D. OTHER POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Russia: Life with Czars

In the nineteenth century, Russia consolidated power over its vast territory by giving absolute power to its Romanov czars. The vast majority of the citizens were serfs with no rights, living an almost slavelike existence. Alexander I and Nicholas I frequently used the secret police to quash rebellions or hints of reform, despite the fact that an increasing number of Russians demanded change.

By the 1860s, long after the Enlightenment had had an effect on most developments in the West, Alexander II began some reforms. He issued the Emancipation Edict, which essentially abolished serfdom. It did little good. The serfs were given very small plots of land for which they had to give huge payments to the government to keep, so it was difficult for them to improve their lot. Some peasants headed to the cities to work in Russia’s burgeoning industries, but there, too, the reforms that softened some of the harsher working conditions in the West hadn’t made their way eastward. Whether in the fields or in the factories, the Russian peasants continued to live a meager existence, especially when compared to many of their western European counterparts.

Still, during the second half of the nineteenth century, a small but visible middle class started to grow, and the arts began to flourish. In a span of just a few decades, Russian artists produced some of the greatest works of all time: Tolstoy wrote Anna Kareninaand War and Peace,Dostoyevsky authored The Brothers Karamazov, and Tchaikovsky composed Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Meanwhile, an intellectual class well-acquainted with political and economic thought in the rest of Europe began to assert itself against the monarchy. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by a political group known as The People’s Will.

Alexander III reacted fiercely by attempting to suppress anything that he perceived as anti-Russian. Through a policy known as Russification, all Russians, including people in the far-flung reaches of the Empire that did not share a cultural history with most of Russia, were expected to learn the Russian language and convert to Russian Orthodoxy. Anyone who didn’t comply was persecuted, especially Jews. Meanwhile, terrible conditions in the factories continued, even as production capacity was increased and greater demands were put upon the workers.

By the time Nicholas II reigned (1894–1917), revolution was in the wind. The Socialists began to organize. Nicholas tried to rally Russians around the flag by going to war with Japan over Manchuria in 1904, but the Russians suffered a humiliating defeat. On a Sunday in 1905, moderates marched on the czar’s palace in a peaceful protest, an attempt to encourage him to enact Enlightened reforms, but Nicholas felt threatened and ordered his troops to fire on the protestors. The day has since been known as Bloody Sunday.

For the next decade, resentment among the working classes festered. In 1906, the czar attempted to enact legislative reforms by appointing a Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, and by creating the Duma, a body intended to represent the Russian people, but every time the Duma was critical of the czar, he immediately disbanded it. In the end, the attempts at reform were too little, too late. The Romanov Dynasty would soon come to an end.

The Ottoman Empire: Are They Still Calling It an Empire?

The Ottoman Empire began its decline in the sixteenth century and never was able to gain a second wind. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottomans continually fought the Russians for control of the Balkans, the Black Sea, and surrounding areas. Most of the time, the Russians were victorious. So by the nineteenth century, not only was the Ottoman Empire considerably smaller and less powerful, but it was in danger of collapse. Greece, Egypt, and Arabia launched successful independence movements. This worried Britain and France, who feared that if the Ottoman Empire fell entirely, the Russian Empire would seize the chance to take over the eastern Mediterranean. So, for the next century, Britain and France tried to keep the Ottoman Empire going if only to prevent Russian expansion, as they did in the Crimean War in 1853. At the same time, of course, Britain and France increased their influence in the region. In 1883, for example, Britain gained control of Egypt.

U.S. Foreign Policy: This Hemisphere Is Our Hemisphere

After the wave of independence movements swept Latin America in the early nineteenth century, Europe found itself nearly shut out of developments in the entire western hemisphere—even as European countries were swiftly colonizing Africa and Asia.

To ensure that Europe wouldn’t recolonize the Americas, U.S. President Monroe declared in his 1823 State of the Union Address that the western hemisphere was off-limits to European aggression. The United States, of course, wasn’t the superpower then that it is today, so it was hardly in a position to enforce its declaration, which became known as the Monroe Doctrine. But Britain, whose navy was enormous and positioned all over the globe, was fearful that Spain wanted to rekindle its American empire, so it agreed to back up the United States. As a result, the European powers continued to invest huge sums of money in Latin American business enterprises but didn’t make territorial claims. In 1904, after European powers sent warships to Venezuela to demand repayment of loans, President Theodore Roosevelt added what came to be known as the Roosevelt Corollary, which provided that the United States would intervene in financial disputes between European powers and countries in the Americas, if doing so would help to maintain the peace. While Latin American nations have at times benefited from the protection and oversight of their North American neighbor, the Monroe Doctrine also gave rise to anger and resentment in many Latin Americans, who sometimes saw the United States as exercising its own brand of imperialism in the region. This became clear when the United States incited Panamanians to declare their independence from Colombia, so that the United States could negotiate the right to build the Panama Canal in the Central American nation. Construction began in 1904 and finished in 1914.

In 1898, a European power was dealt another blow in its efforts to maintain its footing in the Western Hemisphere. Spain, which at that time still controlled both Cuba and Puerto Rico, was embroiled in conflict with Cuban revolutionaries when the United States, which sympathized with the Cubans, intervened and launched the Spanish-American War of 1898. In a matter of a few months, it was all over. The United States quickly and decisively destroyed the Spanish fleets in Cuba and in the Philippines, and thereby gained control of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba was given its independence, in exchange for concessions to the United States, including allowing the creation of two U.S. naval bases on the island. The United States, henceforth, was considered to be among the world powers.