Between 1913 and 1950 the engine of growth that had transformed so much of the world seemed to break down. Global rates of growth of GDP slowed from 1.30 percent per annum between 1870 and 1913 to 0.91 percent between 1913 and 1950. The slowdown affected all the core regions of the Industrial Revolution but was even more pronounced in the former agrarian colossi, China and India. The apparent exception to the rule was Russia, whose annual growth rate rose from 1.06 percent during the late czarist period to 1.76 percent between 1913 and 1950.
The slowdown was caused in part by a breakdown in the international banking and trading systems that had helped spread the Industrial Revolution. Between 1870 and 1950 the proportion of world production that was traded internationally actually fell. Part of the problem was that the governments of industrializing countries were still learning how best to manage rapid economic growth, and all too often, like the great agrarian empires of the past, they treated growth as a zero-sum game (a situation in which a gain for one side entails a loss for the other side) that could be won only by excluding rivals
For more on these topics, please see the following articles: Colonialism p. 381 (v2)
Communism and Socialism p. 401 (v2)
Fascism p. 733 (v2)
Genocide p. 815 (v2)
World War I p. 2079 (v5)
World War II p. 2085 (v5) from protected markets. The burst of imperialism during the late nineteenth century was the most obvious expression of this rivalry; another was the spread of protectionism (protection of domestic producers through restrictions on foreign competitors), and a third was the emergence of a system of defensive alliances in Europe, which helped turn a crisis in the Balkans into a global war. Distrust and rivalry among the major industrial powers clogged the arteries of international exchange that were so crucial as a source of economic growth and political stability.
After the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, on 28 June 1914, Austria invaded Serbia, Russia intervened to defend Serbia, and Germany declared war on Russia, which dragged Russia’s allies, Britain and France, into the war. The global reach of European colonial and commercial networks dragged other regions into the war. German colonies in Africa, the Pacific, and China were seized by French, British, and Japanese armies; troops and supplies came to Europe from present and former colonies in India, southeastern Asia, Africa, Australasia, and North America as well as from semicolonies such as Argentina. In 1917 the United States entered the war against Germany.
Nineteenth-century military innovations ensured that World War I would be particularly bloody. New weapons included machine guns, tanks, airplanes, and chemical weapons such as mustard gas, which could burn out the internal organs of its victims. Ironically, medical improvements kept more troops at the front, only to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns or artillery in often futile raids on enemy positions. Modern industrial states mobilized for “total war” effectively as they took control of national economies to supply their armies. The home fronts—where women replaced men on the farms, in munitions factories, or on the railways—were as vital to success as the armies. Indeed, the role of women during World War I was a major factor in the rapid spread of women’s suffrage during the postwar years. World War I was not the first total war of the industrial era—the U. S. Civil War deserves that title more—but it demonstrated
Extract from All Quiet on the Western Front
Since its publication in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front has remained a classic novel about the personal anguish of soldiers in war. German writer Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) based the novel on his own experiences as a soldier during World War I. Below is one of the most profound quotes from the book.
But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony—Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?
Source: Remarque, E. M. (1929). All Quiet on the Western Front (A. W. Wheen, Trans., p. 223). New York. Fawcett Crest.
Even more powerfully the appalling scale and destructiveness of industrialized warfare, and it was the first truly global war of the modern era.
Global Upheaval
A punitive peace treaty negotiated in Versailles, France, and the failure of the newly created League of Nations ensured that the rivalries that had caused World War I did not go away. In 1929 the international trading and banking system finally collapsed, leading to a depression that affected all the major capitalist powers, as well as the Asian, Latin American, and African countries that supplied them with raw materials. The Great Depression seemed to confirm the socialist prediction that the capitalist system would eventually break down. Many governments retreated even further into autarchy (national economic self-sufficiency and independence) as they saw themselves competing for a dwindling share of world resources and markets.
In 1933 in Germany a fascist government emerged led by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Hitler was determined to reverse the losses of World War I, if necessary through
Conquest. Fascism also took hold in Italy, the birthplace of fascism’s founder, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), as well as in Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere. Fascism and socialism both reflected a deep disillusionment with the liberal capitalist ideologies of the late nineteenth century, but whereas fascists anticipated an era of national and racial conflict, in which the fittest and most powerful would triumph, revolutionary socialists framed the conflict in terms of class war that would pit capitalism against socialism.
The appearance in Russia of a Marxist-inspired state determined to overthrow capitalism was another apparent sign of the breakdown of nineteenth-century capitalism. Russia’s czarist government had encouraged industrial growth but had failed (unlike the Meiji government in Japan) to incorporate within its ruling structures the entrepreneurs who would be needed to make a success of industrialization. Eventually the rapid growth of an urban proletariat (working class) and the impoverishment of increasing numbers of peasants generated a social crisis that, when combined with military defeat during the Russo-Japanese War and the huge costs of participation in World War I, led to the collapse of the Russian imperial state. Traditional elites reacted too passively to the crisis, which allowed the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), to seize power and hold on to it during a brutal civil war (1918-1920).
The Bolsheviks were radical Marxists, committed to the overthrow of world capitalism and its replacement by a society in which productive resources such as the land, banks, and all large enterprises would be owned collectively. Under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin (1879-1953), the Soviet government took decisive and brutal steps to build up a noncapitalist industrial society capable of challenging the might of its capitalist rivals. Employing methods of state management pioneered during World War I, the Soviet government began to manage and coordinate the entire Soviet economy, leaving no significant role to market forces. To manage rapid industrialization and rearmament, the Soviet government created a huge, powerful, and coercive state apparatus, willing and capable of acting with extreme brutality
Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. • Karl Marx C1818—1883)
Where necessary. For a time people thought the new system might match the economic and military power of the major capitalist states. During the 1930s and again during the 1950s rates of economic growth were more rapid in the Soviet Union than elsewhere (although the lack of market prices in the Soviet command economy makes monetary comparisons difficult).
Rearmament
During the 1930s, in an international climate of increasing tension, all the major powers began to rearm. World War II began with attempts by Japan and Germany to create their own land empires. Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937; Germany’s expansionist drive led to war in Europe in 1939 after Germany invaded Poland. In 1941 the United States, now the largest economic power in the world, entered the war after Japan’s preemptive attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Soviet Union entered the war after being invaded by Ger-many. WorldWar II was fought in the Pacific and in eastern and southeastern Asia as much as in Europe, but eventually the economic and military power of the United States and the colossal mobilizational efforts of the Soviet Union helped turn the tide against the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy). World War II was even crueler than World War I. Sixty million people may have died— about 3 percent of the world’s population at the time.
The war ended with the use of the most terrible weapon yet invented—the atomic bomb. The first atomic bombs were dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Most of the casualties of World War II were civilians as the aerial bombing of cities became, for the first time, a recognized weapon of modern warfare. The extreme brutality of the war found its most potent symbol in the systematic murder by Hitler’s Nazi Party of almost 6 million Jews in what has come to be known as the “Holocaust.”
By the end of the war Europe no longer dominated the global economic system. The new superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union. Each had its own allies and clients, and each represented a different path to modernity. The size and power of the Communist bloc were enhanced by the incorporation of much of eastern Europe and by the emergence in 1949 of a Communist-dominated China led by Mao Zedong (1893-1976). By 1950 almost one-third of the world’s population lived under Communist governments. Throughout this period economic growth was more rapid outside of Europe, particularly in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, but also in regions such as Latin America.
The emergence of powerful anticolonial movements in southeastern Asia, India, Africa, and elsewhere marked the beginning of the end of European imperialism. In India the Indian National Congress, established in 1885, became a powerful supporter of independence, and in Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) it found an inspirational and creative leader whose nonviolent protests forced Britain to grant independence to the newly created states of India and Pakistan in 1947.
Despite the crises of the early twentieth century, socialist predictions of the death of capitalism were premature. Technological innovation was rapid throughout the period; the internal combustion engine entered mass production, aviation emerged (first as a weapon of war and then as a new form of commercial and personal transportation), and chemical substitutes for textiles and rubber were first produced. This was also the era of sonar, of nuclear power, and of oil. It also was an era of fundamental scientific breakthroughs, particularly in physics.
Other developments helped ensure that the capitalist engine of growth would revive and that the frenetic pace of economic growth of the nineteenth century would eventually be resumed. The managerial principles that would help revive growth first became apparent in the United States. Two developments were particularly important: mass production on assembly lines, pioneered by Henry Ford (1863-1947) in 1913, and mass consumerism, a phenomenon whose importance first became apparent during the 1920s as ordinary people began to gain access to modern goods such as cars, telephones, and radios.
Buying into Consumerism
Mass consumerism eventually provided a solution to the fundamental problem of underconsumption, which had
History gets thicker as it approaches recent times. • a. J. P. Taylor (1906—1990)
Haunted producers during the nineteenth century when, as productivity rose, they had greater difficulty marketing what they produced. From at least the 1870s people had realized that capitalist economies are prone to periods of boom and bust as productivity outstrips market demand. The business cycles of capitalist economies were the modern equivalents of the agrarian era’s Malthusian cycles of growth and decline, but, in a striking contrast, the business cycle was driven by overproduction, whereas Malthusian cycles had been driven largely by underproduction. During the early twentieth century people realized that raising demand might be a more promising way of ensuring long-term growth than seeking protected markets.
However, for demand to rise, governments and employers had to ensure that consumers had sufficient cash in their pockets to purchase goods and services. During the depression of the 1930s economists such as John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) argued that governments could help revive capitalist economies not by cutting wages further, but rather by boosting consumption through devices such as the provision of unemployment payments. However, governments were already experimenting with such devices. In the United States the “New Deal” of the 1930s pumped large amounts of money into the economy through government programs mostly designed to boost spending by creating employment through the building of new infrastructure such as roads and dams.
For capitalist governments mass consumption offered another advantage that undercut some of the anticapitalist arguments of Marxism and its offshoots. During the twentieth century people realized that populations with access to increasing material wealth were unlikely to turn into the sort of revolutionary proletariat that the German political philosopher Karl Marx had envisaged as the gravediggers of capitalism. Mass consumption was the capitalist antidote to revolution.
Crisis and Innovation
In many fields the crisis period of 1914-1945 was also a period of cultural revolution. The theory of relativity advanced by the U. S. physicist Albert Einstein (1879-
This line drawing by the poet ee cummings shows the austerity typical of so-called modern art.
1955) and quantum mechanics, developed by such scientists as Niels Bohr (1885-1962), Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961), Werner Heisenberg (1901 -1976), and Max Born (1882-1970), challenged earlier mechanistic models of the universe, while the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), by showing the importance of unconscious psychological drives, challenged
Examine the history of all nations and all centuries and you will always find men subject to three codes: the code of nature, the code of society, and the code of religion... [T]hese codes were never in harmony. • Denis Diderot C1713—1784)
Faith in the role of reason in human affairs. New art forms, such as cinema, brought artistic realism into mass culture and challenged artists and writers to experiment with new, less realistic forms of expressionism, from the cubism of painters such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) to the dream narrative of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1882-1941).
The new technologies of mass culture, including radio, newspapers, and particularly the cinema, offered new ways of influencing the ideas, attitudes, and fantasies of people throughout the world, and governments as well as advertisers came to appreciate their power. The Soviet government was particularly creative in using the mass media to spread its ideas. The new mass media also helped create a mass culture that could challenge the hegemony of traditional high culture. Outside of the industrial heartland, the revival of traditional religious and artistic traditions, such as those of Hinduism and Buddhism, began to play an important role in creating new national cultures that could challenge the cultural hegemony of the North Atlantic region.
World History
