A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  Britain and France had made vague promises of self-government, independence, land, and jobs to gain support for the war from their colonial subjects, but at the Paris Peace Conference would not even listen to proposals for national self-determination from individuals such as the Vietnamese leader who would later take the name Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969). The victorious allies made independent nations out of Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman territories in Europe, but they refused to extend this to Asia or Africa, which they defined as “peoples incapable of governing themselves.” Instead the “well-being and development of such peoples” would be assured by “developed nations” until some unspecified point in the future. Disillusioned with democracy, Ho became one of the founders of both the French Communist Party and the Indochinese Communist Party.

  In the former Ottoman Empire, France ruled Lebanon and Syria under a mandate system, and Britain Jordan, Iraq, and Palestine, in which it promised to establish a Jewish national homeland. Many European Jews migrated to Palestine. Arabs gradually won control over internal political affairs, but Western powers retained control of much of the economy, including the newly discovered oil fields. Europeans also occupied parts of Turkey, but a revolution led by Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938) threw them out, deposed the Ottoman sultan, and established a secular state in which law codes influenced by Western models replaced Islamic law, including that governing marriage, and secular schools expanded literacy, now in a new Turkish script instead of Arabic. As in Meiji Restoration Japan, dress was westernized, with government employees ordered to wear suits and women to appear in public without veils. Arabia moved in the other direction, when the powerful tribal leader Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud (1902–69), whose forces were conquering the Arabian peninsula, accepted the puritanical and anti-Western version of Islam known as Wahhabism. Saudi authorities strictly enforced what they saw as an uncorrupted version of Islam, prohibiting alcohol, tobacco, and women appearing in public unveiled or without a male escort, though they welcomed material innovations, which flowed especially to the royal family and its allies after the world's richest oil reserves were discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1935.

  In South and Southeast Asia, educated elites increasingly demanded the self-government that nationalists claimed in Europe, along with the political rights that working-class men had gained through union activism. Among these was Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who studied law in England, led a campaign for the rights of Indian immigrants in Natal in South Africa, and then in 1920 launched a non-violent campaign against British rule in India, among other things urging people to spin and weave their own cloth and not buy imported British goods. The nationalist independence movement grew into a mass movement, supported by people of all castes as well as the outcaste “untouchables,” whom Gandhi welcomed. Gandhi and other leaders, including Nehru, were arrested and imprisoned off and on through the 1920s, 1930s, and most of World War II for sedition and fomenting rebellion, but the British began to negotiate. In French Indochina, colonial authorities repressed all nationalist groups in the 1930s, and only the communists survived. In Vietnam, they waged war against the French, Japanese occupiers during World War II, and ultimately the USA, linking themselves in poems, songs, speeches, and images with long traditions of Vietnamese resistance to foreign conquerors. In the Dutch East Indies, nationalist leaders sought freedom from Dutch control, transforming Malay, which had been a language of trade across much of this huge culturally diverse area, into a unifying national language, which they called Indonesian. Some adopted a more conservative Islam and wanted to rid Indonesia of anything un-Islamic, whether Western or pre-Muslim local traditions, while others adopted Marxist ideas, or blended all these in a distinctive Indonesian nationalism.

  As World War I sparked political and cultural nationalism in colonial areas, it also led to dramatic cultural change in the West. Young people turned against what they saw as the values of an older generation that had led to the unprecedented carnage of industrial warfare. They listened to new types of music, including jazz, either live or on wind-up phonographs, wore less restrictive clothing, and watched motion pictures with internationally known stars such as Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino at movie houses in cities. They even rejected their parents’ notion of the ideal body type; wealth and social prominence were now to be shown through a slender figure rather than the bulky body of prewar “men of substance.” Bicycles allowed young people, including women, to travel without parental supervision and for wealthier people automobiles further increased mobility for work and leisure. Writers and creative artists rejected old forms and values in favor of ones designed to shock, challenge, and perhaps foment radical social change, but also to strip things to their basics, a movement that came to be called “modernism.” Modern architecture and furniture used straight lines with no ornamentation, and modern art, music, and literature sought to express anxiety, multiplicity, irony, and dissonance rather than heroism, glory, harmony, and unity, as these seemed absurd. Art in particular often incorporated Europeans’ growing familiarity with non-Western art as artists traveled in colonial empires or objects were shipped back to European museums for display. In Paris, for example, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) drew on the ways African masks portray faces to create cubist forms of zigzagging lines and angled overlapping planes. Artists and writers were also influenced by the ideas of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), an Austrian neurologist and inventor of psychoanalysis, who argued that human behavior was guided in part by reason, but also by powerful subconscious desires such as aggression and pleasure-seeking that people repressed in order to live peacefully in society.

  5.6 Poster for the French bicycle company De Dion-Bouton, 1921. Advertisements for bicycles, cars, and other consumer goods in the 1920s often showed young people in fashionable modern clothing, and emphasized mobility and freedom.

  Freud's ideas were an important part of what historians have called “modern” sexuality—by which they mean modern Western sexuality. Sexual desires and activity that deviated from the expected norm were increasingly viewed not as sin, but as “degeneracy” or as “perversion” to be corrected or prevented by scientifically trained professionals, especially physicians. Commentators in this era often used industrial or mechanical metaphors when talking about sex, describing sexual drives as surging through the body in the same way steam did through engines or water through pipes in a “hydraulic model” of sex. Western leaders sought to promote a healthy society as a way of building up national strength, and anything that detracted from this became a matter of official and often public concern. Robert Baden-Powell (1857–1941), a British officer who had served in Africa and India, founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 explicitly to teach British boys what he regarded as the right sort of manly virtues and keep them from masturbation, effeminacy, physical weakness, and homosexuality, which he saw as especially prevalent among the non-white subjects of the British Empire and British men who lived in cities. Efforts were made to “cure” people of homosexuality and other types of “deviant” sexuality through drugs, surgery, or psychological treatments. At the same time, however, same-sex desire became something that linked individuals in homosexual subcultures and communities, a matter of identity rather than simply actions. “Heterosexual” became an identity as well, and the idea that people had a permanent “sexual orientation” eventually became a central part of modern Western notions of the self.

  The experimentation of the 1920s included financial speculation. Bankers, investors, and even people of modest means bought stocks with borrowed money in a speculative bubble, and the crash of the New York stock market in 1929 triggered a global financial crisis that led to declining productivity, plummeting trade, mass unemployment, and a long and severe economic depression. The Great Depression shattered fragile political stability in Europe, and made people in many places willing to put their trust in authoritarian leaders. These emerged in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Soviet Union, most of eastern Europe, Latin Amer
ica, and Japan, developing in many places into totalitarian regimes that asserted a complete claim on the lives of their citizens, and demanded popular support for their ambitious aims, which they expected would be achieved by war.

  In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) emerged triumphant from an intense power struggle during the 1920s, and under his direction the Communist Party began a series of five-year plans that sought to expand and transform the Soviet economy from one of peasant farmers to one of state-controlled agriculture and industry. Peasants were ordered to give up their land and animals and become members of collective farms; if they resisted, they could be arrested and sent to forced-labor prison camps, and millions were, along with other opponents of Stalin, including artists, intellectuals, journalists, union leaders, army officers, and lesser party officials. Collective farms were supposed to increase output, but they did not, and there was mass famine, particularly in Ukraine, where Stalin used forced collectivization as a tool to destroy Ukrainian opposition to Soviet rule. Peasants were also sent to the factories opened as part of the five-year plans, or moved to cities for work; during the 1930s, more than 25 million people became industrial workers in the Soviet Union, increasing industrial output by about four times. The Party opened schools and universities to train engineers, skilled workers, and managers, and a technical elite developed. Stalinist propaganda, expressed through posters, government-commissioned music and art, and the government-controlled press, constantly proclaimed the superiority of communism to Western capitalism and highlighted socialist achievements.

  In densely populated Japan, as the world economy collapsed, necessities like food and fuel grew scarcer, and the leadership became increasingly aggressive. Following a pattern of imperial expansion begun several decades earlier, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 to gain its coal, iron, and land, and then took over eastern China in brutal conquests that involved mass murder. The military imposed authoritarian rule, repressing dissent, organizing production, glorifying martial honor and sacrifice, and promoting notions of the sacred origins of the emperor and the Japanese people. In Germany, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and the Nazi Party used discontent at the humiliation of World War I and the Versailles peace treaty, combined with economic insecurity, constant propaganda, and racist sentiments to develop a broad base of popular support and take over control of the government. Hitler supported the Italian Fascist totalitarian attack on Ethiopia—the last independent state in Africa—in 1935 and sent troops to aid Fascist forces in Spain.

  Hitler first cloaked his plans for expansion in claims about the rights of ethnic Germans living in non-German states, but in 1939 his attack on Poland made his true intentions clear, and the British and French declared war. Nazi armies seized Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, and then turned east and attacked the Soviet Union. He intended to create a New Order across Europe based on racist imperialism, in which a “master race” of German “Aryans” would rule inferior Latin peoples and even more inferior Slavs, and in which Jews and others the Nazis declared undesirable, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), socialists, and communists, would all be killed. Systematic extermination began in 1941 as the Nazis sought what Hitler termed “the final solution to the Jewish question,” resulting in mass deportation to concentration camps, where Jews and others were shot or killed by poison gas. About 6 million Jews were murdered in this Holocaust, along with millions of others, in a process that involved the cooperation of many German and non-German officials and ordinary people, and provoked little protest from either inside or outside the Nazi empire.

  Japan allied with Germany and Italy, invaded mainland and island Southeast Asia, claiming it was creating a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, but in reality confiscating raw materials and drafting local people for military and labor services, including “comfort women” forced to provide sex for Japanese soldiers. In 1941 Japan attacked the American naval base of Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. The industrial capacity and large population base of the USA, combined with those of the Soviet Union, Britain, and the other Allies, ultimately defeated Germany and Japan, the latter in part because of the use of the atomic bomb, an outgrowth of the second industrial revolution. Thus the needs of the military had served as an important impetus to the Industrial Revolution, and the expansion of industrialism ultimately determined the outcome of what is, to date, the most deadly war in world history, with 50 million soldiers and civilians killed.

  World War II was a total war just as World War I had been. Governments directed the economy and intervened in education, culture, and family life in totalitarian regimes, but also in democracies. They used new means of mass communication, especially radio and movies, as tools to bolster support for the war, broadcasting speeches and sending filmmakers to shoot actual battles for newsreels, documentaries, and feature films. The Nazis were particularly hostile to modern art, viewing it as Jewish-influenced and “degenerate” and in some cases destroying it. They favored heroic realism, as did their Soviet enemies, in which soldiers, workers, and mothers gazed into the distance at a brighter future. In Germany, Italy, and Japan, birth control was prohibited and large families were rewarded among groups judged to be desirable; those judged undesirable were sterilized or executed. Among the Allied Powers, women were recruited to work in munitions and aircraft factories, join the nursing corps or auxiliary armed forces, raise money for war bonds, and plant “victory gardens” to raise home-grown food to replace that sent to troops; by the end of the war one-third of the vegetables consumed in the USA were being grown in private gardens. Women's factory work allowed astounding increases in the production of weapons and military equipment, but after the war a similar marketing campaign urged the return to “normal” gender roles, women's paid employment declined, and the birth rate soared in a postwar “baby boom.”

  Decolonization and the Cold War

  World War II left Europe, Japan, and other areas where there had been air bombardment and ground fighting physically shattered, and also left the Allied Powers in deep disagreement about the shape of the postwar world. The USA demanded free elections in eastern Europe and refused to negotiate with Stalin. In response, Soviet occupying forces installed pro-Soviet communist leaders in eastern Europe, including the eastern zone of a divided Germany. The United States and its allies reacted with a policy of “containment” that tried to stop any further expansion of communism. For forty years after the end of World War II, political, economic, and even cultural life in much of the world was shaped by the geopolitical and military conflict known as the Cold War that pitted the Soviet Union and the United States against one another. Each side saw itself as the defender of what was good and pressured other countries to follow: the Soviet Union supported Marxist-inspired nationalists who sought to end colonialism or Western economic domination and create new social orders with a more equitable distribution of resources, while the United States supported leaders who promised to fight communists, maintain free trade and private property, and hold democratic elections. Commentators used this division to create a conceptual scheme of the entire world: a First World of wealthy industrial democracies; a Second World of communist nations; a Third World of poor, non-industrialized nations with economies shaped by colonialism or neocolonialism, which in the 1950s meant most of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean; and sometimes a Fourth World of the absolute poorest nations with few exploitable resources, such as Haiti and Mali. The schema ignores differences within nations, as in every Third and Fourth World country some people have led First World lives, but it came to be widely used as a shorthand.

  Both superpowers built up huge arsenals of conventional and nuclear weapons and formed military alliances, sending large-scale military and financial aid to their allies, no matter how repressive or corrupt. This enhanced regional conflicts into larger “proxy wars” that substituted for direct conflict between the two superpowers, which might have escalated into
nuclear war. Military expenses made up a large share of the budgets of many nations, leaving little for other uses, as US President Dwight Eisenhower (1890–1969)—the general who had led the defeat of the Nazis—noted in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone, it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children … This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.” Eisenhower described the growth of what he termed the “military-industrial complex,” and warned of its power.

  Conflicts between the superpowers played out on a global stage of decolonization, in which people around the world sought political self-determination; between 1945 and 1965, almost every colonial territory gained formal independence. This process was supported by the United Nations, the intergovernmental organization formed in 1945 to mediate international conflicts. The General Assembly of the UN became a forum where nationalist leaders condemned colonial powers and neocolonial economic domination. The UN also established agencies and bureaucracies to promote economic development, improve health and nutrition, and eradicate disease, and sent military forces to serve as peacekeepers in various conflict zones around the world. As empires and protectorates across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were transformed into independent nations, religious and ethnic conflicts complicated the struggle. Thus cultural and social issues had a deep impact on decolonization.