Western Civilization II: Renaissance to the Present

This is Unit Four of Social Sciences and History, part two of two: Western civilization from the railways to nineteen ninety-one. Part one closed on Britain's first factories and on an idea, the growing state. This part carries a second idea beside it, the exam's own phrase for the period: Europe's expansion and its outposts, then its imperial contraction and new forms. Read as one curve, the five centuries cohere. The curve rises from fourteen ninety-two, gets a short technological lead from industry, peaks in nineteen twenty, and falls faster than it rose. The anchor insists throughout that the lead was an accident of technology, not of culture, and the capstone at the end draws the curve whole. By the end you will be able to answer sample question ten on urbanization. To classify a statement as conservative, liberal, nationalist or socialist. To answer sample question eight on unification. To say why nineteen fourteen came and why the war's disappointment fed fascism. And to trace Europe's reach as one curve.

Three entries on cities and ideologies: the railways and the working class, the sample question on urbanization, and four ideologies sorted by what they protect.

Railways and cities.

SSH 0325 Railways, Cities, and the Working Class

The first passenger railroad ran between Manchester and Liverpool in eighteen thirty; about sixty-five hundred miles followed in twenty years, and time zones with them. Manchester grew from about twenty thousand people in seventeen fifty to four hundred thousand in eighteen fifty, families living in one-room cellars under unfiltered smoke. Domestic service was the largest sector. Working-class women earned less and kept house besides.

The sample question on urbanization.

SSH 0326 Industrialization's Results: Reading the Claims

Sample question ten asks what industrialization did to nineteenth-century Western Europe, and the key is that it increased urbanization. The anchor's own sentence is that urbanization was the most noteworthy transformation of daily life, and its example is Manchester: about twenty thousand in seventeen fifty, forty thousand in seventeen seventy-five, two hundred fifty thousand in eighteen thirty-one, four hundred thousand in eighteen fifty. The mechanism: factories near coal and canals needed labor, and surplus rural population supplied it. The other results the anchor lists are secondary in the exam's sense: railways shrinking distance, mass print, middle-class holidays, new class divisions, abysmal living conditions. Look for the option that names a change in where people lived. Distractors name results that are true but not primary, or reverse the direction: a return to the countryside, a fall in population, a decline in trade. The trap is confusing cause with result. Population growth and commercial agriculture were causes of industrialization; urbanization was its result. The exam separates them.

The ideologies.

SSH 0327 Four Ideologies After Napoleon: Classifying a Claim

After eighteen fifteen four ideologies competed, and the exam asks which one a statement expresses. Conservatism: tradition, order and the thousand-year hierarchy, against legal equality and suffrage. Liberalism: freedom in all forms, from kings, noble privilege, economic interference and religious intolerance; the word in regular use by eighteen thirty; the middle classes. Nationalism: the state should match a people, with the French Revolution as model and Romanticism as seedbed. Socialism: the word coined in eighteen thirty-four against individualism, a moral order of mutual care before an economic one, and Marx naming the bourgeoisie as the agents of change. A statement that what has kept the peace for a thousand years should not be overturned by abstract rights is conservatism. Government should not interfere with trade, speech or worship: liberalism. A people sharing language and history deserves its own state: nationalism. The pursuit of individual wealth corrodes the community: socialism. Ask what the statement wants protected: order, freedom, a people, or the community. The trap is treating liberalism and nationalism as opposites; the anchor says the same middle-class people often held both. A second trap is reading early socialism as economics; the anchor calls its first decades ethical.

Four entries on nations and empires: Vienna and eighteen forty-eight, the sample question on unification, Victorian culture, and the new imperialism.

Vienna, eighteen forty-eight, and the unifications.

SSH 0328 Vienna, 1848, and the Unifications

The Congress of Vienna in eighteen fifteen restored monarchs, balanced five powers, and ignored nationality. Liberal revolts followed in Spain in eighteen twenty and in Russia. In eighteen forty-eight revolutions across Europe won briefly and were defeated. Mazzini's Young Italy inspired; Cavour and Victor Emmanuel united Italy. Britain and Russia were the exceptions, with no revolution. The German case comes next.

The sample question on unification.

SSH 0329 Who Unified What: Matching Leaders to Nations

Sample question eight asks who unified Germany, and the key is Bismarck. The anchor's account: after eighteen fifteen Germany was only a confederation and free trade zone; nationalism was strong, and eighteen forty-eight failed. Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian noble and chancellor to the Prussian king, unified Germany through war, not speeches, in his own phrase by iron and blood. He provoked Austria into war and beat it, then France, and in eighteen seventy-one the German Empire was proclaimed. The anchor calls him the inventor of Realpolitik, pragmatic enough to introduce social reforms to blunt socialism though he detested reform. Match each leader to a nation and a method. Bismarck: Germany, by Prussian war. Cavour: Italy, as Piedmont's minister, by diplomacy and war under Victor Emmanuel. Mazzini: Italy's romantic nationalist, whose Young Italy inspired but did not unify. Garibaldi, whom the witness names: Italy's soldier. Metternich, a common distractor: Austria's conservative at Vienna. The trap is the parallel. Cavour and Bismarck were similar officials, the anchor says, and the exam will offer Cavour as a distractor for Germany. The second trap is Realpolitik's authorship: inventor of Realpolitik is Brooks's characterization, attributed.

Victorian culture.

SSH 0330 Victorian Culture, Darwin, and Social Darwinism

Victorianism, eighteen thirty-seven to nineteen oh one, set bourgeois norms and class uniforms. Sewers and Pasteur advanced health, and French male literacy rose from under half at the Revolution to nearly all by nineteen hundred. Darwin's evolution was seized as Social Darwinism: Spencer's survival of the fittest, a phrase often misattributed to Darwin. First-wave feminism and modern anti-Semitism rose in the same decades.

The new imperialism.

SSH 0331 The New Imperialism: Technology, Motive, Plunder

Telegraph, weapons and quinine raised Europe's share of the globe from about a third to over eighty percent. The Second Industrial Revolution wanted raw materials, and the Scramble for Africa began in the eighteen eighties. Plunder economies followed: land expropriated, materials shipped, labor coerced, the Congo the extreme. Ethiopia at Adwa in eighteen ninety-six and Japan were the exceptions. Violence was empire's substance.

Five entries on the world wars: why nineteen fourteen, Russia and the interwar mood, fascism, the Second World War's course, and the Holocaust.

Nineteen fourteen.

SSH 0332 Why 1914, and Why It Lasted

Great-power rivalry and alliances meant no one wanted war and all risked it. Franz Ferdinand's assassination in nineteen fourteen by a Serbian nationalist lit it, and every socialist party voted for its own nation's war. Trenches, machine guns and mines made defense stronger than attack. Over twenty million died, in the anchor's count, and three empires ended. Unit six carries the global war.

Russia and the interwar mood.

SSH 0333 Revolution in Russia and the Interwar Mood

Nicholas the Second lost his throne to the revolutions of nineteen seventeen, and the old order of monarchs and nobles ended with the war. Modernism rejected melodrama and authority; Freud reframed the mind. Wartime gains for women were partly reversed, and suffrage was won in the twenties. The Great Depression from nineteen twenty-nine explains extremism's appeal, the anchor argues: progress had reversed.

Fascism.

SSH 0334 Fascism, Weimar, and the Nazis

Fascism glorified the state, rejected individualism, and prized hierarchy. Mussolini's party grew from a hundred members amid Italy's turmoil of nineteen nineteen. Weimar's liberal constitution was poisoned by the stab-in-the-back myth, and Hitler made the Nazis a mass party; Spain's civil war killed about six hundred thousand. Disappointment after victory fed fascism: every nineteenth-century movement had won, and war came anyway.

The Second World War.

SSH 0335 World War II's Course

The Nazis broke Versailles, rearmed from nineteen thirty-four, and met no resistance until Poland in September nineteen thirty-nine. Blitzkrieg took six countries in nine months. The invasion of the Soviet Union in nineteen forty-one was the war's center, with about twenty-five million Soviet dead, seventeen million of them civilians, in the anchor's figures. Coral Sea, Midway and Rommel's check turned the tide in nineteen forty-two.

The Holocaust.

SSH 0336 The Holocaust

The Nuremberg Laws of nineteen thirty-five stripped citizenship; Kristallnacht in nineteen thirty-eight was the first mass roundup. The Holocaust began with the Soviet invasion, when the Einsatzgruppen shot about a million people. From nineteen forty-two six extermination camps killed on arrival, and Eisenhower ordered the camps documented against future denial. Extermination camps were not concentration camps, which numbered thousands. Some six million Jewish people were murdered.

Four entries to close: Stalin and the Cold War, decolonization and the non-aligned, postwar Europe's new forms, and Europe's reach drawn as one curve.

Stalin and the Cold War.

SSH 0337 Stalin, the Cold War, and Its Proxies

Lenin's New Economic Policy allowed markets; after his death Stalin took power, forced industrialization, and purged party, army and police. The wartime alliance shared an enemy, not aims, and the Cold War followed: mutually assured destruction, an arms race, proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam. Khrushchev's secret speech blamed Stalin's cult. On the system's failure, the anchor offers three theories, picking none.

Decolonization.

SSH 0338 Decolonization and the Non-Aligned

Africa's independence came as fast as its conquest: Ghana in nineteen fifty-seven under Nkrumah, peaceful; Algeria, violent. Movements that avoided communist rhetoric escaped the superpowers, while Iran's oil nationalization brought a coup in nineteen fifty-three. Bandung in nineteen fifty-five founded the Non-Aligned Movement. Vietnam shows an independence struggle turned proxy war by its socialism.

Postwar Europe.

SSH 0339 Social Democracy, the EEC, and 1968

Democracy triumphed in the west with women voting almost everywhere, and social democracy guaranteed a minimum standard of living. The European Economic Community of nineteen fifty-seven multiplied trade, and the boom ran to the oil embargo of nineteen seventy-three; nineteen sixty-eight brought the youth movement, and Beauvoir's Second Sex dated from forty-nine. The Community became the European Union. Eastern Europe's system imploded under Gorbachev.

Europe's reach, out and back.

SSH 0340 Expansion and Contraction: Europe's Reach, 1492–1991

The exam's phrase for this half of Western civilization is Europe's expansion and its outposts, then its imperial contraction and new forms, and read as one curve the five centuries cohere. The curve rises in fourteen ninety-two, when Columbus sails on crusading zeal and commercial hope and Spain's conquests deliver bullion, catastrophe for native peoples, and a turn to enslaved African labor. It rises again in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and British replace bullion with commodities, invent the exchange, the bank and the corporation, and build trade empires whose plantations make the Atlantic slave trade the crime at capitalism's first phase. By eighteen hundred Europe controls about a third of the globe. The Industrial Revolution then gives it a lead the anchor insists was short, under a century, and telegraph, quinine and modern weapons carry the share past eighty percent by nineteen hundred: India under a hundred thousand officials, Africa scrambled in twenty years. The curve peaks in nineteen twenty. Then it falls, faster than it rose. The First World War ends three empires and drains the victors; the Second leaves Europe in ruins and two superpowers outside it; between nineteen forty-seven and the sixties Asia and Africa take independence as quickly as they had lost it, by negotiation in Ghana, by war in Algeria and Vietnam, while the non-aligned refuse the Cold War's sides. What Europe builds in place of empire are the new forms the exam names: social democracy at home, the Community and then the Union among states. In nineteen ninety-one the Soviet half of the postwar order dissolves, and the curve ends where the course's history ends. The percentages are the anchor's estimates. The curve explains the exam's pairing of expansion with contraction; it does not explain why any single colony was taken or freed, and the anchor's warning stands that European dominance came from a historical accident of technology, not from culture. That is the idea this lecture opened with, drawn whole.

Look at what you can now do. You can answer sample question ten: industrialization's primary result was urbanization, and population growth was a cause, not a result. You can classify a statement by what it wants protected: order, freedom, a people, or the community. You can answer sample question eight: Bismarck unified Germany by Prussian war, Cavour Italy by diplomacy, and Mazzini inspired without unifying. You can say why nineteen fourteen came, alliances that no one wanted to use and all risked, and why victory's disappointment fed fascism. And you can trace Europe's reach as one curve, a third of the globe by eighteen hundred, over eighty percent by nineteen hundred, a peak in nineteen twenty, and a fall faster than the rise, with the anchor's warning that the lead was technology, not culture. Unit five opens on the world before fifteen hundred, seen from everywhere at once.