Chapter 2

The World in 1900

In This Chapter

arrow Going country spotting: Nations old and new

arrow Living the life: The upper, middle and lower classes

arrow Dreaming the dream: Radical new ideas

arrow Making the world a better place: New ideas that didn’t bring the house down

People often get excited as one century ends and another begins. You may enjoy a good knees-up on New Year’s Eve yourself. That excitement, however, was more marked than ever in 1900 as the 19th century drew to its close. The old century had seen so many changes in technology and in the way people lived that the world of 1900 would’ve been almost unrecognisable to anyone who’d been around a century earlier. The changes were most obvious in the technologically developed western countries of Europe, North America and Australasia, but other parts of the world had changed too, thanks to the westerners who went over and changed them – whether they liked it or not.

By 1900 railways and steamships could connect even the most distant places more quickly and easily than ever before; the electric telegraph could take messages over thousands of miles in a matter of seconds; engineers were developing ever-more efficient automobiles and would soon be sending aircraft into the skies. Medical knowledge was advancing rapidly: antiseptics, X-rays and vaccinations against a whole range of diseases were all well established by 1900. Surely this new century could only get even better? That was certainly how it seemed to many people.

Looking back from today, however, it can seem as if the people of the 1900s were still living in the Victorian age. In many ways they were: societies and cultures don’t change overnight just because a new date arrives on the calendar. But it wasn’t a static, unchanging time. Theirs was a changing, challenging, boundary-stretching, rule-breaking rollercoaster of a world, and a whole range of people, including politicians, artists, scientists, writers, and sportsmen and -women, were working to make the world a much better place than anyone had lived in – ever. But things were about to take a turn for the worse. In a big way.

When the First World War began, it ended abruptly the 19th-century world and gave birth to the unsettlingly Brave New World of the 20th century. So in this chapter, I look at the world that both spawned the war and was destroyed by it: the world of the new century, the world of 1900.

The State We’re In: Taking a Tour of the World in 1900

In the world of 1900, massive contrasts existed between the developed world of the industrial countries and their under-developed overseas colonies. Tensions between countries are nothing new in history, and they certainly existed at the start of the 20th century. Here, I look at what exactly these tensions were and how they threatened the world of 1900.

Everybody wants to rule the world – well, the Europeans do, anyway

remember.eps The world before 1914 was so dominated by Europeans that you can forget that the rest of the world existed. That was how the Europeans themselves tended to see the world. The major European powers ruled colonies in every continent; thanks to their presence, European languages were spoken around the globe, European dress was becoming the normal clothing for serious people to wear while other forms of dress were becoming thought of as ‘traditional’, ‘exotic’ or ‘native dress’. European domination meant that the whole world needed to keep an eye on how these over-mighty European states got on with each other. The outlook was very worrying.

The disunited states of Europe

In the 19th century the political landscape of Europe had changed thanks to some important new ideas. Two of the most important of these ideas were

  • Nationalism: This idea said that the ethnic identity and culture of a people (that is, a nation) mattered and that each nation ought to have its own state. Some nations, such as the French or the Spanish, had had their own states for a long time; nationalism led to others, like the Italians and Germans, creating their own states and changing borders within Europe during the 19th century – though only after a lot of fighting. But some peoples, such as the Serbs of south-eastern Europe, the Irish, the Jews and – farther afield – some of the peoples of India, had a sense of national identity but no nation state. Yet. (You can read more about nationalism in Chapter 3.)
  • Socialism: This idea was based on the writings of Karl Marx and said that people’s main identity should not be their nationality but their social class. Marx held that working people in different countries had more in common with each other than they had with the middle and upper classes in their own countries.

    Europe by 1900 was dominated by the industrial middle classes, who owned the continent’s factories and mills, and who enjoyed increasing wealth and power. Marx preached that working people should join together in a great worldwide revolution to overthrow these middle classes and take control of industrial production from the hands of the wealthy industrialists who got all the profits. Marx’s ultimate dream was that the workers of the world would set up an equal society that would be run by the ordinary people for the ordinary people. By 1900 socialism had already helped to create an extensive trade union movement across Europe.

    Not surprisingly, the ruling classes of Europe regarded these ideas as highly dangerous and subversive, and had a fear of working-class revolution. Maybe a bit of flag waving and a successful war might be a way of taking the workers’ minds off these new socialist ideas? Some European leaders thought this idea was certainly worth trying.

The empire-building states

Owning overseas territory wasn’t an optional extra for 19th-century European states: it was a sort of must-have, almost a definition of what it meant to be a Great Power, and the major powers ruled colonies in every continent on Earth. Some states, such as Britain and France, had possessed colonies overseas for centuries, but others, such as Germany and Italy, came to empire-building relatively late, in the 19th century. Even a small country like Belgium believed that it had to own an overseas empire if it was to be taken seriously. Accordingly, it took over the Congo, a huge land area in central Africa much larger than Belgium itself.

Almost the whole of Africa, a vast land mass much bigger than Europe, fell under European control within 20 years at the end of the century, and the Europeans set about reshaping it, redrawing its boundaries, taking hold of its raw materials and, all too often, forcing the local people to do the hard work for them. Even countries that appeared to be independent were in fact under European domination. For example, China was an independent state but was dominated by the western powers, and some republics of South America were so dependent on British investment that historians have referred to them as being part of Britain’s ‘informal’ empire – not technically ruled by the British or coloured in red on the maps, but effectively British colonies nonetheless.

This list gives you an idea of how much overseas territory the Europeans controlled in 1900. And this list isn’t exhaustive!

  • Britain ruled a vast global empire that included India; Ceylon; Burma; Singapore; Hong Kong; most of southern Africa; Kenya, Uganda; Egypt; Sudan and part of Somaliland; Nigeria; Gambia and the Gold Coast; West Indian islands including Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, St Kitts, Grenada and Bermuda; Pacific islands including Tonga, the Solomon and Ellis Islands, New Guinea and North Borneo; Gibraltar; Malta; Cyprus; and a group of large self-governing dominions: Canada, Newfoundland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
  • France ruled another huge global empire, which covered Algeria; Tunisia; Morocco; a vast area of West Africa including Senegal, Ivory Coast, Chad and the French Congo and Madagascar; the Seychelles; Polynesia; New Caledonia; Guadeloupe; Martinique; and Indo-China (modern-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia).
  • Germany held territory in Africa including Togo, Cameroon, South West Africa, Rwanda and Tanganyika, as well as land in the Pacific including the Marshall, Mariana and Caroline Islands and Samoa, and Kiaochow in China.
  • Italy had conquered Tripoli, Italian Somaliland, Eritrea and the Dodecanese Islands.
  • Belgium ran the huge area of the Congo.
  • The Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch still held overseas territories they’d conquered many years earlier.

The United States, too, was building its own empire in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

Empire enemies, empire ententes

You may wonder what the Europeans wanted all these territories for. In most cases they were interested in the financial profits these colonies could fetch: for example, as the new century dawned, Britain was fighting the Anglo–Boer War in South Africa mainly to gain control of the region’s fabulously wealthy gold mines (the Brits didn’t say that’s what they wanted, but don’t let that fool you). But these western states also believed that because their culture was more technologically advanced than that of other parts of the world (which it was), western rule would be more beneficial for the people they ruled (which is more debatable).

In some cases, European states took over areas simply to stop other European powers from getting them, even if the territory itself wasn’t worth very much. Empire-building was very closely linked to the Europeans’ own national rivalries. For example, Britain and France nearly went to war in 1898 over a dispute in a small town in Sudan (see ‘Annoy the French! Annoy them again!’ later in the chapter). That war scare prompted the 1904 Anglo–French Entente, an agreement between both governments about how they’d decide who got what land in Africa. In 1907, the British signed a similar entente with Russia about who should get what land in Central Asia. These ententes showed how closely colonial and European affairs were linked.

Budge up – Germany wants a place in the sun

The great German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had never been very interested in overseas colonies. He thought Germany should concentrate on getting territory in Europe. But even he couldn’t withstand the pressure from German investors and the German public to start taking over land in Africa and the Pacific. He even got an archipelago in the Pacific named after him, though he probably wasn’t very impressed.

remember.eps When Kaiser Wilhelm II came to the throne, he made gaining colonial territory Germany’s top priority. Germany, he said, wanted its place in the sun, alongside the British and the French. Germany’s drive for colonial territory overseas meant that it would need a large navy, which provided the excuse for Admiral Tirpitz’s big naval expansion programme that sparked off the Anglo–German naval race (see Chapter 8).

Empires in trouble

Not all Europe’s empires were confidently extending their hold over the globe in 1900. Some were facing serious problems:

  • Austria-Hungary: The Austro-Hungarian Empire had a difficult job keeping all its different ethnic groups together. It was painfully aware that its days of military glory were long gone, and knew that if it wanted to fight any major European state, it would need the support of its ally, Germany.
  • The Ottoman Empire (Turkey): The Turkish Empire covered Syria, Palestine, Transjordan, Arabia (Hejaz), Mesopotamia, Armenia, north Africa and south-eastern Europe, but by 1900 it had had to give independence to some of its European subject peoples, while the French, Italians, Russians and British were all manoeuvring to take over Turkish territory in north Africa and the Caucasus. (Chapter 9 looks at the Ottoman Empire in detail.)
  • Russia: Russia was vast but very backward compared with its rival empires. It was much less heavily industrialised and although the Russian army was huge, everyone knew that it was badly organised and hopelessly inefficient.

The nations without states

remember.eps In 1900 some peoples had a strong sense of national identity but didn’t have their own state. That didn’t stop them wanting one, badly. Here are some examples:

  • The Czechs: The Czechs inhabited Bohemia and Moravia, regions within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bohemia had a long history as a kingdom in its own right and the Czechs didn’t see why they shouldn’t be a nation on their own once again. The problem was that neither the Austrians nor the Hungarians saw things that way, and as long as the Austrians and Hungarians ran the Empire, the Czechs were going to have put their dreams of nationhood on hold. Of course, if one day the Austro-Hungarian Empire were to collapse… .
  • The Irish: Ireland had been united with Great Britain a century earlier, but some Irish nationalists never accepted this union and were fighting a guerrilla war to set up a separate Irish state. The complication was that many nationalists were Catholics, and Ireland’s Protestant population wasn’t sure that it wanted to live in a Catholic-dominated Ireland – actually, they were adamant that they didn’t. The divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland were so serious that by 1914 it looked as if Ireland might sink into civil war at any moment.
  • The Jews: The Jews had been expelled from Judaea back in Roman times and over the centuries that followed they’d spread all over the world. Large Jewish communities were to be found in places as far apart and as diverse as Russia, England, southern Africa, Syria, France, Egypt and the United States. Wherever they lived, Jewish people never gave up hope that one day they might return to their ancient homeland.
  • The Poles: Poland had completely disappeared from the map of Europe at the end of the 18th century: it had been swallowed up by its neighbours, Germany, Austria-Hungary and especially Russia. But the Poles never forgot that their homeland had once been a great and powerful nation, and they hoped and believed it would be so again.
  • The Serbs: Of all the nationalist dreams in Europe in the 1900s, the Serbs’ was to prove the most important. The Serbs are one of the Slavic peoples of the Balkan region and, like their neighbours the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the Romanians, they’d spent centuries under Turkish domination. Also like their neighbours, the Serbs had won their independence from the Turks, but that wasn’t enough for them. They dreamed of creating a much larger Slavic state, to include the peoples who lived in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia – a huge area of south-eastern Europe going up the Adriatic coast. The Serbs’ problem was that some of the area they had their eyes on was ruled by the Turks and the rest was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (see the sidebar ‘Whose land is it anyway? Bosnia-Herzegovina’).

Down, but not out: The dragons and tigers of Asia

Europe’s influence spread all over the globe, but that didn’t prevent some of the peoples of Asia from asserting their own identity and trying to control their own futures. The results were a bit mixed.

The defeated dragon: China

Napoleon is supposed to have said that when China woke up it would shake the world. What he meant was that 19th-century China was vast, with a population to dwarf anything Europe could throw at it, yet it seemed to have fallen asleep some time in the Middle Ages and never woken up.

China was ruled by an imperial dynasty that hardly ever moved outside the Forbidden City in Beijing (or Peking, as it was generally known in the west) and only vaguely believed in the existence of the world outside China itself. China’s vast population of peasants was kept in poverty and its armies were huge but still fought largely with spears and bows and arrows as they’d always done. As a result, the Europeans spent the 19th century humiliating the Chinese, forcing the Emperor to sign treaties giving them control of China’s seaports and, above all, forcing the Chinese to accept huge imports of opium from British India. Thousands of Chinese became dependent on the drug, and when the Chinese government tried to crack down on the opium trade, the British and French launched wars to stop them.

By 1900, to patriotic Chinese it seemed as if China was helpless before these westerners. So they decided to do something about it. A secret society took shape, dedicated to driving the foreigners out of China. It was called the Society of Harmonious Fists, though westerners nicknamed it the Boxers.

In 1900 the Boxers struck, killing foreigners and besieging foreign legations (a legation is a kind of embassy in a country that isn’t thought to be important enough to have proper embassies – which in itself tells you how the west regarded China). The Europeans, Americans and Japanese (see the later ‘Thoroughly modern Meiji: Japan’ section to find out why the Japanese were fighting alongside the westerners) organised a multinational force to defeat the Boxers. The westerners imposed heavy reparations payments – a sort of compensation – on the Chinese government and the western troops occupied huge areas of China, burning villages and confiscating goods.

The Boxer Rebellion created a deep sense of injustice and anger against the west amongst many Chinese, which lasted until the very end of the century.

The tamed tiger: India

India had been the seat of the mighty Mughal Empire, but in 1900 the imperial throne of India was occupied by Queen Victoria, who held the title of Empress of India alongside her British crown.

The British had invested heavily in India, building railways, founding schools and hospitals, and providing India with all the infrastructure of a modern state. By 1900 increasing numbers of Indians were being educated along western lines and working in administration or the law.

Each December, Indian nationalists would meet at a gathering known as the Indian National Congress and call for Indians to have more of a say in the running of the country. They were still very loyal to the British Empire – the Congress wasn’t calling for independence – but they knew about the advances made by the different nationalist groups in Europe and they reckoned that they could achieve the same. The British weren’t against giving Indians a bit more of a role in government, especially in the provinces, but they weren’t thinking in terms of handing power over to Indians. The British regarded India as an essential part of their Empire: in fact, many British thought that it was holding India that made Britain a Great Power in the first place, and some historians have agreed with them. (See Chapter 3 for more about the Great Powers.)

Thoroughly modern Meiji: Japan

Nineteenth-century Japan had seemed poised to fall under western domination, as all its Asian neighbours had. Like China (see the earlier ‘The defeated dragon: China’ section), Japan was a medieval country. It was in the grip of powerful warlords known as Shoguns who could square up to each other but would be powerless against the Americans or Europeans. In 1853 an American fleet under Commodore Matthew Perry had anchored near Tokyo to open Japan up to western trade, just as the British and French had done to China: it looked as if Japan was going to go the same way as all the rest of Asia. Some Japanese, however, were determined not to end up as a western colony.

In 1867 Emperor Meiji staged a coup in Tokyo and took power away from the Shoguns and back into his own hands. He used his new power to put Japan on a sort of crash course in western industry and culture. Japanese representatives travelled all over the western world, learning about western industry, society and, above all, western ways of waging war. The Japanese set about adopting as much of the western way of life as they could without entirely losing touch with their own culture. By 1900 Japan was a unique example of an Asian country that had westernised itself without being taken over by the western powers. So, when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in China in 1900, the Japanese sent troops to fight alongside the westerners.

You can see what the Japanese were hoping to achieve by this modernisation programme: they wanted Japan to be accepted as a Great Power alongside the western powers. And because the westerners all seemed to think that a Great Power ought to have an empire, the Japanese – who did after all have an emperor – decided that they’d quite like an empire too.

They had their eyes on China. It was just across the sea from Japan and it was rich in raw materials that the Japanese islands lacked. The only problem was whether or not the western powers would allow the Japanese to build their own empire, and that in turn depended on whether or not the westerners accepted the Japanese as equals. Many of them, particularly the Russians, didn’t – essentially on racial grounds: Europeans simply didn’t believe that Asians were equal to them. But in 1902 the Japanese scored a major coup: Britain signed an alliance with Japan. With a major power such as Britain onside, the Japanese reckoned they could beat any other western power that felt hard enough to take them on. They were right too.

The new empire of the west: The United States of America

In 1900 the British writer Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, which conjured up an image of an old, tired empire – that is, Britain – handing over the task of ruling the less advanced people of the world (that’s Kipling’s view, not mine!) to the new, young, strong power of the west – the United States of America. But was that the role the United States saw for itself?

To the New World

remember.eps The key to understanding the United States in this period is to remember that the country was different. The Americans might speak English (with some funny spellings, but hey, English nonetheless), they might dress in the latest European fashions and they might read European literature, but they lived in the New World, not the Old one.

Of course, ‘New World’ is just a phrase: America is just as old as any other part of the world. But the Europeans who settled on the American continent in the years after Columbus landed liked to think they were creating a new, improved version of the world. They firmly believed that theirs was a purer, happier, freer and more equal society than the ones they’d left behind. The slaves of the American South had a rather different perspective and, even by 1900, for many black Americans the talk of America as a land of liberty and equality rang very hollow indeed, but they still believed in making their life in the United States rather than looking for greater freedom elsewhere.

The end of the frontier

The Americans had spent much of the 19th century exploring the interior of the continent, and then settling down and farming it, all the time fighting wars with the native tribes who lived on what the Americans called the frontier. The frontier was a rough place where you needed to be tough and resourceful to survive, where the law was in the hands of gun-toting sheriffs and marshals, fighting off bandits and gunmen. Through the 19th century writers and artists were conjuring up the myth of the western frontier. Until 1890, that is, because in 1890 the frontier closed down. Officially. The US Census Bureau said so. The native tribes had been rounded up into reservations and the American land mass from sea to sea had been settled and organised, so there literally was no ‘frontier’: all the land belonged to the United States.

After a 19th century taken up with its internal problems, exploring and settling the west, arguing over slavery and fighting the Civil War, 20th-century America would be seeking a role for itself in the world. Just as soon as it had worked what that proper place should be.

The huddled masses

High on its pedestal at the entrance to New York harbour stands the Statue of Liberty, holding aloft a flaming torch as a light for the world. On its base are these words:

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

And to her they came, in their thousands.

As the old century moved to its close, poor people from all over Europe scraped together what money they could, gathered their possessions in bundles and bags, and made their way, often in dangerously overcrowded and leaky ships, to start a new life in America: Italians and Poles escaping grinding poverty; Russian Jews escaping persecution; others simply seeking greater opportunities in life than they’d have at home. They passed through the immigration centre on Ellis Island and out into New York, which soon became a bustling, multi-lingual, multicultural city quite unlike the rather refined British-style city it had been. The new arrivals had to put up with dirty, overcrowded tenements, unscrupulous landlords and hard manual work. In some ways they were no better off than they’d been in their old countries, but America offered one thing that Europe didn’t: a Dream.

Striking it rich …

In America – so the Dream went – anyone, if they worked hard enough, could rise up even to the very top. Americans could point to examples of people who had struck it very rich indeed, such as Andrew Carnegie (a penniless Scottish immigrant who became a fabulously wealthy industrialist and philanthropist) and Henry Ford (the son of immigrants who revolutionised car manufacture, and was soon rolling in it too).

… and striking it poor

diditreallyhappen_fmt.eps Not everyone who came to America was able to live the American Dream. The great majority of first-generation immigrants lived in poverty, working for low wages and living in squalor. Much the same was true for third- or fourth-generation black Americans.

American workers did organise labour unions to protect their rights and interests, but these never achieved the sort of power and influence that unions enjoyed in Europe. Many employers, such as Henry Ford, refused to recognise unions, and some even employed company spies to report on union meetings and company heavies to break them up. Sometimes the American Dream could turn very sour.

An American empire?

Modern Americans don’t always realise it, and President Theodore Roosevelt argued otherwise, but the United States in 1900 was an imperial power. It had conquered the Midwest (you might not think of the story of the frontier as one of conquest and expansion but that’s what it was), annexed the Hawaiian islands, fought a war with Spain and taken over most of Spain’s remaining colonies, including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba. And other imperialist and expansionist powers thought that a Very Good Thing Too.

ononehand_fmt.eps American historians nowadays tend to take the view that America was actually an anti-imperial power and that its possessions weren’t colonies in the sense that the Europeans’ overseas possessions were. European historians, however, tend to take the view that they know an empire when they see one and that the United States in the 1900s ticked all the boxes. It’s probably impossible to reconcile these points of view: you just have to accept that different perspectives exist. What matters is that the United States in the 1900s was in a strange position: it was profoundly suspicious of those imperialist Europeans but, as a global power itself, it couldn’t ignore them either.

Meet the new neighbours: Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa

The Europeans justified their empires by saying that they were only looking after all these peoples around the world until they were grown-up enough to leave home and look after themselves (I leave aside the point that these peoples had been happily ruling themselves for hundreds of years before the Europeans arrived, or I’ll never get to Chapter 3). If you’d asked these Europeans for examples of people who’d grown up enough to rule themselves, they’d have pointed with great pride to a growing number of British colonies that were morphing into self-governing colonies known as dominions:

  • Australia’s separate colonies joined together and formed the self-governing Commonwealth (that is, dominion) of Australia in 1901.
  • Canada became a self-governing dominion in 1867.
  • Newfoundland remained separate from Canada and became a self-governing dominion in 1907.
  • New Zealand became a self-governing dominion in 1907.
  • South Africa, including both English-speaking and Afrikaaner areas, became a self-governing dominion in 1910.

You might be detecting a pattern here. These colonies all had substantial settler populations of white European descent. Does it look to you as if only white people were judged to be grown-up enough to rule themselves? Yes, that’s how it seemed at the time to nationalists in India and Africa.

These nations were proud of their new nationhood, with national flags, capital cities and elected parliaments, yet at the same time they considered themselves as British as people in Liverpool or Edinburgh, for example, and they were proud of being British, too: in fact, for many purposes the British still counted Canadians, Newfoundlanders, Australians and New Zealanders as British. And that meant that Britain’s quarrels and wars were their quarrels and wars too. Units from all these colonies and dominions were serving alongside the British in the Anglo–Boer War, which was going on as the century started. But for how long could the British regard these new nations essentially as an extension of their own country?

Scrambled Africa

In 1884 Berlin became, in effect, the capital city of the whole African continent. In that year representatives of the major powers of Europe met to divide Africa up between them so that everyone who wanted African territory could get it without annoying any of their European neighbours. You can probably guess: not a single African was present at the conference.

What followed was a mad land-grab, nicknamed the Scramble for Africa, by Europeans hoping to get their hands on all the best bits of Africa, though some of them were happy to make do with any bit of Africa, even the Sahara Desert, as long as they could plant their flag on it and colour it in on their wall maps. By 1900 only two states in the entire African continent had escaped the clutches of the Europeans: Liberia, which was under American protection anyway, and Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia), which had managed to defeat an Italian invasion force.

remember.eps The Scramble for Africa threw up some dangerous clashes and rivalries among the European colonial powers that would have important consequences when war broke out in 1914.

Annoy the French! Annoy them again!

The Scramble for Africa is often dated from the British invasion of Egypt in 1882. That invasion seriously annoyed the French (it didn’t exactly please all the Egyptians either), who’d regarded Egypt as their special territory ever since the days of the Crusades. Annoying the French always added to the fun of any enterprise for the British, and in 1898 that invasion of Egypt gave them a chance to drive the French to absolute fury. Egypt had lost control of Sudan, and in 1898 an Anglo-Egyptian army under General Kitchener marched into Sudan and retook the country. Because Egypt was run by Britain, this meant that the British now ruled Sudan too.

Just then, a small French expedition arrived in Sudan and confronted Kitchener at a tiny place in the middle of nowhere called Fashoda. The French tried to claim that the British were intruding on French territory, and for a time the French press called for all-out war against the ‘perfidious English’ until they had to calm down and see sense: it wasn’t worth launching a full-scale war over who controlled the Sudanese desert.

remember.eps The war scare over Fashoda forced the British and French to rethink their relationship in Africa. The result was an understanding – the French word was entente – between the two powers that looked very like an alliance. The entente was a major factor in bringing about war in 1914.

Here come the Germans: Muscling in

At first the major players in the African land-grab were the British, French, Italians and Belgians. The German government hadn’t seemed interested. That changed in the 1890s, though, and the Germans started muscling in with everyone else, taking territory in West Africa (Togo and the Cameroons), East Africa (Tanganyika) and South-West Africa. This sudden change of policy by the Germans had other Europeans worried: why had it happened and where might the Germans be looking to expand next?

Here come the Italians: All right, we’ll have a bit of north Africa, then

The Italians had only finished creating their new nation state in 1870 (actually they hadn’t quite finished – they didn’t control the Vatican, but I won’t quibble for now) and they wanted to show the rest of the world that Italy was a Great Power and could play with the big boys. And because the big boys all seemed to have colonies in Africa, the Italians decided to get one of their own.

They began by taking part of Somaliland and Eritrea, and in 1896 they launched an invasion of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia. It didn’t go to plan: the Ethiopians cut the Italians to pieces at the Battle of Adowa. So they gave up the idea of conquering Ethiopia, and looked at Tripoli in north Africa instead. Tripoli belonged to the Ottoman Empire, and after losing to the Ethiopians, the Italians were nervous about taking on the Turks – not to mention the French, who ruled Algeria and had their eyes on Tunisia and Morocco. Would France welcome an Italian takeover in Tripoli?

This international rivalry in north Africa added to the suspicions and tensions that led to war in 1914.

The British and the Boers

When the new century started a major war was already going on, between the British and the two Boer (that is, Dutch) republics in South Africa. The war began very well for the Boers and disastrously for the British, but by 1900 the British had got their breath back and had defeated the Boer armies in the field. British forces marched into the two republics’ capitals and it seemed as though the Brits could proclaim, ‘Mission accomplished’. They even started sending most of their troops home. But the mission wasn’t accomplished, not by a long chalk.

Some Boer commanders started a guerrilla campaign, launching raids, ambushing British patrols and keeping the resistance going. What followed is still controversial and was to be of enormous importance for the First World War and for the whole of the 20th century. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, faced a problem: the Boer guerrilla units knew the countryside far better than the British, so it was pointless to try to go into the hills to hunt them down. On the other hand, the guerrillas depended on support from civilians who provided them with food, medicine and money for weapons and ammunition. So Kitchener devised a three-pronged plan to bring the commandos to their knees. Be warned: it was ruthless.

  • technologicalinnovation_fmt.eps Barbed wire: Developed for the North American prairie but just as effective spread across the South African veldt, where it seriously hindered the guerillas’ ability to manoeuvre.
  • Scorched earth: To stop the guerillas getting hold of food supplies, the British simply burned down all the farms in the veldt and destroyed all the crops they could find. Simple, effective – and ruthless.
  • Concentration camps: The people whose farms had been destroyed had to go somewhere, so the British concentrated them together into hastily built concentration camps – not prison camps like Nazi concentration camps, but deadly nonetheless. No one gave a thought to basic health sanitation, and the death rate, especially among children, averaged over 2,000 – a month.

Kitchener’s ruthless methods worked, but victory came at a horrific price.

remember.eps The Anglo–Boer War taught some important lessons for when the First World War broke out. It showed the importance of good communications and the effectiveness of accurate rifle fire; it showed the deadly potential of simple barbed wire; above all, it showed that sometimes victory came to those who were prepared to pay any price, however inhuman, to win.

How People Lived: A World of Extremes

In many ways the pre-1914 world didn’t look that different from the current one, especially when a few more motor cars started appearing. But if you were able to travel back to it, you’d find that it contained some more extreme contrasts than you might have been expecting.

Urban warriors: The cities of the world

The world of 1800 had been a rural one, outside of some areas of industrial Britain, but by 1900 the major cities in Europe and the Americas were large, industrial metropolises linked by railway and telegraph lines. They had large, ornate railway stations (by 1900 some of them had underground railways too) and steel frames allowed builders to construct much higher buildings than in the past. Down at street level, roads could be just as congested with horse-drawn traffic as they’d later be with motor cars, but cities were becoming better planned, with parks and open spaces where people could get some fresh air and exercise. Hospitals were being built, and medical officers appointed. People could also go window-shopping: the early 20th century saw the arrival of big department stores, such as Selfridge’s in London and La Samaritaine in Paris. Apart from the horse-drawn traffic and the ladies’ fashions, much of city life would look pretty familiar today.

What would look less familiar would be the huge contrast between the rich and the poor areas. To get an idea, forget modern-day London or New York and think instead of cities such as Mumbai or Rio de Janeiro, with their mix of flashy buildings and huge slums and shanty towns. The Russian leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote how, when he was living in London, he and his wife would go for evening strolls. They’d look at the beautiful houses of the rich, where they could see opulent dinner parties going on, and then they’d turn maybe only one corner and find themselves in another world: the dark and filthy back alleys where people lived in rags, often with no shoes, and with a life expectancy far below that of their rich neighbours around the corner. The British statesmen Benjamin Disraeli had described the rich and the poor as two nations, with virtually nothing in common with each other, and Lenin and his wife could see exactly what he meant.

The terribly respectable middle classes

Spotting the middle classes was easy: they were the ones taking the train or tram to work in the morning rush hour, or going to church on Sunday morning and for a walk on Sunday afternoon. The upper middle classes were the professionals – the lawyers, civil servants, bankers and stockbrokers – who kept national economies buoyant and national governments going. The lower middle classes were the middle managers, cashiers and counter clerks who implemented their seniors’ decisions.

Making fun of the middle classes, with their obsession with respectability and appearances, is an easy thing to do, but without them the huge changes of the 20th century could never have happened.

Workers of the world

Industry had produced a whole new type of people: industrial workers, who lived in the crowded, filthy slums, and who worked in the dirty and dangerous factories and mines that drove the industry that made western countries so rich. By 1900 these people were beginning to organise themselves into trade and labour unions and into political parties. Socialists called on workers around the world to unite and work together to win better wages and conditions for themselves; some called on them to rise up in revolution and overturn the system that had forced them into such appalling poverty. In some countries, such as Russia and the United States, unions encountered strong opposition from employers and the authorities, but in all western European countries the socialist parties were advancing. In 1913 the socialists became the largest single party in the Reichstag, the German parliament.

According to the socialist doctrine of Karl Marx, workers should identify themselves entirely with their class: their nationality was irrelevant. In other words, Italian workers should feel a common identity with workers in Russia or Argentina or Wales or wherever, and should feel hostility towards the middle and upper classes of their own country. The test of whether this idea worked in practice would come when countries went to war with each other. Would workers refuse to fight against their fellow workers from other countries, or would patriotism come first and workers’ solidarity second? Until a major war broke out, no one quite knew the answer to that question.

Country folk: Living on the land

Not everyone lived in cities in 1900: even the industrial countries depended on the countryside to keep their cities fed. Cities demanded a constant supply of food, cloth, tobacco, coffee, rubber and a whole host of other products that had to be grown on farms and plantations. So underneath the urban life was a vast global infrastructure of farms and plantations. New refrigerated ships meant that meat could be slaughtered in Argentina or New Zealand and end up on dinner plates in Paris or Vienna. Rubber could be tapped in Congo or Malaya and turned into tyres or fan belts for motor factories in Detroit or Birmingham.

technologicalinnovation_fmt.eps Despite the huge demand for produce, fields were still ploughed and reaped in much the same way that medieval peasants would’ve recognised. However, some changes were happening in America that looked useful: farmers in the Midwest had pioneered the use of barbed wire fences to protect their crops from cattle and they were also trying out motorised tractors with caterpillar tracks for crossing rough ground. Both of these ideas would be put to military use in the First World War.

How (Some) People Thought: Brave New Ideas for a Brave New World

Historians use the French term fin de siècle to refer to the last decade of the 19th century. Literally, it just means ‘end of the century’, but it also has the sense of the end of the old order, of a world coming to its close. That’s partly because historians know, of course, that the First World War was on the horizon, but equally it refers to some of the radical – and, to the established order, unsettling – new ideas that were developing as the old world drew towards its end.

It’s art and music, Jim, but not as we know it

In the rapidly changing world of the 19th century people could at least rely on some certainties: if you looked at a painting, for example, you knew what it was meant to be, and music comprised tunes you could hum, such as Franz Lehár’s jolly little operetta The Merry Widow or the stirring, patriotic tunes of Edward Elgar.

But other artists and musicians seemed determined to turn all that certainty on its head. For example, Henri Matisse, the French painter, pioneered a trend for bright, unnaturally garish colours that prompted one art critic to call him and his colleagues les fauves – the wild beasts. Spanish artist Pablo Picasso alarmed the art world in 1905 with a painting of a group of nude prostitutes called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The, er, Ladies of Avignon). What raised eyebrows wasn’t the subject matter but the way he painted them: they start naturalistic enough on the left, but get steadily more abstract, until the one on the right is more of a set of shapes topped off by what appears to be an African tribal mask (I bet she never sat for him again). Russian composer Igor Stravinsky provoked a riot with his ballet The Rite of Spring when it premiered in Paris in 1913. It’s set in pagan Russia and shows a young girl dancing herself to death to an increasingly frenzied, savage rhythm, to appease the gods and feed the crops of her tribe.

These writers and artists were disturbing Europe’s feelings of superiority by seeking ideas and inspiration from non-western art and traditions – in other words, from cultures that most Europeans thought barbaric and inferior. To some, these new artistic movements were an exciting way out of the boring, predictable styles they’d grown up with; but to others these radical new styles were dangerous – a rejection of European civilisation itself.

The windmills of your mind – Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis

In 1901 an Austrian doctor called Sigmund Freud published a book with the intriguing title The Interpretation of Dreams. Interpreting people’s dreams is as old as the Bible, but Freud had some startlingly new things to say about what’s going on in your sleep. Based on interviews with hundreds of patients, whom he encouraged to lie out on a comfy couch so they could open up while he sat taking notes behind them, Freud said that dreams reflect the subconscious, and that the subconscious spends most of its time thinking about sex. Not just adolescent fantasies, but deeply suppressed sexual desires for mothers and fathers. Freud said that even apparently harmless objects that appeared in people’s dreams had sexual meanings. It was all most shocking and disturbing, and very good news for booksellers.

Meanwhile another doctor, Carl Jung, was working with mental patients in a Zurich mental hospital and developing the study of the subconscious even further. Jung thought that people have two levels of subconsciousness – their own individual one and a sort of collective subconscious, common to all people within a particular culture.

remember.eps To many people these new sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis was exciting and disturbing at the same time. People often like the idea of being decoded or explained, but Freud’s work also suggested that beneath the civilised and cultured surface of fin de siècle Europe were some savage and primitive desires and emotions. This too would be a major theme in trying to understand the First World War when it came.

The intriguing world of physics

As if deconstructing art and music and unpicking the mind weren’t enough, by the turn of the century scientists were even examining and changing the make-up of the universe itself. The exciting science to be involved in by 1900 was physics – the story of the physical world itself. The happening part of physics was the study of atoms and electrons and molecules – the building blocks of life and matter. Key figures included Pierre and Marie Curie, who were exploring the nature of radiation, and Ernest Rutherford, who was investigating the structure of the atom and would later oversee the splitting of the atom and the development of atomic power.

Even more far-reaching was the publication in 1905 of Albert Einstein’s theory about the structure of the universe and its relationship to the light through which people perceive it. Einstein put forward the idea that in some circumstances, such as those that might exist in space, the rules of gravity and motion (which had seemed rock solid since Newton drew them up 200 years earlier) weren’t fixed at all, but relative. Energy, he declared, equals mass times the speed of light squared. Or E = mc2, as relativists say.

Don’t worry if all this science has you a bit lost: not many people outside the scientific world understood these developments at the time (except for X-rays, which did begin to pass into general use). However, these advances in science would have a huge impact on the 20th century in due course, and they certainly showed that the world of the 1900s was one in which absolutely nothing, not even the very structure of matter itself, was taken for granted: everything was open to question.

When the revolution comes …

With so many new ideas around at the time, it might not come as a great surprise to hear that numerous revolutionary groups were operating in the Europe of the 1900s. Some were socialists, wanting to pull down society and rebuild it along Marxist lines; some were nationalists, wanting to set up their own nation states; some were anarchists, who didn’t believe in rules and wanted to destroy states, not set them up. Apart from a revolution in Russia in 1905 (and that didn’t achieve much), these revolutionaries had few opportunities to put their ideas into action in the years before the First World War broke out, so they threw their energies into writing endless pamphlets and bitter in-fighting. But they knew their day would come.

Working with What We’ve Got: Building a Better World

While some groups were hoping to pull down the old world order and construct a new one (see the preceding sections), others were more interested in trying to improve the existing system.

The Red Cross

The Red Cross was the brainchild of a Swiss, Henry Dunant, who was appalled at the lack of facilities for the wounded when he witnessed a battle between the French and Austrians in 1859. The Red Cross was originally intended to provide a battlefield ambulance service, but in 1864 its International Committee drew up the first Geneva Convention, laying down certain humane rules to be observed when fighting a war, and persuading governments to sign up to it. The Geneva Convention was extended in 1907, laying down rules for the treatment of prisoners of war and establishing the Red Cross as a neutral humanitarian organisation to be respected by all sides, even in the thick of the fighting.

The Hague Conventions

In 1899 governments from around the world sent representatives to The Hague to draw up an international agreement on the waging of war. They agreed rules for the proper treatment of prisoners of war and they banned certain types of weapon that they thought were inhumane, such as:

  • Aerial bombing: At a time when aircraft had only just started to fly, it was remarkably fore-sighted of the Convention-signers to consider the dropping of explosives from balloons or aircraft. Like gas, it was thought to be an inhumane way of fighting, not least because it was so indiscriminate in whom it could kill.
  • The dum-dum bullet: This bullet expanded after it penetrated a body, so that a single bullet could tear a person’s guts out. Both sides used it in the Anglo–Boer War.
  • Poison gas: As the chemicals industry developed, the potential for using chemicals as weapons became much clearer. The general view was that this was an insidious and inhumane way of fighting, though others disagreed. When war broke out in 1914, the others got their way.

In 1907, representatives of the leading nations added a few more clauses, covering warfare at sea, steps to take to rescue the crews of sunken merchant ships and so on.

remember.eps The Hague Conventions represent a remarkable attempt by the Great Powers to try to avert the full force of the industrial and military capacity they were uneasily aware that they possessed. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably guessed, they had very little influence over the way the First World War would be fought, especially after its early stages. Of the three types of weaponry banned, countries respected only the ban on the dum-dum bullet.

The 1900 Paris Universal Exhibition – come and see the future!

All the hope and vision of these exciting years was visible at the Universal Exhibition held in 1900 in Paris. People flocked to see how the marvels of technology were transforming the modern world: a world in which you could buy soup in a metal tin, move up and down buildings on travelling staircases and watch films with recorded sound to go with them. To emphasise the vision of a future of international harmony and aspiration, the Exhibition even included the games of the Second Olympiad (see the following section). The future seemed very bright. How very appropriate, then, that the Exhibition was brought to an early and unexpected close by an assassination: US President McKinley was shot, in his own country, by an anarchist in 1901. It wouldn’t be the last time an assassin ruined hopes of world peace.

The Olympic Vision

A world without war, in which rivalry would be channelled into healthy competitive sport – that was the vision of the French Baron Pierre de Coubertin. Inspired by the spirit of sportsmanship at British public schools and the ‘Olympian Games’ held at the country town of Much Wenlock, he decided to revive the ancient Greek Olympic Games. The first modern Olympiad was held at Athens in 1896, and had it not been for the Paris Universal Exhibition in 1900 the Games might have stayed in Greece as the original ones did.

Alas for Baron de Coubertin, the familiar themes of politics and trickery soon began to spoil his dream. At the 1908 London Olympics, for example, the Americans accused the host team of cheating in the tug-of-war by fielding a team of burly policemen who planted their heavy boots in the mud and proved impossible to shift. And the Italian winner of the marathon was disqualified for being inadvertently helped over the finish line by overenthusiastic spectators. But somehow the Games survived, and not even the First World War could kill them off or the ideals that underpinned them.