A Concise History of the World

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

  In South Asia, Gandhi hoped for a united independent India, but Muslim leaders worried that the majority Hindus would dominate, and pressed for a separate state, arguing that Hindus and Muslims were “two different civilizations” that each deserved its own nation. The British proposed partition, and in 1947 India and Pakistan gained political independence, with Pakistan divided into two provinces. The “two civilizations” actually lived intermingled in many areas, especially in Kashmir, the Punjab, and Bengal, and independence was followed by bloodshed and mass expulsions, as each side tried to create a more homogenous state. Millions of people became refugees or were forcibly relocated. Political, economic, and ethnic conflicts between East and West Pakistan led to further violence and more refugees, and East Pakistan won its independence in 1971 as Bangladesh. Bangladesh was (and is) an extremely densely populated country centered on the low-lying Ganges Delta, often subject to natural disasters such as floods and typhoons. It was also very poor, although programs to help lessen poverty, such as expanded elementary education, very small loans to help people establish village businesses, and rural cooperatives, slowly brought improvements for some people.

  Nehru became India's first prime minister, establishing a political dynasty in which his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandes Gandhi) and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi also became prime ministers. He was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Nations Movement, through which some recently independent nations in Asia and Africa hoped to find a “third force” that was neither Soviet nor US, and promoted industrial development and agricultural innovation through a system that blended capitalism and socialism. The Indian state was officially secular and democratic, although traditional attitudes toward women and untouchables changed very slowly. Most people in India lived in villages, and irrigation projects plus new high-yield wheat and rice introduced as part of what was known as the Green Revolution of the 1960s increased agricultural output significantly. This was paralleled by population growth resulting from the spread of vaccines that lowered the death rate among children, the use of antibiotics, DDT spraying to reduce insect-borne diseases, and other public health measures.

  Religious conflicts were even more explosive in the Middle East. In the 1940s, France and Britain granted independence to most of their mandate-held countries, and the British dumped the problem of what to do in Palestine in the lap of the United Nations. The UN proposed a two-state solution—a Jewish Israel and a Muslim Palestine—which the Jews accepted and the Arabs rejected. Jews then proclaimed the state of Israel, which they enforced through military victories over coalitions of Arab countries in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Many Palestinians fled Israel or were expelled, becoming refugees in surrounding Arab countries who sought to return to their homeland. The Arab defeat led to a nationalist revolution in Egypt, which emerged as the leader of the Arab world. Egypt received significant financial aid from both the Soviet Union and the United States, but a series of authoritarian leaders, ruling through emergency laws that suspended rights, extended police powers, and limited freedom of expression, funneled this into the military or the hands of corrupt officials, and the economy stagnated. Corruption, one-party dictatorships, and great disparities in wealth and poverty marked many other Middle Eastern countries as well, including Iran, where in the 1950s the hereditary ruler, known as the shah—restored to power with the help of secret US forces after he had been thrown out in an election—set out to modernize the country using Iran's gigantic oil revenues, which were controlled by US companies. The shah and his officials opened secular schools, proclaimed women's rights, and promoted a market economy, but also tolerated no dissent and siphoned off much foreign aid and oil revenue for themselves, living extravagantly while most peasants remained poor and landless.

  In Africa, resistance to colonialism combined with nationalism to create new nations after World War II in processes that ranged from largely peaceful to extremely violent. In the first half of the twentieth century, many educated Africans and people of African descent who lived elsewhere were pan-Africanists, who sought cultural solidarity among black people everywhere, combined with an “Africa for the Africans” in which all Africans would form some sort of united government for the whole continent. Some articulated the idea of negritude, a sense of racial identity and pride in black creativity and African cultural traditions to counter the prevailing Social Darwinist notion that Africans were at the bottom of a hierarchy of races. Postwar leaders, many educated in Europe or the United States, tended to accept existing political boundaries as a practical matter that would allow them to gain independence as soon as possible. This came first in the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah (1909–72) organized a mass political party that staged strikes and political actions until the British agreed to an election. Nkrumah's party won a huge majority, and he headed both a transitional government and the new nation of Ghana. Independence for most other British and French African colonies and the establishment of democratic constitutions followed fairly quickly, with extensive bloodshed only where there were large numbers of white settlers, such as Kenya, Algeria, and Rhodesia, and in the Congo. The political boundaries established by European imperial powers had not followed the lines of earlier African kingdoms or ethnic divisions, however, and political parties and rival factions often coalesced along regional or ethnic lines, which led to violence. Many leaders decided that authoritarian rule and a one-party state were the only way to assure order, and in some countries the army—the institution that had been the best developed under imperial rule—seized power.

  Because cash crops took the best land in Africa, food imports brought in as aid or purchased were often necessary for survival. Child mortality remained much higher than in industrialized countries, though some improvements in health care lowered the death rate, which led to a rate of population increase that far outstripped economic growth. Most postcolonial states provided more access to education than the colonial governments had, and literacy rates slowly began to rise during the 1960s, with those for girls lagging behind those for boys, as girls generally attended school less often and for a shorter period than boys. Women were also often excluded from development plans, as international development agencies assumed—based on Western practices—that men were the primary agricultural producers. They thus often sought to “modernize” agriculture by teaching men new methods of farming or processing crops in cultures where these tasks had always been done by women.

  Although most of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean had gained political independence in the nineteenth century, their economies were similar to those of Africa, in that they often depended on the export of one or two crops or natural products, which regularly suffered price collapses that brought unemployment, social unrest, and sometimes starvation. Economic nationalists sought to free their countries from US and European domination and expand the economy through industrialization in the same type of important substitution strategy that had sparked the Industrial Revolution in Britain. This began in Mexico, where in the 1930s President Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970), from a poor and indigenous family, nationalized the oil industry and promoted industrialization. Brazil and Argentina followed a similar pattern, with populist leaders such as President Juan Perón of Argentina promising rapid industrialization and higher wages. The communist Cuban Revolution in 1959 led conservative political and business leaders and the military in much of Latin America to fear a further spread of communism and the redistribution of wealth this might bring. As in Africa, coups and armed interventions undermined or overthrew elected governments, and right-wing military dictators came to hold power, often backed covertly or openly by the United States government, which saw everything through a Cold War lens.

  China also experienced the establishment of an authoritarian one-party state, in which party leaders sought to revolutionize social structures and cultural forms. Nationalists opposed to Japanese and other foreign imperialism had established a republic before the war, but
the Chinese communists, led by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), defeated the nationalists in a civil war that ended in 1949. The nationalist leadership and about 2 million refugees fled to Taiwan. The communists distributed land confiscated from landlords and richer peasants to hundreds of millions of poor peasants, and looked to the Soviet Union for inspiration, beginning to collectivize agriculture and developing a five-year plan for growth that would allow China to compete with the West. China became a second major communist power, sending troops to fight the USA and its allies in the Korean War (1950–53), one of the Cold War's proxy wars that ended in a truce and a divided Korea. In 1958, Mao broke with Soviet patterns and proclaimed a Great Leap Forward, in which industrial growth would be centered not in large factories, but instead in small backyard workshops and mills run by peasants living collectively. This was a disaster, as people who were not skilled workers attempted industrial production instead of farming, and there was widespread famine in which as many as 30 million people died. Further chaos resulted from Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, a purge of the Communist Party in which young people organized themselves into revolutionary cadres known as Red Guards and denounced those they thought were insufficiently loyal to Mao's ideas. Anything that represented “feudal” or “bourgeois” culture was suspect, and art and books were destroyed. The universities were closed, and millions of people were sent to rural forced-labor camps.

  5.7 In a scene staged for the photographer, young men read Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung while waiting for transport during the Cultural Revolution, 1968. The book, known in the West as the “Little Red Book” because of its small size and red cover, became required reading in schools, workplaces, and military units; more than a billion were printed.

  While communism triumphed in China, capitalism triumphed in Japan. Japan was occupied by US forces from 1945 to 1952, who dictated a new constitution that abolished the armed forces but left the emperor as a symbol of the state. The Americans also left Japan's bureaucracy and large corporations in place, and they continued the policy of close cooperation that had characterized earlier industrial development in Japan. Japan served as a military base for the USA during the Korean War, and was increasingly seen as an important ally in the fight against communism. The Japanese economy grew at a breathtaking pace from the 1950s through the 1980s, the fastest economic growth in world history. “Salarymen” were hired for life, and their social lives came to revolve around the company, with long hours of work followed by long hours of drinking while their wives remained at home.

  As Japan rebuilt, so did western Europe. Economic aid provided by the United States and hard work by local people and migrants from the Mediterranean basin who filled labor shortages led to an amazing recovery from the war's devastation. Housing was reconstructed, productivity and wages rose, and new factories opened, now often using oil imported from the Middle East by European or American corporations such as British Petroleum or Standard Oil instead of coal. Many jobs in newer industries such as chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and electronics were increasingly managerial, and required higher levels of education than blue-collar jobs in mining and heavy industry had. Expanding government-financed higher education allowed some young people from working-class backgrounds to move into these positions, but older and less-educated workers were vulnerable. Seeking to prevent the dislocation that had led to fascism and war, and often led by moderate socialist political parties that responded to labor interests, western European governments created a social safety net for workers and families, with unemployment insurance, family allowances, old-age pensions, government-supported health care, and inexpensive public housing, building what was termed the “welfare state.”

  As the dominant power in the First World, the USA experienced a postwar boom similar to that of Japan and western Europe, becoming the world's largest economy. Despite a growing population, per-worker productivity and real wages increased steadily from 1945 to 1975 as people built houses (often in suburbs around cities), bought cars to take them from work to home and on vacations on the nation's new interstate highway system, and filled their houses with consumer goods. Consumer spending became the driver of the US economy, and to a great degree of its culture, and has remained so, with global implications. Well-paying industrial jobs drew African Americans into northern cities from the South in what is often termed the “Great Migration.” Here as well as in the South they confronted segregation and discrimination, and beginning in the 1950s black leaders began a civil rights movement that challenged this. They often looked to Gandhi and other anticolonial leaders for inspiration and tactics, and worked for greater equity in schools, voting, housing, employment, and every other aspect of life. In the mid 1960s, laws prohibiting discrimination were passed and programs created to lessen poverty and provide a social safety net, although these never went as far as those in western Europe, as health care remained a matter for employers or individuals, and much of higher education was private.

  In the Soviet Union and the rest of the Second World, communism prescribed social egalitarianism, and education and health care became more widely available to all social groups. Party members and officials had easier access to housing and consumer goods, however, both of which were in short supply, as planners concentrated on heavy industry, not consumer products. Communism also prescribed gender egalitarianism, and women entered occupations that had been previously limited primarily to men, including engineering and medicine. Women continued to do almost all of the household tasks, however, and shortages in foodstuffs and household goods meant that they had to spend hours each day (after their paid workday was done) standing in lines. Because of this “second shift,” women were not free to attend Communist Party meetings or do extra work on the job in order to be promoted. In the 1970s Soviet Union, for example, though women made up over 50 percent of the paid workforce, only 0.5 percent of managers and directors were women, about the same as in Western democracies at that time.

  Immediately after World War II, the Soviet-dominated states of eastern Europe adopted the Stalinist system, nationalizing industries, collectivizing agriculture, limiting religious worship, and controlling the media and education. The communist regime established in Cuba in the 1950s as a result of the Cuban Revolution similarly abolished private property and repressed opposition to the government. Party control over cultural and intellectual life in communist states waxed and waned. Periods of liberalization were followed by crackdowns when reformers, students, workers, or opposition leaders voiced protests too loudly, or when eastern European countries attempted to leave the Soviet sphere, as they did in Hungary in 1956.

  Cold War conflicts and anti-colonial struggles came together in many parts of the world in the decades after World War II, including Guatemala and the Congo, and especially in Vietnam. In 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent country after the Japanese occupation ended. The French attempted to continue their colonial rule instead, but were defeated in 1954. A national election was supposed to be held, but the USA, worried that Ho would win, backed his non-communist opponents in South Vietnam, while Russia and China supported North Vietnam. The USA sent massive military aid, and then hundreds of thousands of troops, who bombed North Vietnam and engaged in a ground war. Support for the war in the USA was initially strong, but an anti-war movement grew in the 1960s, particularly on college campuses. Protests on campuses and in cities, some of which were put down violently, denounced the war as criminal, and despite a large loss of life on both sides US military victories were inconclusive. The USA withdrew from the war, and Vietnam became a unified communist nation in 1975.

  Protests against the Vietnam War, which occurred in many other parts of the world along with the USA, were part of a global youth movement among the unusually large and prosperous cohort of young people born in the postwar baby boom. Young people in the late 1960s, much like those of the 1920s, renounced what they saw as the militaristic and conformist values of their p
arents’ generation, wore clothing and hair styles that signified their countercultural values, and listened to new types of music—now rock 'n’ roll and folk music rather than jazz. Anti-war protests combined with other demonstrations: for women's rights and the rights of racial minorities in the USA; against right-wing governments in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico; for students’ and workers’ rights in France; against nuclear proliferation in Australia and western Europe. Even the Catholic Church saw calls for dramatic change emerge from within its ranks, as Latin American theologians and clergy created liberation theology, a movement that called on religious and political leaders to address the suffering and oppression of the poor and move toward greater social justice. Mass communication and cheap youth travel facilitated contacts among politically active students, who often idealized Marxist leaders such as Mao or Ho for their emphasis on social equality and revolutionary change. But calls for dramatic change occurred in the communist world as well, especially in Czechoslovakia in 1968 where reformers within the Czechoslovakian Communist Party calling for “socialism with a human face” eased civil rights and press restrictions.

  Liberation and liberalization

  The protests of the late 1960s suggested the possibility of revolutionary social transformation, but this was not to be. Soviet tanks rolled into the streets of Prague, crushing the reform movement and reintroducing rigid one-party rule. The Mexican government shot student protestors, as did police on several US university campuses. Advocates of liberation theology, including priests and nuns, were killed by repressive regimes and the movement itself was condemned in the 1980s by the Catholic Church's Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI) for its use of ideas taken from Marx. The military government in Brazil imposed martial law, and the military government in Argentina carried out what became known as the “dirty war,” imprisoning, torturing, and killing its opponents. In many newly independent African nations civil war, corruption, and ethnic tensions limited stability.