cated whole populations, creating millions of refugees.War and revolution forced almost 2 million Russians,750,000 Germans, and 400,000 Hungarians to flee theirhomes. War led to the expulsion of hundreds of thou-sands of Greeks from Anatolia and Turks from Greece.

Many refugees found shelter in France, which wel-comed 1.5 million people to bolster its declining popula-tion. The preferred destination, however, was the UnitedStates, the most prosperous country in the world. About800,000 immigrants succeeded in reaching the UnitedStates before immigration laws passed in 1921 and 1924closed the door to eastern and southern Europeans.Canada, Australia, and New Zealand adopted similar re-strictions on immigration. The Latin American republicswelcomed European refugees, but their economies werehard hit by the drop in the prices of their main exports,and their poverty discouraged potential immigrants.

One unexpected byproduct of the war was the greatinfluenza epidemic of 1918–1919, which started amongsoldiers heading for the Western Front. This was no or-dinary flu but a virulent strain that infected almosteveryone on earth and killed one person in every forty. Itcaused the largest number of deaths in so short a time inthe history of the world. Half a million Americans per-ished in the epidemic—five times as many as died in thewar. Worldwide, some 20 million people died.

The war also caused serious damage to the envi-ronment. No place was ever so completely devastated asthe scar across France and Belgium known as the West-ern Front. The fighting ravaged forests and demolishedtowns. The earth was gouged by trenches, pitted withcraters, and littered with ammunition, broken weapons,chunks of concrete, and the bones of countless soldiers.After the war, it took a decade to clear away the debris,rebuild the towns, and create dozens of military ceme-teries with neat rows of crosses stretching for miles. To

The Impact of the War

this day, farmers plow up fragments of old weapons andammunition, and every so often a long-buried shell ex-plodes. The war also hastened the buildup of industry,with mines, factories, and railroad tracks.

In early 1919 delegates of thevictorious powers met in Paris.The defeated powers were keptout until the treaties were

ready for signing. Russia, in the throes of civil war, wasnot invited.

From the start, three men dominated the Paris PeaceConference: U.S. president Wilson, British prime minis-ter David Lloyd George, and French premier GeorgesClemenceau˚. They ignored the Italians, who had joinedthe Allies in 1915. They paid even less attention to thedelegates of smaller European nations and none at all tonon-European nationalities. They rejected the Japaneseproposal that all races be treated equally. They ignoredthe Pan-African Congress organized by the African-American W. E. B. Du Bois to call attention to the con-cerns of African peoples around the world. They alsoignored the ten thousand other delegates of various na-tionalities that did not represent sovereign states—theArab leader Faisal, the Zionist Chaim Weizmann, andseveral Armenian delegations—who came to Paris tolobby for their causes. They were, in the words ofBritain’s Foreign Secretary Balfour, “three all-powerful,all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up conti-nents” (see Map 28.3).

Each had his own agenda. Wilson, a high-mindedidealist, wanted to apply the principle of self-determina-tion to European affairs, by which he meant creating na-tions that reflected ethnic or linguistic divisions. Heproposed a League of Nations, a world organization tosafeguard the peace and foster international coopera-tion. His idealism clashed with the more hard-headedand self-serving nationalism of the Europeans. To satisfyhis constituents, Lloyd George insisted that Germanypay a heavy indemnity. Clemenceau wanted Germany togive Alsace and Lorraine (a part of France before 1871)and the industrial Saar region to France and demandedthat the Rhineland be detached from Germany to form abuffer state.

The result was a series of compromises that satisfiedno one. The European powers formed a League of Na-tions, but the United States Congress, reflecting the iso-lationist feelings of the American people, refused to letthe United States join. France recovered Alsace and Lor-raine but was unable to detach the Rhineland and had to

The PeaceTreaties

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content itself with vague promises of British and Ameri-can protection if Germany ever rebuilt its army. Britainacquired new territories in Africa and the Middle Eastbut was greatly weakened by human losses and the dis-ruption of its trade.

On June 28, 1919, the German delegates reluctantlysigned the Treaty of Versailles˚. Germany was forbiddento have an air force and was permitted only a token army

and navy. It gave up large parts of its eastern territory toa newly reconstituted Poland. The Allies made Germanypromise to pay reparations to compensate the victors fortheir losses, but they did not set a figure or a period oftime for payment. A “guilt clause,” which was to ranklefor years to come, obliged the Germans to accept “re-sponsibility for causing all the loss and damage” of thewar. The Treaty of Versailles left Germany humiliated butlargely intact and potentially the most powerful nationin Europe. Establishing a peace neither of punishment

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nor of reconciliation, the treaty was one of the great fail-ures in history.

Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had fallenapart. In the Treaty of Saint-Germain˚ (1920) Austria andHungary each lost three-quarters of its territory. Newcountries appeared in the lands lost by Russia, Ger-many, and Austria-Hungary: Poland, resurrected afterover a century; Czechoslovakia, created from the north-ern third of Austria-Hungary; and Yugoslavia, combiningSerbia and the former south Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary. The new boundaries coincided with the majorlinguistic groups of eastern Europe, but they all con-tained disaffected minorities. These small nations weresafe only as long as Germany and Russia lay defeatedand prostrate.

The end of the Great War didnot bring peace to all of Europe.Fighting continued in Russiafor another three years. TheBolshevik Revolution had pro-

voked Allied intervention. French troops occupiedOdessa in the south; the British and Americans landedin Archangel and Murmansk in the north; and the Japa-nese occupied Vladivostok in the far east. LiberatedCzech prisoners of war briefly seized the Trans-SiberianRailway.

Also, in December 1918, civil war broke out in Rus-sia. The Communists—as the Bolsheviks called them-selves after March 1918—held central Russia, but all thesurrounding provinces rose up against them. Counter-revolutionary armies led by former tsarist officers ob-tained weapons and supplies from the Allies. For threeyears the two sides fought each other. They burnedfarms and confiscated crops, causing a famine thatclaimed 3 million victims, more than had died in Russiain seven years of fighting. By 1921 the Communists haddefeated most of their enemies, for the anti-Bolshevikforces were never united, and the peasants feared that atsarist victory would mean the return of their landlords.The Communists’ victory was also due to the superiordiscipline of their Red Army and the military genius oftheir army commander, Leon Trotsky.

Finland, the Baltic states, and Poland remained in-dependent, but the Red Army reconquered other parts ofthe tsar’s empire one by one. In December 1920 Ukrain-ian Communists declared the independence of a SovietRepublic of Ukraine, which merged with Russia in 1922to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR),or Soviet Union. The provinces of the Russian Empire in

Russian Civil Warand the NewEconomic Policy

the Caucasus and Central Asia had also declared their in-dependence in 1918. Although the Bolsheviks staunchlysupported anticolonialist movements in Africa and Asia,they opposed what they called “feudalism” in the formerRussian colonies. They were also eager to control the oilfields in both regions. In 1920–1921 the Red Army recon-quered the Caucasus and replaced the indigenous lead-ers with Russians. In 1922 the new Soviet republics ofGeorgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan joined the USSR. Inthis way the Bolsheviks rid Russia of the taint of tsaristcolonialism but retained control over lands and peoplesthat had been part of the tsar’s empire.

Years of warfare, revolution, and mismanagementruined the Russian economy. By 1921 it had declined toone-sixth of its prewar level. Factories and railroads hadshut down for lack of fuel, raw materials, and parts.Farmland had been devastated and livestock killed,causing hunger in the cities. Finding himself master of acountry in ruin, Lenin decided to release the economyfrom party and government control. In March 1921 heannounced The New Economic Policy (N.E.P.). It allowedpeasants to own land and sell their crops, private mer-chants to trade, and private workshops to produce goodsand sell them on the free market. Only the biggest busi-nesses, such as banks, railroads, and factories, remainedunder government ownership.

The relaxation of controls had an immediate effect.Production began to climb, and food and other goodsbecame available. In the cities food remained scarcebecause farmers used their crops to feed their livestockrather than sell them. But the N.E.P. reflected nochange in the ultimate goals of the Communist Party. Itmerely provided breathing space, what Lenin called“two steps back to advance one step forward.” TheCommunists had every intention of creating a modernindustrial economy without private property, underparty guidance. This meant investing in heavy industryand electrification and moving farmers to the cities towork in the new industries. It also meant providingfood for the urban workers without spending scarce re-sources to purchase it from the peasants. In otherwords, it meant making the peasants, the great major-ity of the Soviet people, pay for the industrialization ofRussia. This turned them into bitter enemies of theCommunists.

When Lenin died in January 1924 his associatesjockeyed for power. The leading contenders were LeonTrotsky, commander of the Red Army, and JosephStalin, general secretary of the Communist Party. Trot-sky had the support of many “Old Bolsheviks” who hadjoined the party before the Revolution. Having spentyears in exile, he saw the revolution as a spark thatwould ignite a world revolution of the working class.

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Stalin, the only leading Communist who had neverlived abroad, insisted that socialism could survive “inone country.”

Stalin filled the party bureaucracy with individualsloyal to himself. In 1926–1927 he had Trotsky expelled for“deviation from the party line.” In January 1929 he forcedTrotsky to flee the country. Then, as absolute master ofthe party, he prepared to industrialize the Soviet Unionat breakneck speed.

The 1920s were a decade ofapparent progress hiding ir-reconcilable tensions. Conser-vatives in Britain and France

longed for a return to the stability of the prewar era—thehierarchy of social classes, prosperous world trade, andEuropean dominance over the rest of the world. All overthe rest of the world, people’s hopes had been raised bythe rhetoric of the war, then dashed by its outcome. InEurope, Germans felt cheated out of a victory that hadseemed within their grasp, and Italians were disap-pointed that their sacrifices had not been rewarded atVersailles with large territorial gains. In the Middle Eastand Asia, Arabs and Indians longed for independence;the Chinese looked for social justice and a lessening offoreign intrusion; and the Japanese hoped to expandtheir influence in China. In Russia, the Communists

An EphemeralPeace

were eager to consolidate their power and export theirrevolution to the rest of the world.

The decade after the end of the war can be dividedinto two distinct periods: five years of painful recoveryand readjustment (1919–1923), followed by six years ofgrowing peace and prosperity (1924–1929). In 1923 Ger-many suspended reparations payments. In retaliationfor the French occupation of the Ruhr, the German gov-ernment began printing money recklessly, causing themost severe inflation the world had ever seen. SoonGerman money was worth so little that it took a wheel-barrow full of it to buy a loaf of bread. As Germanyteetered on the brink of civil war, radical nationalistscalled for revenge and tried to overthrow the govern-ment. Finally, the German government issued a newcurrency and promised to resume reparations pay-ments, and the French agreed to withdraw their troopsfrom the Ruhr.

Beginning in 1924 the world enjoyed a few years ofcalm and prosperity. After the end of the German crisisof 1923, the western European nations became less con-frontational, and Germany joined the League of Na-tions. The vexed issue of reparations also seemed tovanish, as Germany borrowed money from New Yorkbanks to make its payments to France and Britain, whichused the money to repay their wartime loans from theUnited States. This triangular flow of money, based oncredit, stimulated the rapid recovery of the European

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economies. France began rebuilding its war-torn north-ern zone; Germany recovered from its hyperinflation;and a boom began in the United States that was to lastfor five years.

While their economies flourished, governments grewmore cautious and businesslike. Even the Communists,after Lenin’s death, seemed to give up their attempts tospread revolution abroad. Yet neither Germany nor theSoviet Union accepted its borders with the small nationsthat had arisen between them. In 1922 they signed a se-cret pact allowing the German army to conduct maneu-vers in Russia (in violation of the Versailles treaty) inexchange for German help in building up Russian indus-try and military potential.

The League of Nations proved adept at resolving nu-merous technical issues pertaining to health, labor rela-tions, and postal and telegraph communications. Butthe League could carry out its main function, preservingthe peace, only when the great powers (Britain, France,and Italy) were in agreement. Without U.S. participation,sanctions against states that violated League rules car-ried little weight.

CHINA AND JAPAN:CONTRASTING DESTINIES

China and Japan share a common civilization, andboth were subject to Western pressures, but their

modern histories have been completely opposite. Chinaclung much longer than Japan to a traditional socialstructure and economy, then collapsed into chaos andrevolution. Japan experienced reform from above (seeChapter 26), acquiring industry and a powerful military,which it used to take advantage of China’s weakness.Their different reactions to the pressures of the West putthese two great nations on a collision course.

China’s population—about 400million in 1900—was the largestof any country in the worldand growing fast. But China

had little new land to put into cultivation. In 1900 peas-ant plots averaged between 1 and 4 acres (less than 2hectares) apiece, half as large as they had been two gen-erations earlier. Farming methods had not changed incenturies. Landlords and tax collectors took more thanhalf of the harvest. Most Chinese worked incessantly,survived on a diet of grain and vegetables, and spenttheir lives in fear of floods, bandits, and tax collectors.

Social andEconomic Change

Constant labor was needed to prevent the YellowRiver from bursting its dikes and flooding the low-lyingfields and villages on either side. In times of war andcivil disorder, when flood-control precautions were ne-glected, disasters ensued. Between 1913 and 1938 theriver burst its dikes seventeen times, each time killingthousands of people and making millions homeless.

Japan had few natural resources and very littlearable land on which to grow food for its rising popula-tion. It did not suffer from devastating floods like China,but it was subject to other natural calamities. Typhoonsregularly hit its southern regions. Earthquakes periodi-cally shook the country, which lies on the great ring oftectonic fault lines that surround the Pacific Ocean. TheKanto earthquake of 1923 destroyed all of Yokohama andhalf of Tokyo and killed as many as 200,000 people.

Above the peasantry, Chinese society was dividedinto many groups and strata. Landowners lived off therents of their tenants. Officials, chosen through an elab-orate examination system, enriched themselves fromtaxes and the government’s monopolies on salt, iron,and other products. Wealthy merchants handled China’sgrowing import-export trade in collaboration with for-eign companies. Shanghai, China’s financial and com-mercial center, was famous for its wealthy foreigners andits opium addicts, prostitutes, and gangsters.

Although foreign trade represented only a small partof China’s economy, contact with the outside world hada tremendous impact on Chinese politics. Young menliving in the treaty ports saw no chance for advancementin the old system of examinations and official positions.Some learned foreign ideas in Christian mission schoolsor abroad. The contrast between the squalor in whichmost urban residents lived and the luxury of the foreign-ers’ enclaves in the treaty ports sharpened the resent-ment of educated Chinese.

Japan’s population reached 60 million in 1925 andwas increasing by a million a year. The crash program ofindustrialization begun in 1868 by the Meiji oligarchs(see Chapter 26) accelerated during the First World War,when Japan exported textiles, consumer goods, and mu-nitions. In the war years, its economy grew four times asfast as western Europe’s, eight times faster than China’s.

In the 1880s electrification was still in its infancy, soJapan became competitive very early on. Blessed with arainy climate and many fast-flowing rivers, Japan quicklyexpanded its hydroelectric capacity. By the mid-1930s,89 percent of Japanese households had electric lights,compared with 68 percent of U.S. and 44 percent ofBritish households.

Economic growth aggravated social tensions. Thenarikin (“new rich”) affected Western ways and lifestylesthat clashed with the austerity of earlier times. In the big

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cities mobos (modern boys) and mogas (modern girls)shocked traditionalists with their foreign ways: dancingtogether, wearing short skirts and tight pants, and be-having like Americans. Students who flirted with danger-ous thoughts were called “Marx boys.”

The main beneficiaries of prosperity were the zai-batsu˚, or conglomerates, four of which—Mitsubishi,Sumitomo, Yasuda, and Mitsui—controlled most ofJapan’s industry and commerce. Farmers, who consti-tuted half of the population, remained poor; in despera-tion some sold their daughters to textile mills or intodomestic service, where young women formed the bulkof the labor force. Labor unions were weak and repressedby the police.

Japanese prosperity depended on foreign trade andimperialism in Asia. The country exported silk and lightmanufactures and imported almost all its fuel, raw ma-terials, and machine tools, and even some of its food.Though less at the mercy of the weather than China,Japan was much more vulnerable to swings in the worldeconomy.

In 1900 China’s Empress Dowa-ger Cixi˚, who had seized powerin a palace coup two years ear-lier, encouraged a secret soci-

ety, the Righteous Fists, or Boxers, to rise up and expel allthe foreigners from China. When the Boxers threatenedthe foreign legation in Beijing, an international forcefrom the Western powers and Japan captured the cityand forced China to pay a huge indemnity. Shocked bythese events, many Chinese students became convincedthat China needed a revolution to get rid of the Qing dy-nasty and modernize their country. In Shanghai dissi-dents published works that would have been forbiddenelsewhere in China.

When Cixi died in 1908, the Revolutionary Allianceled by Sun Yat-sen˚ (Sun Zhongshan, 1867–1925) pre-pared to take over. Sun had spent much of his life inJapan, England, and the United States, plotting the over-throw of the Qing dynasty. His ideas were a mixture ofnationalism, socialism, and Confucian philosophy. Hispatriotism, his powerful ambition, and his tenaciousspirit attracted a large following.

The military thwarted Sun’s plans. After China’s de-feat in the war with Japan in 1895, the government hadagreed to equip the army with modern rifles and ma-chine guns. The combination of traditional regional au-tonomy with modern tactics and equipment led to thecreation of local armies beholden to local generalsknown as warlords, rather than to the central govern-ment. When a regional army mutinied in October 1911,Yuan Shikai˚, the most powerful of the regional gener-als, refused to defend the Qing. A revolutionary assemblyat Nanjing elected Sun president of China in December1911, and the last Qing ruler, the boy-emperor Puyi, ab-dicated the throne. But Sun had no military forces at hiscommand. To avoid a clash with the army, he resignedafter a few weeks, and a new national assembly electedYuan president of the new Chinese republic.

Yuan was an able military leader, but he had nopolitical program. When Sun reorganized his followersinto a political party called Guomindang˚ (National

Revolution andWar, 1900–1918

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People’s Party), Yuan quashed every attempt at creating aWestern-style government and harassed Sun’s followers.Victory in the first round of the struggle to create a newChina went to the military.

The Japanese were quick to join the Allied side inWorld War I. They saw the war as an opportunity to ad-vance their interests while the Europeans were occupiedelsewhere. The war created an economic boom, as theJapanese suddenly found their products in greater de-mand. But it also created hardships for workers, who rioted when the cost of rice rose faster than their wages.

The Japanese soon conquered the German coloniesin the northern Pacific and on the coast of China, thenturned their attention to the rest of China. In 1915 Japanpresented China with Twenty-One Demands, whichwould have turned it into a virtual protectorate. Britainand the United States persuaded Japan to soften the de-mands but could not prevent it from keeping the Ger-man coastal enclaves and extracting railroad and miningconcessions at China’s expense. In protest, anti-Japaneseriots and boycotts broke out throughout China. Thus be-gan a bitter struggle between the two countries that wasto last for thirty years.

At the Paris Peace Conference,the great powers acceptedJapan’s seizure of the Germanenclaves in China. To many ed-ucated Chinese, this decisionwas a cruel insult. On May 4,

1919, students demonstrated in front of the ForbiddenCity of Beijing. Despite a government ban, the MayFourth Movement spread to other parts of China. A newgeneration was growing up to challenge the old officials,the regional generals, and the foreigners.

China’s regional generals—the warlords—still sup-ported their armies through plunder and arbitrarytaxation. They frightened off trade and investment inrailroads, industry, and agricultural improvement. Whileneglecting the dikes and canals on which the livelihoodof Chinese farmers depended, they fought one anotherand protected the gangsters who ran the opium trade.During the warlord era only the treaty ports prospered,while the rest of China grew poorer and weaker.

Sun Yat-sen tried to make a comeback in Canton(Guangzhou) in the early 1920s. Though not a Commu-nist, he was impressed with the efficiency of Lenin’s rev-olutionary tactics and let a Soviet adviser reorganize theGuomindang along Leninist lines. He also welcomedmembers of the newly created Chinese CommunistParty into the Guomindang.

Chinese Warlordsand theGuomindang,1919–1929

When Sun died in 1925 the leadership of his partypassed to Jiang Jieshi, known in the West as Chiang Kai-shek˚ (1887–1975). An officer and director of the militaryacademy, Chiang trained several hundred young officerswho remained loyal to him thereafter. In 1927 he deter-mined to crush the regional warlords. As his army movednorth from its base in Canton, he briefly formed an al-liance with the Communists. Once his troops had occu-pied Shanghai, however, he allied himself with localgangsters to crush the labor unions and decimate theCommunists, whom he considered a threat. He then de-feated or co-opted most of the other warlords and estab-lished a dictatorship.

Chiang’s government issued ambitious plans tobuild railroads, develop agriculture and industry, andmodernize China from the top down. However, his fol-lowers were neither competent administrators like theJapanese officials of the Meiji Restoration nor ruthlessmodernizers like the Russian Bolsheviks. Instead, thegovernment attracted thousands of opportunists whosegoals were to “become officials and get rich” by taxingand plundering businesses. In the countryside tax col-lectors and landowners squeezed the peasants everharder, even in times of natural disasters. What littlemoney reached the government’s coffers went to themilitary. For twenty years after the fall of the Qing, Chinaremained mired in poverty, subject to corrupt officialsand the whims of nature.

Having contributed to the Al-lied victory, the Arab peoplesexpected to have a say in theoutcome of the Great War. But

the victorious French and British planned to treat theMiddle East like a territory open to colonial rule. Theresult was a legacy of instability that has persisted tothis day.

At the Paris Peace ConferenceFrance, Britain, Italy, and Japanproposed to divide the formerGerman colonies and the terri-

tories of the Ottoman Empire among themselves, buttheir ambitions clashed with President Wilson’s ideal ofnational self-determination. Eventually, the victors ar-rived at a compromise solution called the mandate sys-tem: colonial rulers would administer the territories butwould be accountable to the League of Nations for “the

The MandateSystem

The New Middle East

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material and moral well-being and the social progress ofthe inhabitants.”

Class C Mandates—those with the smallest popu-lations—were treated as colonies by their conquerors.South Africa replaced Germany in Southwest Africa (nowNamibia). Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Japantook over the German islands in the Pacific. Class B Man-dates, larger than Class C but still underdeveloped, wereto be ruled for the benefit of their inhabitants underLeague of Nations supervision. They were to receive au-tonomy at some unspecified time in the future. Most ofGermany’s African colonies fell into this category.

The Arab-speaking territories of the old OttomanEmpire were Class A Mandates. The League of Nationsdeclared that they had “reached a state of developmentwhere their existence as independent nations can beprovisionally recognized subject to the rendering of ad-ministrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory, untilsuch time as they are able to stand alone.” Arabs inter-preted this ambiguous wording as a promise of inde-pendence. Britain and France sent troops into the region“for the benefit of its inhabitants.” Palestine (now Israel),Transjordan (now Jordan), and Iraq (formerly Mesopo-tamia) became British mandates; France claimed Syriaand Lebanon (see Map 28.4). (See Diversity and Domi-nance: The Middle East After World War I.)

At the end of the war, as theOttoman Empire teetered onthe brink of collapse, France,Britain, and Italy saw an op-

portunity to expand their empires, and Greece eyedthose parts of Anatolia inhabited by Greeks. In 1919French, British, Italian, and Greek forces occupied Con-stantinople and parts of Anatolia. By the Treaty of Sèvres(1920) the Allies made the sultan give up most of hislands.

In 1919 Mustafa Kemal, a hero of the Gallipoli cam-paign, had formed a nationalist government in centralAnatolia with the backing of fellow army officers. In1922, after a short but fierce war against invading Greeks,his armies reconquered Anatolia and the area aroundConstantinople. The victorious Turks forced hundreds ofthousands of Greeks from their ancestral homes in Ana-tolia. In response the Greek government expelled allMuslims from Greece. The ethnic diversity that had pre-vailed in the region for centuries ended.

As a war hero and proclaimed savior of his country,Kemal was able to impose wrenching changes on hispeople faster than any other reformer would have dared.An outspoken modernizer, he was eager to bring Turkey

The Rise ofModern Turkey

closer to Europe as quickly as possible. He abolished thesultanate, declared Turkey a secular republic, and intro-duced European laws. In a radical break with Islamictradition, he suppressed Muslim courts, schools, and re-ligious orders and replaced the Arabic alphabet with theLatin alphabet.

Kemal attempted to westernize the traditional Turk-ish family. Women received civil equality, including theright to vote and to be elected to the national assembly.Kemal forbade polygamy and instituted civil marriageand divorce. He even changed people’s clothing, stronglydiscouraging women from veiling their faces, and re-placed the fez, until then the traditional Turkish men’shat, with the European brimmed hat. He orderedeveryone to take a family name, choosing the nameAtatürk (“father of the Turks”) for himself. His reformsspread quickly in the cities; but in rural areas, where Is-lamic traditions remained strong, people resisted themfor a long time.

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During the First World War, Entente forces invaded theArab provinces of the Ottoman Empire and occupied

Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Syria. This raised the questionof what to do with these territories after the war. Wouldthey be returned to the Ottoman Empire? Would they simplybe added to the colonial empires of Britain and France? Orwould they become independent Arab states?

The following documents illustrate the diversity of opin-ions among various groups planning the postwar settle-ment: Great Britain concerned with defeating Germany andmaintaining its empire; the United States, basing its policieson lofty principles; and Arab delegates from the Middle East,seeking self-determination.

In the early twentieth century, in response to the rise ofanti-Semitism in Europe, a movement called Zionism hadarisen among European Jews. Zionists, led by TheodoreHerzl, hoped for a return to Israel, the ancestral homeland ofthe Jewish people. For two thousand years this land hadbeen a province of various empires—the Roman, Byzantine,Arab, and Ottoman—and was inhabited by Arabic-speakingpeople who practiced the Islamic religion.

During the war the British government eagerly soughtthe support of the American Jewish community to balancethe hostility of Irish-Americans and German-Americanstoward the British war effort. It was therefore receptive tothe idea of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. TheBritish government therefore found itself torn between twocontradictory impulses, both motivated by the short-termneed to win the war, but not without thought of the moredistant future. The result was a policy statement, sent byForeign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild,a prominent supporter of the Zionist movement in England.This statement, called the “Balfour Declaration,” has hauntedthe Middle East ever since.

THE BALFOUR DECLARATION OF 1917

Foreign OfficeNovember 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild:I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of

His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of

sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which have beensubmitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:

His Majesty’s Government view with favor the estab-lishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewishpeople, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate theachievement of this object, it being clearly understoodthat nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civiland religious rights of existing non-Jewish communitiesin Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed byJews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declarationto the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours,Arthur James Balfour

On January 8, 1918, the American president Woodrow Wil-son issued his famous Fourteen Points proposal to end

the war. Much of his speech was devoted to European affairsor to international relations in general, but two of his four-teen points were understood as referring to the Arab world.

WOODROW WILSON’S FOURTEEN POINTS

We entered this war because violations of right had occurredwhich touches us to the quick and made the life of our ownpeople impossible unless they were corrected and the worldsecured once for all against their recurrence. What we de-mand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves.It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and par-ticularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nationwhich, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine itsown institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by theother peoples of the world as against force and selfish ag-gression. All the peoples of the world are in effect partners inthis interest, and for our own part we see very clearly thatunless justice be done to others it will not be done to us. Theprogramme of the world’s peace, therefore, is our pro-gramme; and that programme, the only possible programme,as we see it, is this:

V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjust-ment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict obser-

D I V E R S I T Y A N D D O M I N A N C E

THE MIDDLE EAST AFTER WORLD WAR I

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vance of the principle that in determining all suchquestions of sovereignty the interests of the popula-tions concerned must have equal weight with the eq-uitable claims of the government whose title is to bedetermined.

XII. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empireshould be assured a secure sovereignty, but the othernationalities which are now under Turkish rule shouldbe assured an undoubted security of life and an ab-solutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous de-velopment. . . .

When the war ended, the victorious Allies assembled inParis to determine, among other things, the fate of the

former Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This was amatter of grave concern to both Zionists and leaders of theArab populations. Arab leaders, in particular, had reason todoubt the intentions of the great powers, especially Britainand France. When the Allies decided to create mandates inthe Arab territories on the grounds that the Arab peopleswere not ready for independence, Arab leaders expressedtheir misgivings, as the following statement shows:

MEMORANDUM OF THE GENERAL SYRIAN CONGRESS, JULY 2, 1919

We the undersigned members of the General Syrian Con-gress, meeting in Damascus on Wednesday, July 2nd, 1919,made up of representatives from the three Zones, viz., TheSouthern, Eastern, and Western, provided with credentialsand authorizations by the inhabitants of our various dis-tricts, Moslems, Christians, and Jews, have agreed upon thefollowing statement of the desires of the people of thecountry who have elected us. . . .

1. We ask absolutely complete political independence forSyria. . . .

2. We ask that the government of this Syrian countryshould be a democratic civil constitutional Monarchyon broad decentralization principles, safeguarding therights of minorities, and that the King be the EmirFeisal, who carried on a glorious struggle in the causeof our liberation and merited our full confidence andentire reliance.

3. Considering the fact that the Arabs inhabiting the Syr-ian area are not naturally less gifted than other moreadvanced races and that they are by no means lessdeveloped than the Bulgarians, Serbians, Greeks, andRoumanians at the beginning of their independence,we protest against Article 22 of the Covenant of theLeague of Nations, placing us among the nations intheir middle stage of development which stand in needof a mandatory power.

4. In the event of the rejection of the Peace Conferenceof this just protest for certain considerations that we

may not understand, we, relying on the declarations ofPresident Wilson that his object in waging war was toput an end to the ambition of conquest and coloniza-tion, we can only regard the mandate mentioned inthe Covenant of the League of Nations as equivalentto the rendering of economical and technical assis-tance that does not prejudice our complete indepen-dence. And desiring that our country should not fall aprey to colonization and believing that the AmericanNation is furthest from any thought of colonizationand has no political ambition in our country, we willseek the technical and economic assistance from theUnited States of America, provided that such assis-tance does not exceed 20 years.

5. In the event of America not finding herself in a posi-tion to accept our desire for assistance, we will seekthis assistance from Great Britain, also provided thatsuch does not prejudice our complete independenceand unity of our country and that the duration of suchassistance does not exceed that mentioned in the pre-vious article.

6. We do not acknowledge any right claimed by the FrenchGovernment in any part whatever of our Syrian countryand refuse that she should assist us or have a hand inour country under any circumstances and in any place.

7. We opposed the pretensions of the Zionists to create aJewish commonwealth in the southern part of Syria,known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration toany part of our country; for we do not acknowledgetheir title but consider them a grave peril to our peoplefrom the national, economical, and political points ofview. Our Jewish compatriots shall enjoy our commonrights and assume our common responsibilities.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

1. Was there a contradiction between Balfour’s proposalto establish “a national home for the Jewish people”and the promise “that nothing shall be done which mayprejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”? If so, why did hemake two contradictory promises?

2. How would Woodrow Wilson’s statements about “theinterests of the populations concerned” and “an ab-solutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous devel-opment” apply to Palestine?

3. Why did the delegates to the Syrian General Congressobject to the plan to create mandates in the former Ot-toman provinces? What alternatives did they offer?

4. Why did the delegates object to the creation of a Jew-ish commonwealth?

Source: The Balfour Declaration, The Times (London), November 9, 1917. Memorandumof the General Syrian Congress, Foreign Relations of the United States: Paris PeaceConference, vol. 12 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1919), 780–781.

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Among the Arab people, thethinly disguised colonialismof the mandate system set offprotests and rebellions not onlyin the mandated territories, but

even as far away as Morocco. Arabs viewed the Europeanpresence not as “liberation” from Ottoman “oppression,”but as foreign occupation.

After World War I Middle Eastern society underwentdramatic changes. Nomads disappeared from the desertsas trucks replaced camel caravans. The rural populationgrew fast, and many landless peasants migrated to theswelling cities. The population of the region is estimatedto have increased by 50 percent between 1914 and 1939,while that of large cities such as Constantinople, Bagh-dad, and Cairo doubled.

The urban and mercantile middle class, encouragedby the transformation of Turkey, adopted Western ideas,customs, and styles of housing and clothing. Some fam-ilies sent their sons to European secular or missionschools, then to Western colleges in Cairo and Beirut oruniversities abroad, to prepare for jobs in governmentand business. Among the educated elite were a fewwomen who became schoolteachers or nurses. Therewere great variations, ranging from Lebanon, with itsstrong French influence, to Arabia and Iran, which re-tained their cultural traditions.

The region in closest contact with Europe was theMaghrib—Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco—which theFrench army considered its private domain. Alongsidethe old native quarters, the French built modern neigh-borhoods inhabited mainly by Europeans (see Environ-ment and Technology: Cities Old and New). France hadoccupied Algeria since 1830 and had encouraged Euro-pean immigration. The settlers owned the best lands andmonopolized government jobs and businesses, whileArabs and Berbers remained poor and suffered intensediscrimination. Nationalism was only beginning to ap-pear before World War II, and the settlers quickly blockedattempts at reform.

The British attempted to control the Middle Eastwith a mixture of bribery and intimidation. They helped

Arab Lands andthe Question of Palestine

Faisal, leader of the Arab Revolt, become king of Syria.When the French ousted him, the British made him kingof Iraq. They used bombers to quell rural insurrections inIraq. In 1931 they reached an agreement with KingFaisal’s government: official independence for Iraq inexchange for the right to keep two air bases, a military al-liance, and an assured flow of petroleum. France, mean-while, sent thousands of troops to Syria and Lebanon tocrush nationalist uprisings.

In Egypt, as in Iraq, the British substituted a phonyindependence for official colonialism. They declaredEgypt independent in 1922 but reserved the right tostation troops along the Suez Canal to secure their linkwith India in the event of war. Most galling to the Wafd(Nationalist) Party was the British attempt to removeEgyptian troops from Sudan, a land many Egyptiansconsidered a colony of Egypt. Britain was successful inkeeping Egypt in limbo—neither independent nor acolony—thanks to an alliance with King Farouk and con-servative Egyptian politicians who feared both secularand religious radicalism.

Before the war, a Jewish minority lived in Palestine,as in other Arab countries. As soon as Palestine became aBritish mandate in 1920, Jewish immigrants began arriv-ing from Europe, encouraged by the Balfour Declarationof 1917. Most settled in the cities, but some purchasedland to establish kibbutzim, communal farms. Theirgoals were to become self-sufficient and to reestablishtheir ties to the land of their ancestors. The purchases ofland by Jewish agencies angered the indigenous Pales-tinians, especially tenant farmers who had been evictedto make room for settlers. In 1920–1921 riots erupted be-tween Jews and Arabs. When far more Jewish immigrantsarrived than they had anticipated, the British tried tolimit immigration, thereby alienating the Jews withoutmollifying the Arabs. Increasingly, Jews arrived withoutpapers, smuggled in by militant Zionist organizations. Inthe 1930s the country was torn by strikes and guerrillawarfare that the British could not control. In the process,Britain earned the hatred of both sides and of much ofthe Arab world as well.

SOCIETY, CULTURE, AND

TECHNOLOGY IN THE

INDUSTRIALIZED WORLD

With the signing of the peace treaties, the coun-tries that had fought for four years turned their

efforts toward building a new future. The war had left adeep imprint on European society and culture. Advances

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Cities do not just grow larger; they change, sometimesradically, in response to culture and technology. The im-

pact of cultural dominance and technological innovations onurban design is evident in these photographs of Cairo.

The European colonial presence was felt more strongly incities than in the countryside. Cairo, the largest city in theArab world before the British conquest, grew much larger af-ter 1882. However, the construction of modern quarters for

Europeans and wealthy Egyptians had little impact on theolder quarters where most Cairenes lived. In the picture ofthe old quarter of Cairo in 1900 with its narrow streets andopen stalls, men wear the burnoose and women cover theirfaces with a veil. The later picture, taken in 1904, showsShepheard’s hotel, one of the most luxurious hotels in theworld, built on a broad avenue in the city’s modern quarter.

The picture at left reflects the traditional architecture ofhot desert countries: narrow streets, thick whitewashedwalls, small windows, and heavy doors, all designed to keepout the heat of the day and protect privacy. The picture be-low shows the ideas Europeans brought with them abouthow a city should look. The wide streets and high airy build-ings with windows and balconies mimic the urban design oflate-nineteenth-century Paris, London, and Rome.

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in science offered astonishing new insights into the mys-teries of nature and the universe. New technologies,many of them pioneered in the United States, promisedto change the daily lives of millions of people.

After the war, class distinctionsbegan to fade. Many Europeanaristocrats had died on the bat-

tlefields, and with them went their class’s long domina-tion of the army, the diplomatic corps, and other elitesectors of society. The United States and Canada hadnever had as rigidly defined a class structure as Euro-pean societies or as elaborate a set of traditions andmanners. During the war, displays of wealth and privi-lege seemed unpatriotic. On both sides of the Atlantic,engineers, businessmen, lawyers, and other profession-als rose to prominence, increasing the relative impor-tance of the middle class.

The activities of governments had expanded duringthe war and continued to grow. Governments providedhousing, highways, schools, public health facilities,broadcasting, and other services. This growth of govern-ment influence created a need for thousands morebureaucrats. Department stores, banks, insurance com-panies, and other businesses also increased the white-collar work force.

In contrast with the middle class, the working classdid not expand. The introduction of new machines andnew ways of organizing work, such as the automobile as-sembly line that Henry Ford devised, increased workers’productivity so that greater outputs could be achievedwithout a larger labor force.

Women’s lives changed more rapidly in the 1920sthan in any previous decade. Although the end of the warmarked a retreat from wartime job opportunities, somewomen remained in the work force as wage earners andas salaried professionals. The young and wealthy en-joyed more personal freedoms than their mothers hadbefore the war; they drove cars, played sports, traveledalone, and smoked in public. For others the upheavals ofwar brought more suffering than liberation. Millions ofwomen had lost their fathers, brothers, sons, husbands,and fiancés in the war or in the great influenza epidemic.After the war the shortage of young men caused manysingle women to lead lives of loneliness and destitution.

In Europe and North America advocates of women’srights had been demanding the vote for women sincethe 1890s. New Zealand was the only nation to grantwomen the vote before the twentieth century. Women inNorway were the first to obtain it in Europe, in 1915. Rus-sian women followed in 1917, and Canadians and Ger-mans in 1918. Britain gave women over age thirty the

Class and Gender

vote in 1918 and later extended it to younger women.The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitutiongranted suffrage to American women in 1920. Women inTurkey began voting in 1934. Most other countries didnot allow women to vote until after 1945.

In dictatorships voting rights for women made nodifference, and in democratic countries women tendedto vote like their male relatives. In the British elections of1918—the first to include women—they overwhelminglyvoted for the Conservative Party. Everywhere, their influ-ence on politics was less radical than feminists hadhoped and conservatives had feared. Even when it didnot alter politics and government, however, the right tovote was a potent symbol.

Women were active in many other areas besides thesuffrage movement. On both sides of the Atlantic womenparticipated in social reform movements to prevent mis-treatment of women and children and of industrial work-ers. In the United States such reforms were championedby Progressives such as Jane Addams (1860–1935), whofounded a settlement house in a poor neighborhood andreceived the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. In Europe reform-ers were generally aligned with Socialist or Labour Parties.

Since 1874 the Women’s Christian Temperance Unionhad campaigned against alcohol and taverns. In the earlytwentieth century the American Carrie Nation (1846–1911) became famous for destroying saloons and for lec-tures in the United States and Europe against the evilsof liquor. As a result of this campaign the EighteenthAmendment imposed prohibition in the United Statesfrom 1919 until it was revoked by the Twenty-FirstAmendment fourteen years later.

Among the most controversial, and eventually mosteffective of the reformers, were those who advocatedcontraception, such as the American Margaret Sanger(1883–1966). Her campaign brought her into conflictwith the authorities, who equated birth control withpornography. Finally, in 1923 she was able to found abirth control clinic in New York. In France, however, thegovernment prohibited contraception and abortion in1920 in an effort to increase the birthrate and make upfor the loss of so many young men in the war. Only theRussian communists allowed abortion, for ideologicalreasons (see Diversity and Dominance: Women, FamilyValues, and the Russian Revolution in Chapter 29).

For two hundred years scien-tists following in Isaac New-ton’s footsteps had applied thesame laws and equations to

astronomical observations and to laboratory experi-ments. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, a

Revolution in the Sciences

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revolution in physics undermined all the old certaintiesabout nature. Physicists discovered that atoms, thebuilding blocks of matter, are not indivisible, but consistof far smaller subatomic particles. In 1900 the Germanphysicist Max Planck (1858–1947) found that atomsemit or absorb energy only in discrete amounts, calledquanta, instead of continuously, as assumed in New-tonian physics. These findings seemed strange enough,but what really undermined Newtonian physics was thegeneral theory of relativity developed by Albert Einstein(1879–1955), another German physicist. In 1916 Ein-stein announced that not only is matter made of insub-stantial particles, but that time, space, and mass are notfixed but are relative to one another. Other physicistssaid that light is made up of either waves or particles,depending on the observer, and that an experimentcould determine either the speed or the position of aparticle of light, but never both.

To nonscientists it seemed as though theories ex-pressed in arcane mathematical formulas were replacingtruth and common sense. Far from being mere specula-tion, however, the new physics promised to unlock thesecrets of matter and provide humans with plentiful—and potentially dangerous—sources of energy.

The new social sciences were even more unsettlingthan the new physics, for they challenged Victorianmorality, middle-class values, and notions of Westernsuperiority. Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), a Viennesephysician, developed the technique of psychoanalysisto probe the minds of his patients. He found not onlyrationality but also hidden layers of emotion and desirerepressed by social restraints. “The primitive, savageand evil impulses have not vanished from any individ-ual, but continue their existence, although in a re-pressed state,” he warned. Meanwhile, sociologists andanthropologists had begun the empirical study of soci-eties, both Western and non-Western. Before the warthe French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)had come to the then-shocking conclusion that “thereare no religions that are false. All are true in their ownfashion.”

If the words primitive and savage applied to Euro-peans as well as to other peoples, and if religions were allequally “true,” then what remained of the superiority ofWestern civilization? Cultural relativism, as the new ap-proach to human societies was called, was as unnervingas relativity in physics.

Although these ideas had been expressed before1914, wartime experiences called into question theWest’s faith in reason and progress. Some people ac-cepted the new ideas with enthusiasm. Others con-demned and rejected them, clinging to the sense of

order and faith in progress that had energized Europeanand American culture before the war.

Some Europeans and Ameri-cans viewed the sciences withmixed feelings, but the newtechnologies aroused almostuniversal excitement. In North

America even working-class people could afford some ofthe new products of scientific research, inventors’ inge-nuity, and industrial production. Mass consumptionlagged in Europe, but science and technology were justas advanced, and public fascination with the latest in-ventions—the cult of the modern—was just as strong.

Of all the innovations of the time, none attractedpublic interest as much as airplanes. In 1903 two youngAmerican mechanics, Wilbur and Orville Wright, builtthe first aircraft that was heavier than air and could bemaneuvered in flight. From that moment on, whereverthey appeared, airplanes fascinated people. During thewar the exploits of air aces relieved the tedium of newsfrom the front. In the 1920s aviation became a sport anda form of entertainment, and flying daredevils achievedextraordinary fame by pushing their planes to the verylimit—and often beyond. Among the most celebrated pi-lots were three Americans. Amelia Earhart was the firstwoman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, and her exampleencouraged other women to fly. Richard Byrd flew overthe North Pole in 1926. The most admired of all wasCharles Lindbergh, the first person to fly alone across theAtlantic in 1927. The heroic age of flight lasted until thelate 1930s, when aviation became a means of transporta-tion, a business, and a male preserve.

Electricity, produced in industrial quantities sincethe 1890s (see Chapter 26), began to transform home life.The first home use of electricity was for lighting, thanksto the economical and long-lasting tungsten bulb. Then,having persuaded people to wire their homes, electricalutilities joined manufacturers in advertising electricirons, fans, washing machines, hot plates, and other ap-pliances.

Radio—or wireless telegraphy, as it was called—hadserved ships and the military during the war as a meansof point-to-point telecommunication. After the war, am-ateurs used surplus radio equipment to talk to one an-other. The first commercial station began broadcastingin Pittsburgh in 1920. By the end of 1923 six hundred sta-tions were broadcasting news, sports, soap operas, andadvertising to homes throughout North America. By1930, 12 million families owned radio receivers. In Eu-rope radio spread more slowly because governments re-

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served the airwaves for cultural and official programsand taxed radio owners to pay for the service.

Another medium that spread explosively in the1920s was film. Motion pictures had begun in France in1895 and flourished there and elsewhere in Europe,where the dominant concern was to reproduce stageplays. In the United States filmmaking started at almostthe same time, but American filmmakers considered ittheir business to entertain audiences rather than pre-serve outstanding theatrical performances. In compet-ing for audiences they looked to cinematic innovation,broad humor, and exciting spectacles, in the process de-veloping styles of filmmaking that became immenselypopular.

Diversity was a hallmark of the early film industry.After World War I filmmaking took root and flourished inJapan, India, Turkey, Egypt, and a suburb of Los Angeles,California, called Hollywood. American and Europeanmovie studios were successful in exporting films, sincesilent movies presented no language problems. In 1929,out of an estimated 2,100 films produced worldwide, 510were made in the United States and 750 in Japan. But bythen the United States had introduced the first “talking”motion picture, The Jazz Singer (1927), which changedall the rules.

The number of Americans who went to see their fa-vorite stars in thrilling adventures and heart-breakingromances rose from 40 million in 1922 to 100 million in1930, at a time when the population of the country wasabout 120 million. Europeans had the technology andthe art but neither the wealth nor the huge market of theUnited States. Hollywood studios began the diffusion ofAmerican culture that has continued to this day.

Health and hygiene were also part of the cult ofmodernity. Advances in medicine—some learned in thewar—saved many lives. Wounds were regularly disinfec-ted, and x-ray machines helped diagnose fractures. Sincethe late nineteenth century scientists had known thatdisease-causing bacteria could be transmitted throughcontaminated water, spoiled food, or fecal matter. Afterthe war cities built costly water supply and sewage treat-ment systems. By the 1920s indoor plumbing and flushtoilets were becoming common even in working-classneighborhoods.

Interest in cleanliness altered private life. Doctorsand home economists bombarded women with warn-ings and advice on how to banish germs. Soap and appli-ance manufacturers filled women’s magazines withadvertisements for products to help housewives keeptheir family’s homes and clothing spotless and theirmeals fresh and wholesome. The decline in infant mor-tality and improvements in general health and life ex-

pectancy in this period owe as much to the cult of clean-liness as to advances in medicine.

Two new technologies—theskyscraper and the automo-bile—transformed the urbanenvironment even more radi-

cally than the railroad had done in the nineteenth cen-tury. At the end of the nineteenth century architects hadbegun to design ever-higher buildings using load-bearingsteel frames and passenger elevators. Major corporationsin Chicago and New York competed to build the mostdaring buildings in the world, such as New York’s fifty-five-story Woolworth Building (1912) and Chicago’sthirty-four-story Tribune Tower (1923). A building boomin the late 1920s produced dozens of skyscrapers, culmi-nating with the eighty-six-story, 1,239-foot (377-meter)Empire State Building in New York, completed in 1932.

European cities restricted the height of buildingsto protect their architectural heritage; Paris forbadebuildings over 56 feet (17 meters) high. In innovative de-signs, however, European architects led the way. In the1920s the Swiss architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret(1887–1965), known as Le Corbusier˚, outlined a new ap-proach to architecture that featured simplicity of form,absence of surface ornamentation, easy manufacture,and inexpensive materials. Other architects—includingthe Finn Eero Saarinen, the Germans Ludwig Mies vander Rohe˚ and Walter Gropius, and the American FrankLloyd Wright—also contributed their own designs to cre-ate what became known as the International Style.

While central business districts were reaching forthe sky, outlying areas were spreading far into the coun-tryside, thanks to the automobile. The assembly linepioneered by Henry Ford mass-produced vehicles inever-greater volume and at falling prices. By 1929 theUnited States had one car for every five people, five-sixths of the world’s automobiles. Far from being blamedfor their exhaust emissions, automobiles were praised asthe solution to urban pollution. As cars replaced cartsand carriages, horses disappeared from city streets, asdid tons of manure.

The most important environmental effect of auto-mobiles was suburban sprawl. Middle-class familiescould now live in single-family homes too spread apartto be served by public transportation. By the late 1920spaved roads rivaled rail networks both in length and inthe surface they occupied. As middle- and working-class

Technology andthe Environment

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families bought cars, cities acquired rings of automobilesuburbs. Los Angeles, the first true automobile city, con-sisted of suburbs spread over hundreds of square milesand linked together by broad avenues. In sections of thecity where streetcar lines went out of business, the auto-mobile, at first a plaything for the wealthy, became a ne-cessity for commuters. Many Americans saw Los Angelesas the portent of a glorious future in which everyonewould have a car; only a few foresaw the congestion andpollution that would ensue.

Technological advances also transformed rural envi-ronments. Automobile owners quickly developed an in-terest in “motoring”—driving their vehicles out into thecountry on weekends or on holiday trips. Farmers beganbuying cars and light trucks, using them to transportproduce as well as passengers. Governments obliged bybuilding new roads and paving old ones to make auto-mobile travel smoother and safer.

Until the 1920s horses remained the predominantsource of energy for pulling plows and reapers and pow-ering threshing machines on American farms. Only thewealthiest farmers could afford the slow and costly steamtractors. In 1915 Ford introduced a gasoline-poweredtractor, and by the mid-1920s these versatile machinesbegan replacing horses. Larger farms profited most fromthis innovation, while small farmers sold their land andmoved to the cities. Tractors and other expensive equip-ment hastened the transformation of agriculture fromfamily enterprises to the large agribusinesses of today.

In India, Australia, and the western United States,where there was little virgin rain-watered land left to cul-tivate, engineers built dams and canals to irrigate drylands. Dams offered the added advantage of producingelectricity, for which there was a booming demand. Theimmediate benefits of irrigation—land, food, and elec-tricity—far outweighed such distant consequences assalt deposits on irrigated lands and harm to wildlife.

CONCLUSION

In the late 1920s it seemed as though the victors in theGreat War might reestablish the prewar prosperity and

European dominance of the globe. But the spirit of the1920s was not real peace; instead it was the eye of a hur-ricane.

The Great War caused a major realignment amongthe nations of the world. France and Britain, the two lead-ing colonial powers, emerged economically weakeneddespite their victory. The war brought defeat and humil-iation to Germany but did not reduce its military or in-dustrial potential. It destroyed the old regime and thearistocracy of Russia, leading to civil war and revolutionfrom which the victorious powers sought to isolate them-selves. Two other old empires—the Austro-Hungarianand the Ottoman—were divided into many smaller andweaker nations. For a while, the Middle East seemed ripe

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for a new wave of imperialism. But there and throughoutAsia the war unleashed revolutionary nationalist move-ments that challenged European influence.

Only two countries benefited from the war. Japantook advantage of the European conflict to develop itsindustries and press its demands on a China weakenedby domestic turmoil and social unrest. The United Statesemerged as the most prosperous and potentially mostpowerful nation, restrained only by the isolationist senti-ments of many Americans.

Modern technology and industrial organization hadlong been praised in the name of “progress” for theirability to reduce toil and disease and improve livingstandards. The war showed that they possessed anequally awesome destructive potential. As we shall see inthe next chapter, most survivors wanted no repeat ofsuch a nightmare. But a small minority worshiped vio-lence and saw the new weaponry as a means to domi-nate those who feared conflict and death.

■ Key TermsWestern Front

Faisal

Theodore Herzl

Balfour Declaration

Bolsheviks

Vladimir Lenin

Woodrow Wilson

League of Nations

Treaty of Versailles

New Economic Policy

■ Suggested ReadingBernadotte Schmitt and Harold C. Bedeler, The World in theCrucible, 1914–1918 (1984), and John Keegan, The First WorldWar (1999), are two engaging overviews of World War I. ImanuelGeiss, July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War (1967), ar-gues that Germany caused the conflict. Barbara Tuchman’s TheGuns of August (1962) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August1914 (1972) recount the first month of the war in detail. Kee-gan’s The Face of Battle (1976) vividly describes the Battle of theSomme from the soldiers’ perspective. On the technology ofwarfare see William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technol-ogy, Armed Force, and Society (1982), and John Ellis, The SocialHistory of the Machine Gun (1975). The role of women and thehome front is the subject of essays in Margaret Higonnet et al.,eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (1987),and sections of Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to WorkingMother (1985). The definitive work on the flu epidemic is AlfredW. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918(1989). Two famous novels about the war are Erich Maria Re-marque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928) and Robert

Sun Yat-sen

Yuan Shikai

Guomindang

Chiang Kai-shek

mandate system

Margaret Sanger

Max Planck

Albert Einstein

Wilbur and Orville Wright

Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929). The war in English litera-ture is the subject of Paul Fussell, The Great War and ModernMemory (1975).

For the background to the Russian Revolution read Theodorevon Laue’s Why Lenin? Why Stalin? 2d ed. (1971); but see alsoRichard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), and OrlandoFiges, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924(1996). The classic eyewitness account of the Revolution is JohnReed’s Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). On gender issuessee Wendy Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: SovietFamily Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (1993). The best-known novel about the Revolution and civil war is Boris Paster-nak’s Doctor Zhivago (1958).

John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of thePeace (1920) is a classic critique of the Paris Peace Conference.Arno Mayer’s Political Origins of the New Diplomacy, 1917–1918(1959) analyzes the tensions and failures of great-power poli-tics. The 1920s are discussed in Raymond Sontag’s A BrokenWorld, 1919–1939 (1971).

The best recent book on Japan in the twentieth century is Dai-kichi Irokawa’s The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan(1995). See also Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan(1982), and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Technological Transfor-mation of Japan (1994). In the large and fast-growing literatureon twentieth-century China, two general introductions are es-pecially useful: John K. Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution,1800–1985 (1986), and Jonathan Spence, The Search for Mod-ern China (1990). On the warlord and Guomindang periods seeLucien Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915–1949(1971).

On the war and its aftermath in the Middle East see DavidFromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), and M. E. Yapp, TheNear East Since the First World War (1991). Bernard Lewis, TheEmergence of Modern Turkey (1968), is a good introduction. OnAfrica in this period see A. Adu Boahen, ed., Africa Under Colo-nial Domination, 1880–1935, vol. 7 of the UNESCO General His-tory of Africa (1985), and A. D. Roberts, ed., Cambridge Historyof Africa, vol. 7, 1905–1940 (1986).

The cultural transformation of Europe is captured in H. StuartHughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of Euro-pean Social Thought, 1890–1930 (1958). The towering intellec-tuals of that era are the subject of Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for OurTime (1988), and Abraham Pais, Subtle Is the Lord: The Scienceand Life of Albert Einstein (1982). Three books capture the en-thusiastic popular response to technological innovations:David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a NewTechnology (1990); Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: GermanAviation and the Popular Imagination (1992); and the sweepingoverview by Thomas Hughes, American Genesis: A Century ofInvention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (1989). Onthe role of women is this period, see Ellen DuBois, Woman Suf-frage and Women’s Rights (1998); Sheila Rowbotham, A Centuryof Women: The History of Women in Britain and the United States(1997); and Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stu-ard, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (1987).

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DOCUMENT 5Cairo—Modern and Traditional (Environment andTechnology, p. 758)

In Document 3, how does the particular purposeof the three authors affect the reliability of theirstatements? What additional types of documentswould help you understand the success and failureof self-determination in the Middle East afterWorld War I?

Document-Based QuestionSelf-Determination in theMiddle East after World War IUsing the following documents, assess the successand failure of self-determination in the Middle Eastafter World War I.

DOCUMENT 1Two quotes from the League of Nations (pp. 752–753)

DOCUMENT 2Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (photo, p. 753)

DOCUMENT 3The Middle East After World War I (Diversity andDominance, pp. 754–755)

DOCUMENT 4Map 28.4 Territorial Changes in the Middle East AfterWorld War I (p. 757)

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