World Civilizations 112
Lecture Outlines

European Nation-States and the New Imperialism

The Crimean War (1854-1856)

The Russians wanted access to the Mediterranean all year round (their seaport in Murmansk in the far northwest was frozen for more than half a year). On a flimsy pretext, they went to war with the Ottoman Turks. Most of the fighting took place on the Crimean Peninsula that gave the war its name. Great Britain and France decided that its was in their strategic interest to deny Russia access to the Mediterranean and sided with the Turks. The Russians were badly beaten and forced to sign an unfavorable treaty with the Turks. Their reputation for invincibility was shattered but so was the Congress system that had preserved peace in Europe for forty years. Henceforth, the forces of nationalism were to gradually draw Europe over a half-century of time into a general war (World War I).

Italian Unification

Garibaldi and the Wars against Austrians: Giuseppe Mazzini and Giussepe Garibaldi sought to drive the Austrians out of Italy. They failed but frightened more moderate Italians to seek a safer alternative. In May, 1860, Garibaldi landed in Sicily with more than a thousand troops and captured Palermo. He then drove north until he had conquered Naples. At that point, Cavour rushed troops south to confront Garibaldi (next paragraphs).
Piedmont (the Kingdom of Sardinia): Piedmont was discussed several times in this course. It was a province of Italy that formed the southeastern border with France. Piedmont was a liberal state with ambitions to dominate northern Italy, or if possible, all of it. So, Piedmont was constantly at war with Austria who acted as the hegemonic power in Italy. Piedmont, however, was liberal in the nineteenth century terms but not radical (socialist or in favor of income redistribution). Victor Immanuel II chose Count Cavour in 1852 to actually run his government.
Count Cavour, Prime Minister of Piedmont: Cavour believed that, if the Italians proved themselves to be efficient and economically progressive, they would gain the support of France and England in the conflict with Austria. So, Cavour worked for free trade, railway construction, credit expansion and agricultural improvements. He fostered the Nationalist Society which had chapters across Italy. Cavour jointed France and Great Britain in the Crimean War against Russia. In 1859, Piedmont and Austria went to war once again with the support of France. This time, Piedmont finally won a major battle but were then deserted by the French. Nevertheless, Piedmont won Lombardy but Veneto (Venice and surrounding province) remained in Austrian hands. Shortly thereafter, Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Romagna voted to unite with Piedmont.
Victor Immanuel II, King of Italy: It was at that point that Garibaldi invaded Sicily and marched up to Naples. Garibaldi's nationalism won out over his republicanism and he accepted the domination of Piedmont. In 1860, the southern Italian state voted to unite with the northern state and Italy was born. Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed King of Italy in March, 1861. Three months later, Cavour died. The new state had never been unified since the days of the Roman Empire and most Italians identified with their region but only weakly with the country. This led to sectional as well as economic politics that, forevermore, were a model of complexity and frustration.

German Unification

Bismarck: Otto von Bismarck, a son of minor nobility in eastern German, was so conservative that the Prussian King in 1848 found him too far right! After he completed university education, he retired to his father's estate and then gradually entered pan German politics by being elected first to his provincial diet (Parliament) and then to the Frankfort Diet in 1859. Later he served as the Prussian ambassador to Saint Petersburg (capital of Russia) and then to Paris.
The Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871): Finally, Bismarck cleverly provoked Napoleon III into war with Prussia. The efficient Prussian Army beat the French easily and, surrounding Paris, forced the French to capitulate in 1871. Germany won the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. They became one of the causes of World War I. It was even more important for Germany that the remaining states of southern Germany joined Prussia. A German Empire emerged under the leadership of King William I. The new central power replaced the largely weak and ineffectual Austrians. The conflict between the French and the Germans was to dominated Europe from 1870 to 1945. One result of the defeat in war was the abdication of Napoleon III and the birth of the Third Republic.

Napoleon III (1851-1870)

Supported by the French Catholic Church, property owners and businessmen, Napoleon suppressed the liberals in every way he could following his "coup de tat" (military takeover of the state) in 1851. From the late 1850's on, Napoleon III became somewhat more liberal as his foreign policy became increasingly unsuccessful. Between 1861 and 1867, he supported Archduke Maximilian's seizure of the government of Mexico using French troops. The Mexicans overthrew the French government in 1867 and executed the Archduke. Then, Napoleon lost the war with Prussia. At that point, the French had finished with him and he had to flee to England.

Monarchists dominated the Assembly which met in Versailles in 1871. They negotiated a settlement with Germany that required France to pay a large indemnity and surrender Alsace-Lorraine to Germany. Paris resented this settlement and on March 26, 1971 they elected a new municipal government called the Paris Commune. The Assembly reacted by having the French army besiege Paris and kill 20,000 Parisians. However, the monarchists dominating the Assembly were divided between those who supported the House of Bourbon and those who supported the House of Orleans. In 1875, they reluctantly settled upon a republican form of government that became known as the Third Republic.

The Third Republic (1871-1945)

The Third Republic consisted of a chamber of deputies elected by universal manhood suffrage, a senate chosen indirectly and a president elected by the two houses. Thus, it resembled the original design of the American constitution before it was democratized. The greatest trauma of the republic was the so-called 'Dreyfus Affair'. Captain Alfred Dreyfus of the French Army was Jewish. He was accused of spying for the Germans. After Dreyfus was convicted in a court-martial, military secrets continued to flow to Germany. A new head of French counter-intelligence reexamined the file and found evidence of forgery in documents supposedly signed by Dreyfus. A different officer was implicated but acquitted of all charges by a military court. The officer who discovered the forgeries was transferred to a distant post.

Emil Zola, a novelist, wrote an article entitled "I accuse" in which he identified the army, the French Catholic Church, political conservatives and anti-Semitic newspapers as being in a conspiracy to make Dreyfus a scapegoat for something he had not done. In a new military trial, Dreyfus was again convicted of treason. The President of France pardoned him and a civilian court in 1906 set aside the results of both previous military trials. The officer corps remained vehemently anti-Semitic on the whole. It was this corps that sided with Adolf Hitler in the Vichy Government. The left united against this coalition of conservative forces. The political conflict thus started over Dreyfus was to persist for the entire twentieth century and lent a bitter tone to French politics. It also fatally weakened the Third Republic in the conflict with Germany.

The Formation of the Dual Monarchy in the Hapsburg Empire

The revolts of 1848 in the Hapsburg Empire simply served to reinforce the reactionary politics of the regime. The Emperor Franz Joseph(1848-1916) sought to impose a centralized administration on the many different ethnic groups that comprised the Empire by using German-speaking Austrians Defeated n 1859 and 1866 and driven out of Italy, the Emperor was forced to come to terms with the most powerful other ethnic group in the Empire; namely, the Hungarians. The compromise of 1867 transformed the Hapsburg Empire into a dual monarchy in which Hungary had nearly total autonomy except for the common monarchy, foreign policy and army. This created great resentment by the Czechs, Ruthenians, Rumanians, and Serbo-Croations outside of Austria itself. Thereafter, they sought the same level of political recognition as the Hungarians. Finally, the Emperor dissolved Parliament and ruled by decree around the turn of the twentieth century. This feeling extended throughout central Europe and virtually everyone outside of Austria itself, the new Germany and Russia wanted to have an independent state. Ultimately, this wave of nationalism gave rise to patriots who resorted to force to liberate their homelands from foreign domination. This led, of course, directly to terrorism because the dominant states were too strong militarily to be openly confronted on the field of battle.

The Reforms of Alexander II (1855-1881)

Following the defeat of the Russian Army in the Crimean Peninsula and an unfavorable treaty concluding the war, the new Emperor of Russia, Alexander II determined that he was going to restructure Russian society along more modern lines. In 1856, he announced his intention to abolish serfdom in the Russian Empire. This elicited enormous opposition from the landlords and it took him five years to actually promulgate a long statute ending serfdom. Serfdom was a legal system in which farmers were bound to work the land for landlords who could extract labor and part of the harvest from them. The long struggle with the landlords resulted in a compromise in which the peasants were forced to pay back the landlords for their losses due to emancipation over a period of 49 years. This led to endless disputes and much resentment on all sides. Finally, following the defeat by the Japanese navy in 1905 and beset by uprisings, the government grudgingly cancelled the remaining debts five years ahead of schedule. Abolition of serfdom required the reorganization of both local government and the judicial system. The reforms were under-funded and the tsarist government remained the only effective power in Russia. The courts were reformed with better results although the legal system was far from meeting western standards of impartiality.

A Russian living in exile, Alexander Herzen, published a newspaper called The Bell that set forth reformist proposals. Some students formed a revolutionary group based on these ideas and hundreds of them took to the countryside in the early 1870's to propagandize among the peasants. The peasants were distrustful and turned all of the students over to the police. They were given light sentences by a judge who felt that a display of mercy might lessen public support for them. The movement split up and a radical offshoot assassinated Alexander II in 1881.

Many were convinced that the monarchy would never reform Russian and a revolutionary underground gradually formed throughout the country. Alexander III (1881 - 1894) confirmed the pessimism concerning the monarchy. He strengthened the secret police (the 'Cheka') and increased press censorship. Russian festered and slid towards revolution.

Towards Democracy in Great Britain

In 1867, a Second Reform Act passed Parliament at the urging of the conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (the first had been passed in 1832). It increased the number of voters from 1.4 million to 2.5 million from one year to the next. The election of 1868, however, disappointed Disraeli who had hoped for the support of British working people enfranchised the previous year by his government and the liberals won. Gladstone introduced competitive examinations in the British Civil Service, abolished the purchase of officer's commissions and made the British government responsible for establishing and running elementary schools. Disraeli succeeded Gladstone in office in 1874 and passed the Public Health Act of 1875 that consolidated and extended previous sanitary legislation and also passed the Artisans Dwelling Act which provided for public housing.

The major issue of the 1880's was Ireland. From the 1860's onward, Irish nationalists sought Irish independence from the United Kingdom. In 1885, a united bloc of Irish members of Parliament held the balance of power between the Conservatives and Liberals. In 1885, Gladstone announced support for Irish home rule. Parnell, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary bloc supported Gladstone but enough members of his own Liberal party deserted him so that the Conservatives elected Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister. He sought to mollify the Irish with public works and administrative reform but met with only marginal success. In 1892, a second bill on home rule for Ireland was passed but was defeated in the House of Lords. The liberal ministry passed a third home rule bill but its implementation was postponed during World War I. Basically, the Irish question split the liberals into two warring camps and prevented them from effectively carrying the banner of reform. In the vacuum created, a new Party called the Labor Party gradually accumulated political power.

The New Imperialism

The Europeans reached the pinnacle of their power in the world during the period 1870 to 1945. North and South America were populated mostly by European peoples. So were Australia and New Zealand. Until this period, most of Asia (with exception of India) and Africa had gone their own ways. The Middle Eastern regions were dominated by the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. But, during the first half of this period from 1870 to 1945, most of these areas were absorbed into European Empires or were dominated by them. The expansion spread over 10 million square miles and 150 million people. The dictionary definition of Imperialism is useful in evaluating this period: "The policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations." Usually this began by European countries making investments in foreign countries and supporting these investments by arrangements with local potentates. If these arrangements did not work, the European power extended military aid and, if this did not work either, by outright annexation.

Motives for Imperialism

Lenin's interpretation of this process was that "Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." According to Lenin, competition inevitably leads to the elimination of inefficient capitalist and to the creation of monopolies. Running out of profitable markets at home, monopolists expand into foreign markets and that leads to imperialism. The facts do not support the argument which is logical on its face. Only a small percentage of British and European investments were made in under-developed countries. Most were made in Europe itself or in America. Often new investments that were made in the global south were made in countries that were not colonies. Another fact that was inconvenient for the socialists was the repeated introduction of new products and new techniques of production that produced new companies and new competition. Another argument for the economic roots of imperialism was that the global south produced the raw materials for the industrial state in the United Kingdom and Europe. All of the imperial powers were forced to rely on sources not under imperial control. Nor did the colonies constitute a significant market for the home countries. In the end, most imperial governments spent more money on their colonies than they received in privileged access.

Some arguments were put forward that the European peoples possessed a superior culture and that they had a responsibility to civilize backward nations. Few people were persuaded by these arguments although many people of the time shared the underlying assumption of European superiority. Religious groups in Europe had always argued that conversion to Christianity was a duty. Some thought that the colonies were a way of diverting public attention from problems at home or for places to settle surplus population. In fact, most European immigrants went to North and South America where there was empty land to be settled due to the eradication of Native American populations.

Basically, many Europeans viewed the holding of vast lands and peoples overseas as a matter of national prestige with England being regarded as the prime example. Many were envious of the UK and the Russians, Japanese and even the Americans emulated the British in acquiring colonies. What did occur as a result of this period of expansion was that European conflicts inevitably became world conflicts. Another more enduring result was that nationalism spread by example all across Asia and resulted in the emergence of Asian nation states in the Twentieth Century and liberation movements (but not really nationalism) in Africa.

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World Civilizations 112 Lecture Outlines