World Civilizations 112
Lecture Outlines

The Age of European Supremacy

In the half-century between 1860 and 1914, Europe became a predominantly urban, middle-class society. During this period, the automobile, airplane, bicycle, refrigerated ship, telephone, radio, typewriter and electric light were introduced. Most of these devices of modern life were rapidly expanding their market share at the time of World War I. Business adopted large-scale corporate structures and the labor force organized itself into unions. The old craft guilds faded away. Socialism became an article of belief for millions and was vehemently opposed by other millions. Women began to agitate for legal equality. The foundations of the welfare state were laid, vast military organizations emerged around the new technology and giant bureaucracies began their expansion. Naturally, the rate of taxation increased substantially. Above all, the Europeans assumed that they were rightful inheritors of the earth and that all other people were backward. This illusion was to be shattered after World War II when both Asia and Latin America began to develop industrially at a rapid rate.

Jewish Life in Europe before Emancipation

Jews had always been barely tolerated in Christian Europe. For the thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire in the West and the beginnings of the Renaissance in Europe, Jews were much better treated in the lands of Islam. Some of the original restrictions are: Given this long, long history, it is not surprising that European Jews viewed the vicious anti-Semitism of the 1930's as just another spasm of Christian hatred for the Jew rather than what it really was --- a prelude to extermination.

Jewish Emancipation

During the enlightenment, certain European rulers granted the Jews in their realms limited citizenship. For example, Joseph II (son of Maria Theresa) issued a decree in 1782 that placed the Jews more or less under the same laws as Christians. In France, the National Assembly recognized Jews as French citizens in 1789 (they had been living in France for 1800 years by that point in time). By the end of the first half of the 19th Century, Jews were more or less recognized as citizens throughout western and central Europe (for example, these Jewish citizens still could not own land or serve in the army in most countries). In Russia, nothing changed at all and Jews were regarded as sub-human and literally beneath contempt.

After the Revolutions of 1848, the situation of western European Jews improved for several decades. For example, Great Britain allowed Jews to sit in Parliament after 1858 (the second Reform Act). In Austria-Hungary, Jews were extended full legal rights and could enter the professions for the first time in substantial numbers (there always were a few exceptions but these often were cases in which Jews had to convert to Christianity or pretend to convert in order to get into college). Within one generation, the universally literate Jews entered university life in numbers out of proportion to their population and the tradition of professional career began in earnest. A Jewish male had to be able to read the Bible to participate in Saturday services and be recognized as a full member of the congregation. At a personal level, Jews were still discriminated against and involuntarily segregated. Still, the Jews of the period around 1870 felt reasonably secure and believed that things would get better.

Instead, they got worse. Antisemitism spread like wildfire throughout Western Europe. The Dreyfus Affair was a symptom of deep hatred for Jews within the French military, peasants and Catholic Church. This reversal of direction finally convinced many Jews that there was no future for them in Europe (how correct they were did not become evident for another couple of generations of growing hatred). Millions of Jews began to leave Europe and, especially, the lands controlled by Germans, Austrians and Russians in Poland. Most of them went to America. Some went to Argentina and Brazil. A few went to Palestine that was then a province of the Ottoman Empire. This last group were Zionists which meant a group of Jews who believed that the only route to survival was to reestablish a homeland in the land of Israel after an absence of 2,000 years. Of course, the problem with this last solution to the problem where to flee was that people already lived in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean and they called themselves Palestinians. Most but not all of the Palestinians were Muslim (a substantial minority was Christian). Zionism was a minority movement within the Jewish community. It remained that way until after the establishment of the State of Israel. The Orthodox Jews almost universally opposed Zionism in every way and many still do so.

Late 19th Century Urban Life

From the Age of Exploration in the 1500's to the mid-19th Century, most urban places fell into one of two categories. Either they were local market town trading in local produce and exchanging goods with other market towns in a limited form of inter-regional trade. Or, they were port cities located at the junction of major rivers or where major rivers had a navigable path to the world ocean. With few exceptions, these cities had less than 50,000 people and would have been recognizable to people in the Roman Empire 1500 years prior.

Starting in the 1840's (a little earlier in some places in England and the Low Countries), cities were transformed into industrial complexes. This was accompanied by a great shift in the population from rural to urban areas (from 25% in 1850 to 44 % in 1911 in France and from 30% in 1850 to 60% in 1911 in Germany). Some of the anti-semitism experienced during this period of time may be ascribed to the much closer contact that working class populations had with urban Jews. Of course, they were in the urban areas from the beginning and had urban skills that allowed them to get ahead quickly in the newly permissive atmosphere of Western Europe.

In order to facilitate the very large growth of population and the use of cities to produce large quantities of goods, virtually all cities in the second half of the 19th Century developed central business districts (CBD's). CBD's were places where businesses, government offices, large retail stores, wholesale centers, bank and insurance companies clustered in order to facilitate communication in an era without telephones. People then were obliged to live in concentric rings around the CBD and these became the origin of the suburbs. Part of the movement outward was voluntary because people could find affordable housing with decent ventilation in less polluted areas. The expansion of railways created the first formal suburban developments as work became separated from home.

Paris became a rather spectacular example of the new 19th Century City. Napoleon III personally determined to redesign Paris. Part of his motivation was political. The city had been built over centuries without any urban plan at all. There were whole district comprised of narrow winding alleys and huge densities of people living in filthy and rat infested buildings. There were not even complete maps of the streets of Paris. As a result, the Parisian mob could easily and often did raise barricades blocking access to whole districts that were practically impossible for army troops to penetrate. Ever since the 1789 revolution, the 'sans coulottes' (people without coats) used these neighborhoods almost as forts from which to conduct revolution. So, Napoleon determined to create broad, open avenues across the city to open it up to movement of imperial troops.

The other motivations were very clear. The broad avenues very quickly became places for large urban housing for the upper middle class as well as places for many shops selling expensive goods. This greatly raised urban rents and city revenues. The straight boulevards also made it possible to build sewers and water lines. This greatly reduced urban mortality rates due to cholera and made Paris the envy of Europe in terms of quality of life. The projects also required huge amounts of manual labor and reduced urban unemployment rates during construction.

In general, all across Western Europe there were a series of reforms of public health regulation and public investments in sanitation. For the first time in history, urban death rates fell to levels almost equal to urban birth rates. Before then, cities were places of death and disease where death rates always exceeded birth rates and cities had to be constantly supplied with new migrants from the countryside to survive let alone grow. Housing for working class people became a pressing problem because of the vast concentration of human beings in a small area (densities were generally ten times or more what they are today in the average suburb). Before, people lived in hovels in small villages, out of sight and out of mind. The surrounding open space tended to reduce the communication of infectious disease and to provide natural sanitation to some extent. In cities, housing now had to be produced in large quantities and in sufficient quality to prevent mass epidemics that would wipe out the working classes on which the factories depended. Owning one's own home became the goal of the new working class as they saw how the urban middle class lived. In fact, middle class values spread throughout the population as a result of urbanization.

Women's Experience in the Late Nineteenth Century

There were two contradictory trends in the half century between the close of the Civil War in the US and the beginning of World War I. The first was the incorporation of women into the work forces of the rapidly growing urban regions. The second was the withdrawal of middle class women into the suburban homes and out of the work force.

The first trend was due to the growth of what became known as 'women's occupations.' Examples were garment and textile workers, secretaries and clerks in office and retail employees. Other examples of more middle class jobs for women were nursing and teaching at the elementary school level. The second was due to the cult of domesticity. It was considered a sign of success for men to be able to earn enough at urban occupations to support his wife and children at home. So, if a wife worked, it was a sure sign of the lack of occupational success of the husband and therefore shameful. Other traditional tasks that were assigned to women were church going and support of the church in many substantive and practical ways. Another task considered to be 'women's work' in the Victorian Era was the administration of charity. These traditions are still very much alive today. For example, Williams Gates' retired father and wife jointly administer the Gates' charitable trust. Go to any church other than the main service for the week and, predominantly, it is women who are doing the activities that sustain the church. The preacher man is usually male and the vast majority of the congregation is usually female. Finally, the other significant change in middle-class life in western Europe was the acceptance of small families as the norm.

The Rise of Political Feminism

Liberal philosophy from its origins in the eighteenth century did not particularly favor women. Conservatives wanted the little lady to stay home, go to church and take care of children. The Germans put it in the form a triad. Children, Church and Kitchen (all begin with a 'K' in German) was the motto. Liberals were afraid to let women vote because they were thought to be too influenced by the church who was the liberals worst enemy. Besides many women were opposed to feminism and held views no different than their men. However, the liberal doctrines of utility and efficiency when logically applied to the labor inevitably raised the issue as to why Western European society wasted so much talent and energy by unjustifiably excluding women from many occupations. Gradually, especially in England and the US, women organized to protest their lack of the basic rights of citizenship. The right most demanded was the one that gave women the right to vote. By the first decade of the twentieth, demonstrations for suffrage (the right to vote) often attracted literally thousands of women who marched in the street of the great cities of Europe and America. At first the reaction was fierce. Women were jailed by the hundreds. Those who went on hunger strike were force fed in a brutal manner. Only in 1918 did British women win the right to vote. In France, women did not have the right to vote until the Fourth Republic in 1946! In Germany, the right to vote was noted granted until Germany had been defeated in World War I and the new Weimar Republic granted the vote to women in 1918. In the US, it took a constitutional amendment after World War I to grant women the right to vote. Only little Norway allowed women to vote before World War I.

Labor, Socialism and Politics between 1865 and 1915

Once factories replaced craft shops, the personal ties that bound masters to journeymen and apprentices were broken and massed labor became just another commodity. This swiftly led both to exploitation and to alienation of the labor force. In turn, these grievances led to the formation of large scale unions. The reaction of the factory owners in most cases was to go to war on the unions and bloody strikes were common. In the United States, factory owners hired strike breakers who worked without a contract and goons who physically assaulted workers on the picket lines. The conflict was pervasive and simmered just short of revolution at times. However, most workers were not in favor of socialism but, instead, preferred trade unionism. Namely, workers wanted better pay, fewer hours, better working conditions and some fringe benefits. They, by and large, distrusted socialist and other radicals.

Karl Marx himself, while remaining privately revolutionary, publicly pursued a different tactic in the third quarter of the 19th Century. In 1864, a group of British and French trade unionists founded the International Working Men's Association. Marx address its first convention. While Marx urged revolution, he tempered the means that could be used. Only after his death, did an examination of his private letters indicate that he disapproved of what he called ameliorative measures that pacified workers without fundamentally changing the situation (i.e. capitalism). In Germany, Bismarck tried physical repression but, when that did not succeed, he copied some of the programs from the trade unionist such as social security that stole their thunder. Nevertheless, a politicized trade union movement had emerged all over Europe by the beginning of World War I.

Russia: Industrial Development and Pre-Revolutionary Russia

In the 1880's and 90's, the Tzarist Russian government embarked on an industrialization program. They favored iron and steel production that supplied the military with basic goods. By 1900, there were about 3 million factory workers in Russia. In 1901, a Social Revolutionary Party was founded. It opposed industrialization and extolled a rural communal life. In 1903, the Constitutional Democratic Party or Cadets were formed. This was composed mostly of liberals who had participated in earlier local government councils during the reforms of Alexander II. The Cadets wanted a Parliamentary government headed by a liberal party similar to those throughout Europe.

Because there were no representative political institutions, the usual sorts of compromises and incremental reforms were not possible. The Russian Social Democratic Party had been established in 1898 and was Marxist. The leading 19th Century Russian Marxist was Georgi Plekhanov who was based in Switzerland in order to avoid arrest by the Russian secret police (the "Cheka"). Plekhanov's chief disciple was Vladimir Illich Lenin who was the son of a high bureaucrat in the Tzarist government. Lenin's older brother had been executed in 1887 for participating in a plot against Alexander III. This radicalized Lenin. In 1895, Lenin was exiled in Siberia and, in 1900, was released. He spent the next seventeen years in Switzerland. Lenin rejected a democratic socialism like that advocated by the German SPD at the time. He favored a tight, small revolutionary party comprised of 'people who make revolutionary activity their profession.' At the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Lenin split the party ranks and named his faction the Bolsheviks (majority) because they had won a slim majority on some of the later votes in the Congress. The truly democratic half (or at least close to half) of the Social Democrats were forevermore call the Menshiviks (minority). By 1912, Lenin's faction organized separately and became its own party. Lenin realized that a rebellion of workers and peasants probably could not be suppressed by the army. He bided his time and waited for the right moment.

In 1905, following the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1904, riots broke in several cities. As some of the petitioners for reform approached the winter palace in St. Petersburg, imperial troops opened fire and killed about 100 of them. Sailors mutinied, peasants revolted and property was attacked. In 1905, strikes broke out in St. Petersburg (the national capital at the time) and they were organized by worker groups called soviets. Finally, Nicholas II promised Russian constitutional government. In 1906, an election to a two chamber Parliament (Duma in Russia) was held but Nicholas II proceeded to ignore the Duma and worked through his personally appointed chief minister whose name was Stolypin. Stolypin finally ended the payments that the peasants were paying for 45 years for ending serfdom (they were to be paid off in 5 years anyway). Thereafter, he suppressed the peasants viciously. In 1911, Stolypin was assassinated. The Imperial Family had been embroiled in a scandal involving a mad monk by the name of Rasputin.

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