Chapter 9

Clashing All Around the World

In This Chapter

Fighting back in the colonies

Rocking Europe to the revolutionary beat

Leaping forward in fields of transportation and communication

Feeling the reverberations of the World Wars and the Cold War

As the nineteenth century began, the world headed in two directions at once — defiantly away from European imperialism, and headlong into the most imperialist period ever.

After two monumental revolutions — the American rebellion against British rule, and the French overthrow of monarchist order — liberation movements rose in overseas colonies such as the Spanish-ruled lands in Latin America, and on the European continent. These movements rolled on into the early twentieth century, when reform fervor turned Russia into a new kind of socialist state.

In France, revolutionary spirit faded as Napoleon Bonaparte took over, carving France’s European neighbors into an empire. Britain joined with Prussia, Russia, and other allies to stop Bonaparte’s land-grabs, yet Britain amassed more territory for itself at the same time. Although it lost North American colonies, Britain secured an empire that stretched around the world.

Africans, Asians, and other people intent on resisting European control or tossing out their European masters had a difficult job ahead of them — especially before Europe’s powers clashed in cataclysmic twentieth-century conflicts that caught fire throughout their worldwide empires, drawing in non-European powers, too. World War I and World War II depleted the resources and resolve of colonial powers, forcing them to let go of third-world possessions. Those wars also led people worldwide to reevaluate warfare and begin international efforts intended to prevent future armed conflicts.

Managing Unprecedented Empires

Since the Portuguese sailors Magellan and da Gama pioneered sea routes around the world in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (see Chapter 8), a handful of nations built empires like nothing the world knew before. Russia extended its territory eastward across Asia to the Pacific Ocean, and venturing westward, descendants of Europeans in North America spread to the Pacific.

In 1915, both England and France ruled more people in overseas possessions than they did at home. Africa, much of which hadn’t even been explored by Europeans before 1800, had by a century later become a crazy patchwork quilt of colonies held by Germany, Belgium, France, and other colonial powers.

Britain battles on multiple fronts

Britain should have beaten the nankeen britches off the upstart American rebels in the 1770s and 1780s. What were nankeen britches? Also called breeches, they were the khakis of their time — trousers made out of sturdy, buff-colored cotton cloth that the British East India Company bought from Chinese traders — and that’s not as beside the point as it seems.

At the time of the American Revolution, the British were the greatest sea power of the world and one of the biggest trading powers. They were on their way to amassing an empire that, at its height, would have made Alexander the Great’s eyes pop out of his handsome Macedonian head.

The American setback (although the American Revolution wasn’t a setback to the colonists) could be blamed on just how far-flung and thinly spread the British had become. They were busy in other corners of the globe in the late eighteenth century. British soldiers fought French forces in West Africa and the West Indies and faced Dutch opposition in India. Spain got into the fight and blockaded the British colony at Gibraltar. Meanwhile, East India Company troops plunged into the second of four closely spaced Mysore Wars against the Muslims who ruled southwest India.

British manpower was so overstretched and its wealth so great that Britain resorted to fighting the American war with hired German mercenaries, the Hessians. (Hesse is a state in Germany.) Well-trained but hardly united behind the British cause, many German soldiers became Americans after the war.

In the larger scheme of world domination, Britain’s setback in America — even Britain’s inability to bring the Americans to their knees in the War of 1812 — amounted to not all that much. Not compared to all the victories and conquests the British made in the nineteenth century.

 Progress for colonial powers amounted to blows upon many of the world’s indigenous peoples. Australia, the last habitable continent to receive Europeans, was home to a British penal colony starting in 1788. Voluntary settlers followed. Many Australian Aborigines who were isolated from most of the world for many thousands of years met the same fate as natives in the Americas: widespread disease that was often fatal. Without immunities against the Europeans’ diseases and no weapons to match the Europeans’ guns, the entire native population of Tasmania, the large island off Australia’s southern shore, died between 1803, when the British built a penal colony there, and 1876. They were wiped out in one lifetime.

 “Wherever the European has trod,” wrote the English biologist Charles Darwin in 1836, “death seems to pursue the aboriginal.” Darwin was thinking of Australia, the Americas, Polynesia, and Africa.

By the early twentieth century, Britain’s empire included some 400 million people, with only 35 million of them in the United Kingdom (which at that time still included what’s now the Republic of Ireland).

Reinventing post-revolutionary France

Circumstances in Europe forced the British to take other challenges more seriously than they did the American colonists’ breakaway. Another rebellion against a king, the French Revolution (see Chapter 8) changed France radically in 1789, but the governments in Paris and London remained enemies — more bitterly opposed than ever.

British/French rivalry only intensified as Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in Paris and made much of Europe his empire. Conquering Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands, Napoleon tried to overtake the entire continent in the early nineteenth century.

Napoleon was so successful in his military conquests and so powerful that some of his bitterest opponents — including Austria and Britain — agreed to fragile, short-lived peace agreements that gave economic and territorial concessions to France.

 Finally, in 1812, making a serious mistake, Napoleon invaded Russia, marching a force of 500,000 men over muddy, rutted terrain. The outmatched Russians withdrew so rapidly that the French found themselves penetrating all the way to Moscow, trailed by supply wagons that couldn’t keep the pace and broke down trying. Napoleon’s troops were used to foraging and living off the land while on the march, but Russia — a land of poor, widely spaced farms with meager crops that had already been raided or even burned by the retreating Russians — offered too little sustenance. Napoleon conquered Moscow but then was unable to provision or shelter his troops through the coming Russian winter, especially after a fire of disputed origin devastated the city. Thousands of starving French soldiers froze to death during a desperate trudge back west.

Anti-Bonapartist European nations — Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, Sweden, and more — joined in a series of alliances during Napoleon’s years of power. Although these countries’ leaders often distrusted each other, they distrusted Napoleon more.

 After the disaster of the Russian invasion, Napoleon was vulnerable. His foes took advantage of the situation and invaded France in 1814. Armies commanded by Alexander I of Russia removed the self-made French emperor from his throne that year. Napoleon was exiled to an island, Elba, in the Mediterranean, but he didn’t call it quits. Napoleon escaped Elba, seized power in Paris, and fought the allies again. Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria defeated Napoleon one final time at Waterloo, Belgium, on June 18, 1815.

Another Louis — number XVIII, the former king’s brother — had taken the throne during the Elba exile but had to skip town when Bonaparte came back. After Waterloo, Louis donned the crown and stayed awhile.

 What happened to Louis XVII? The son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette reportedly died in prison without even getting a style of furniture named after him. The fact that he wasn’t guillotined led to rumors that he was still alive. A number of imposters claiming to be Louis XVII emerged long after the revolution. Some won small groups of followers, but little came of it.

Dividing up Africa

Europeans put their figurative foot in Africa’s door in the fifteenth century. Portugal was both the first European sea power to sail around Africa and the first to establish a slaving station on the continent’s west coast, dealing in human merchandise before 1500.

Other European nations followed the Portuguese into profitable slave trading. Yet it was inevitable that the empire-builders would eventually want more from Africa than just its captive labor. In the nineteenth century, territory-hungry Europeans carved the continent into colonies.

Making gradual inroads

Taking large pieces of African turf took a while for Europeans because, for hundreds of years after the Portuguese began landing at African ports, few outsiders were able to penetrate the interior. Thick jungles, forbidding deserts, and disease-ridden wetlands made overland journeys difficult. In 1760, Europeans knew no more about Africa beyond Egypt and the Mediterranean than their ancestors had known in Roman times — maybe less.

Presuming Dr. Livingstone

In the 1860s, while on an African expedition to settle a dispute about the source of the Nile (Europeans weren’t sure where the river started), British explorer, medical doctor, missionary, and popular author Dr. David Livingstone disappeared.

Famous for his earlier African explorations, Livingstone intrigued British and American newspaper readers, who eagerly devoured any report about him. Lacking anything to report on the missing doctor, the The New York Herald hired another explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, to go after Livingstone. (Stanley had made his reputation writing dispatches from the American West and the Middle East.)

After two rough years of searching, Stanley sent back a story reporting what he said when he found the man: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Maybe because the public waited so long for news of Livingstone, or because Stanley’s greeting was such an understated, civilized conclusion to such a long, difficult search, the phrase struck a nerve. As the only other white man for hundreds of miles, of courseit was Dr. Livingstone. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” became a catchphrase quoted over and over well into the twentieth century.

Livingstone was seriously ill when Stanley came across him and died before he could return to Britain. After finding Dr. Livingstone, Stanley led another expedition into Africa, and his 1878 book about the trip, Through the Dark Continent, was a bestseller.

Scotsmen James Bruce and Mungo Park began changing that limitation with their expeditions — Bruce in Ethiopia and Park in West Africa — in the late eighteenth century. As more European explorers followed, word got out about the vast resources of Africa’s interior.

 Europe’s Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 15), which began in the eighteenth century, ate up raw materials. Nineteenth-century Europeans realized that they could mine, cut, and grow such resources in the wilds of Africa, so nations began sending armed expeditions to claim rights over one chunk after another of the big, yet-untapped continent.

By the early twentieth century, the African map was a jigsaw puzzle with pieces bearing European names such as French West Africa, Belgian Congo, German South West Africa, British East Africa (Kenya), and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (British-controlled), as shown in Figure 9-1.

Overwhelming Africa’s defenders

African peoples such as the Asante and the Zulu tried to resist the Europeans who took over their lands, but the natives were largely outgunned.

Samory (or Samir) Ture, the self-appointed emperor of Guinea in West Africa, built an Islamic nation in the region of the upper Niger River and had a large and disciplined, if poorly equipped, army at his command. From 1883, Emperor Ture fought hard to keep out Europeans, but squeezed between the French and the British, he had little chance. His army was defeated and he died in exile in Gabon in 1900.

Only one African nation successfully resisted the Europeans. Ethiopia smashed an invading Italian army of 17,000 at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Ethiopia was the only independent native African nation left.

Challenges Test European Dominance

By the early twentieth century, white Europeans and their descendants ruled so much of the world that it’s easier to say what they hadn’t yet grabbed than to list everything they had.

As I mention in the previous section, Ethiopia was a black-ruled holdout in Africa. Persia and the Ottoman Empire resisted in the Middle East — although the long-lived Ottoman Empire, based in Istanbul and ruled since the fifteenth century by an Islamic Turkish dynasty, was only a ghost of its mighty former self. In Asia, Japan stood apart. So did China, but shakily. Beyond that handful of nations, there was little that Europe (or the descendants of Europeans — as in the United States) didn’t control besides poor countries no European power wanted.

Yet even the strongest colonial powers could never take their holdings for granted. They had to fight to keep their trade advantages, as when China resisted European hegemony over its ports. The colonial powers also had to fight against uprisings both by colonists and conquered indigenous people, as happened in South America and Africa. And they had to watch for new powers rising to rival them, as Japan did as it emerged from a long, self-imposed isolation.

Turning against Spanish rule in Latin America

 Spain’s greatest empire from the time of Christopher Columbus was in the Americas. Land claims based on explorations and conquests in the late fifteenth century brought Spanish rule to much of southern and western North America, all of Central America, and most of South America.

Yet rebels began challenging Spain’s authority in South America starting in the late eighteenth century. In Peru in 1780, Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui rallied miners and factory workers — descendants of the Inca — against their Spanish bosses. They attacked Cuzco and La Paz in neighboring Bolivia.

Condorcanqui, a rich man of mixed Spanish-Inca heritage, called himself Tupac Amaru, borrowing the name of a sixteenth-century emperor. The Spanish caught and tortured him to death and finally crushed the revolt after two years. But more unrest was on the way within the Spanish empire in the Americas.

Confusing leadership in Chile

Spanish authority in the Americas really faltered after Napoleon, self-crowned emperor of France and conqueror of Spain, knocked King Ferdinand VII off the throne back in Madrid. In 1808, Napoleon gave Spain’s crown to Joseph Bonaparte, his brother. Two years later in Chile, a Spanish captain-general lost his power to a junta (a political committee) that, in turn, was replaced by one republican leader and then another, creating continuous confusion. When Ferdinand regained his Spanish throne in 1814, royalist troops marched to restore authority in Chile, and the military leader who emerged from the republican chaos to fight them was Bernardo O’Higgins. (Now there’s a historical name you ought to remember, even if you forget what he did.)

Breaking away with Bolívar

The situation in South America began to snowball as King Ferdinand VII reassumed control of Spain and its empire. Simón Bolívar, inspired by the North American patriots and the French revolutionaries, got the idea that the entire, chili pepper-shaped continent needed to break free from Spain. His revolutionaries took over Venezuela in 1816. Then Bolívar beat the Spanish in Colombia, where he became president. He went back to Venezuela when the Spanish tried to recapture it and drove them out again. Yet Bolívar was far from finished.

Hopping borders with Jose de San Martin

Down in Argentina, the Spanish-trained soldier Jose de San Martin led a revolutionary army in that country’s fight for independence. Then he joined O’Higgins, who had been driven out of Chile by royalist troops. Together, they beat Spanish forces, and Chile declared independence in 1818. With O’Higgins in charge as Supreme Director (dictator), San Martin headed to the next spot on the map — Peru.

He beat the Spanish forces yet again, declaring Peru independent in 1821. He even stayed on for a bit to lead the new government in Lima. After he retired in 1822, the Peruvians got a good replacement — Simón Bolívar — who drove the remaining Spanish forces out and became dictator in 1824. But Bolívar still wasn’t finished overturning Spain’s colonial authorities. He moved north and founded Bolivia.

Struggling in Mexico

Mexico’s struggle to break free of Spain began only a few decades after the United States had thrown off British rule, but Mexico suffered many setbacks on its way to a stable independent government. Early in the nineteenth century, Spanish authorities arrested two priests, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon, for spreading ideas from the French Revolution (see Chapter 8). Both received the death sentence, but the revolutionary fever took hold. Augustin de Iturbide broke Mexico free of Spain in 1823, declaring a short-lived Mexican-Guatemalan Empire. The following year, Mexican patriots replaced Iturbide with a constitution based on that of the United States.

The biggest setbacks in Mexico came in quick succession from the 1830s–1860s. Still struggling to find its feet after winning independence from Spain, Mexico lost its northeastern state of Texas to a second-generation independence movement in 1836. Then Mexico lost huge territories in western North America to the U.S. in the Mexican-American War of 1846–1848.

 France and some of its European allies invaded Mexico in 1861. Mexican forces defended the homeland, scoring a notably improbable and heroic victory on May 5, 1862, at the city of Puebla. The occasion is still celebrated as the holiday Cinco de Mayo. The Europeans persisted and eventually prevailed, however, and about a year later, Emperor Napoleon III offered the Mexican throne to Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph, Archduke of Austria, who belonged to the powerful Hapsburg Dynasty of Europe.

Maximilian didn’t last long as emperor of Mexico. Napoleon III withdrew French troops, leaving his puppet unable to maintain authority. Mexican General Benito Juarez defeated and captured Maximilian in May 1867 and ordered the deposed emperor executed.

Reclaiming Africa for Africans

Although conquered fairly late in the game by Europeans, Africa didn’t wait long to get in on the rebellion business. Although their revolt failed, the people of Zimbabwe rebelled against the British in 1896. Africans in Tanzania rose against their German government in 1905, but that movement, too, was crushed. Germany’s colonial troops burned crops to create a famine and weaken the Tanzanian rebels.

The Herero and Nama people of Namibia suffered incredible losses in uprisings against the Germans. The cattle-raising Nama were reduced from a population of 20,000 to less than half that. Of the estimated 80,000 Herero living in central Namibia before the war, only 15,000 were left in 1911.

This struggle finally began to result in self-rule for African nations in the 1950s. In 1948, riots shook Ghana (then called the Gold Coast) and the British, whose home nation was impoverished by World War II, realized that they could no longer afford an empire. Other colonial powers also woke up to the same reality during WWII. The war had rocked the European empires to their foundations.

Rising Asians

In the 1820s, the Dutch rulers in Java (one of the larger islands in today’s Indonesia) fought a Javanese prince, Diponegoro, who tried to liberate his island from the foreigners. The Dutch arrested and exiled him. As in so many colonial holdings, Indonesian independence had to wait until after the turmoil of the World Wars loosened the Europeans’ hold.

Europe had to fight to hang onto its economic dominance in other parts of East Asia, too. The Chinese went to war against Britain from 1839–1842 and again from 1856–1860 over the issue of illegal British imports of the drug opium from India to China (see Chapter 8). Although China lost the fight and had to allow trading concessions to the British and other European powers as a result, deep-seated resentment lingered.

Japan unleashes pent-up power

In Japan, teenage Emperor Meiji inherited the throne in 1867. Simultaneously, the longstanding system of rule by a shogun, a warlord far more powerful than the emperor, was crumbling under pressure from nobles and others eager for the long-isolated nation to adopt Western technology. After 700 years of shogunate rule and a short civil war, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, gave up his powers in 1868.

Called the Meiji Restoration, this transition freed the emperor to pursue modernization and launch an ambitiously militaristic foreign policy strategy. While many empires of the era fell back or held steady, Japan gained territory from China in the 1890s and from Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. The latter was a humiliating defeat for the Russians. In 1910, Japan seized control of Korea. This empire-building continued long beyond Meiji’s death in 1912. In 1932, Japan turned Chinese Manchuria into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.

 Tom Cruise stars in the 2003 box-office hit The Last Samurai, a film loosely — and I mean extremely loosely — based on Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Enjoy it, but don’t mistake the story for fact.

Ricocheting unrest comes home to Europe

Europe didn’t shake the unrest at home after the French Revolution because the ideas that fueled upheaval in 1789 didn’t go away. The French saw another revolution in 1848, although this one didn’t involve as much head-chopping. France replaced King Louis Phillipe, a champion of the rich, by electing Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon I, to a four-year presidency in 1850. Under a banner of law and order, the new president worked to consolidate his power and succeeded in getting the French Senate to declare him Emperor Napoleon III in 1852.

 What about Napoleon II? He never got his opportunity. Born in 1811, Napoleon’s son was a small child when hard-line supporters of a Napoleonic dynasty tried to prop him up as an emperor in 1815. The allies who beat his dad at Waterloo discouraged the attempt, and Junior moved to Vienna and stayed out of the way.

 France had rebellious company in 1848. Many Europeans were miserable — hungry, out of work, and angry — because the changes that accompanied the agricultural and industrial revolutions didn’t benefit everyone. Revolutionary movements broke out in Austria and Hungary (they finally got rid of serfdom, a medieval form of forced labor) and in many German and Italian states. Revolts also rocked Ireland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The revolutionaries failed to overthrow their governments, but the people made themselves heard. Change was in the air. Most of Europe — especially Western Europe — headed toward democracy, but it wasn’t a smooth, easy road.

Revolting in Russia

The pressures that erupted into the 1848 revolutions in Europe were much the same as the pressures that brought about revolution in Russia a half-century later. In 1905, Russian troops fired on Russian workers marching in the streets of St. Petersburg who were trying to win higher wages and shorter hours in the factories.

Shooting at them didn’t work. The surviving demonstrators went on strike, and strikes spread from St. Petersburg to other Russian cities. Then the rebellion spread to rural revolts against landlords.

Standing apart up north

Russia had long been a special case among European nations — partly because although huge, it was so remote, northern, and inland. Founded by Swedish Vikings, the Russian nation had begun forming in the ninth century. As in Poland, the indigenous population was largely Slavs, a people of obscure origin who had somehow withstood centuries of Huns, Goths, Avars, and other barbarians rumbling past on their way into Europe.

In social, economic, and technological progress, Russia lagged behind countries to the west. To a Russian, even a Russian of the highest rank, the Western European level of craftsmanship and skill in fields ranging from shipbuilding to architecture to weaponry to printing seemed remarkably advanced. Peter I (also known as Peter the Great; see Chapter 22), who became sole ruler of Russia in 1696, spent two years traveling in places such as England, France, and the German states, learning about a wide variety of industries. When he returned, he brought experts and teachers with him, because he was determined to drag Russians into the eighteenth century, kicking and screaming if necessary.

 Yet despite its early modernizations, Russia still stood apart in that it was mired in the past as the nineteenth century changed the rest of Europe. For example, as many European nations abolished the old feudal system of serfdom, Russia went the other way, making even more people serfs. Serfs were not little blue cartoon characters from the 1980s (those are Smurfs), but rather people at the bottom rung of society who had no rights. Serfdom disappeared from England in the Middle Ages but continued in many lands on the European continent. France formally abolished the institution with its Revolution of 1789; in Austria and Hungary, serfdom endured until 1848. Russia finally freed its serfs in 1861. (Smurfdom, on the other hand, continues in TV reruns in many parts of the world.)

Rushin’ toward rebellion

Perhaps it’s not surprising that revolutionary unrest hit Russia hard and went to extremes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

You’d think Russian peasants, having been freed from serfdom, would be contentedly happy, but an unfair land settlement left many without enough soil in which to grow adequate food to support themselves. Ironically, better medical care made the situation worse. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, fewer peasants died of disease, which left more mouths to feed.

High taxes also fueled unrest. Urban professionals and nobles didn’t like paying for their government to build an expensive fleet of warships just to see the Japanese sink those ships during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

 Unrest locked up the country. In 1905, rebels elected representatives to the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, a council to coordinate strikes and demonstrations. Other soviets, or councils, soon formed across Russia. In October 1905, Czar Nicholas II agreed to reforms, including the creation of a Russian parliament, the Duma. By giving unhappy Russians a legislative body, Nicholas hoped to provide a safety valve to ease political dissatisfaction — a place for society to air its grievances. But the Duma was doomed from the beginning. On the left, socialist groups boycotted it. On the right, reactionaries in Nicholas’s court fought the Duma’s efforts to reform tax and farm policies. The czar’s advisors convinced Nicholas to dissolve the legislature every time they didn’t like its direction. Between 1905 and 1912, he dissolved the Duma three times.

In 1917, after 5 million Russian soldiers died in World War I, Czar Nicholas faced widespread unrest. Again, he ordered a disobedient Duma to dissolve itself, but the legislators refused his order.

Taking power: The Soviet Union

After forcing Czar Nicholas to abdicate, a broad coalition of representatives — liberals, social democrats, and agrarian socialists — formed a provisional government and set up headquarters in the czar’s Winter Palace. The provisional government held elections for a Constituent Assembly — a representative body to draft a constitution. But before the assembly met, extremists led by Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin seized power by force.

Lenin’s followers called themselves Bolsheviks, which means “majority,” even though they were a minority. They captured the palace in October 1917. Lenin allowed the Constituent Assembly to convene in January 1918, but then he used soldiers to break it up.

Lenin and his Red Army fought counterrevolutionaries over the next few years, but Russia — renamed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or the Soviet Union, for short — became a very different beast for most of the twentieth century.

 Inspired by the writings of Karl Marx, a nineteenth-century German economic philosopher, Lenin set up a government based on national ownership. Everything belonged to the government, and everybody worked for the government (or, nominally, for “the people”). For the first time ever, a great national power was run by leaders who wanted to overthrow and replace all existing society with communism’s new economic model.

Not really progress for the people

As Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, later proved, a Leninist-Marxist system could bring about rapid industrialization, turning Russia into one of the two greatest economic and military powers in the world. But on the way toward economic gains, Stalin left many millions of Russians dead. His so-called agricultural reforms caused widespread starvation.

In the 1930s, Stalin brutally eliminated any colleague he perceived as a rival for his power, staging show trials and executions of many men who had stood beside him in 1917. The USSR’s most revered Bolshevik veterans were forced to confess to unlikely crimes and then were sentenced to death by firing squad or a term in a prison camp from which they would never return. From 1934–1938, hundreds of thousands of lesser officials also disappeared as victims of Stalin’s purges.

Nobody knows exactly how many people Stalin killed and imprisoned, but estimates range as high as tens of millions dead.

Returning Russia

By 1991, the Soviet Union was in economic ruin, strained by Cold War military spending, and fell apart. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Russian Republic, successor to the USSR, reemerged as an important economic and military power with what U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates characterized as an “aggressive posture” toward neighboring states.

Accelerating toward the Present: Transportation and Communication

As you get closer to modern times, you find that human civilization quickly became more tightly crisscrossed with interconnections between peoples and places than ever before. Technological innovation was a major factor in the change as people used new machines born of the Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 15) to make distances less . . . well, less distancing in terms of both transportation and communication.

Getting somewhere in a hurry

Ever since the discovery of new sea routes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, oceans brought continents together as much as they separated them. Harnessing steam power in the eighteenth century meant ships covered oceanic distances quicker, or at least at a steadier, more reliable pace. After the steam engine got wheels, a land transportation revolution quickly followed.

Steaming into port

The steam engine, first used to pump water out of coal and tin mines, became a primary engine of the Industrial Revolution. This coal-fired power source was adapted to drive boats successfully early in the nineteenth century.

Robert Fulton, an American, built a functional steamship called the Claremont in 1807. Around the same time, England’s Patrick Bell built a similar boat. At first, steam was considered useful mainly for river and canal travel, but by the 1830s, steamships were already taking trans-oceanic voyages. Shippers could keep to schedules as never before because they weren’t relying on favorable winds. As a result, international commerce boomed. Steam, rather than sail, soon interlinked vast empires such as Britain’s.

By the 1880s, steam engines powered virtually every kind of vessel — warship, cargo carrier, passenger liner. Steam-driven navies featured battleships that could be more heavily armed and more heavily armored than any in history. (For more about technological advances in modern warfare, see Chapter 18.)

 Steam engines became so reliable that ships finally stopped carrying sails at all. The sailor’s craft, which was once all about canvas, rope, and pulleys, became an occupation concerned with boilers, pistons, and coal fire.

Working on the railroads

Richard Trevithick, a British engineer, put a steam engine on wheels in 1804 and made it run on rails. (Mining wagons pulled by animals had long run on iron rails.) In 1825, England saw its first commercial railway — the Stockton and Darlington. By 1851, there were rail networks in 17 other countries. By the end of the century, Russia had built a railroad across Siberia.

 In the U.S., people who had spent arduous months crossing the continent westward to California in wagons could retrace the journey in a week, rumbling along in rail passenger cars. Rail travel revolutionized commerce by opening up vast inland areas — once too isolated for large-scale settlement — to trade, commercial agriculture, and city-building as brand new communities grew up along rail lines.

Driving innovations

 The steam engine uses heat from a fire to create steam in a boiler. Steam pressure then pushes a piston, which in turn powers locomotive wheels or a ship’s propeller. The early success of this technology inspired some dreamers to wonder if it would be possible to build an engine containing the fire itself within the cylinder — an internal combustion engine. In Switzerland, Isaac de Rivaz (or Rivas) built such an engine in 1804 and used it to push a cart across a room. Rivaz’s machine, however, wasn’t practical. It burned a mixture of purified hydrogen and air, which had to be injected manually with every pump of the cylinder. Rivaz also had to kick open an exhaust valve every time the engine fired. Other inventors, among them Samuel Brown of England and Jean-Joseph-Etienne Lenoir, improved on Rivaz’s crude design through the middle of the nineteenth century.

These new internal combustion engines were much lighter than the steam engine because they didn’t require a cumbersome boiler or firebox. So, they seemed well-suited for powering vehicles light enough to travel on roads built for horse-drawn traffic rather than on the rails required for heavy steam locomotives.

In Germany in 1885, engineer Karl Benz used an internal combustion engine to power a practical motor car. (The word car began as a shortened version of carriage.) His vehicles led to one of the twentieth century’s biggest and most world-changing industries.

 Large-scale automobile manufacturing took off in 1908 when American Henry Ford (1863–1947) began using an assembly-line factory in Michigan to make cars affordable for the middle class. From that time on, automobiles changed people’s lifestyles. Cars sparked road construction and changed the shape of cities as newly mobile workers relocated from central cities to suburban neighborhoods.

Taking to the air

Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio, Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur, flew an airplane for the first time in 1903. Commercially built aircraft followed, with passenger travel right behind. Places formerly days apart by train or car were soon separated by mere hours — and even fewer hours as passenger jets came on the scene after World War II.

Sending word

By the middle of the nineteenth century, it was possible to send messages over wires by electric current. The technological advance of the telegraph amounted to a communications revolution in itself, but it was only the beginning of a wired-up world.

Stringing cables

 Samuel Finley Breese Morse, an American artist and inventor, came up with the first practical, wide-scale application for electromagnetic impulses when he invented Morse code in 1837. Seven years later he sent an instantaneous message, “What hath God wrought!” over a telegraph line strung from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.

What did he mean by that? It was a reverent expression of wonder. Soon cables crisscrossed industrialized countries in Western Europe and North America, and then they spread to more remote parts of the world.

Talking on the phone

Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), a speech and hearing therapist, put his interest in sound and communication together with telegraphic technology to build an experimental telephone in 1876.

Bell, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, founded the Bell Telephone Company to build and market his invention. By the early twentieth century, the phone was becoming an everyday convenience.

In 1977, the U.S. electronics company Motorola developed a wireless telephone that connected with the public telephone network through a system of short-range radio cells. In the twenty-first century, personal cellphones — which continue to get smaller and less expensive — are everywhere and threaten to replace traditional landline phones.

Sending radio waves

At the end of the nineteenth century, Italian-born inventor Gugliemo Marconi demonstrated that radio waves could be used to send signals without wires. In 1901, he successfully sent a wireless telegraph signal all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. Marconi won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1909.

By adding voice-signal technology developed for the telephone by Bell (more about him in the previous section) and by American inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931) for his innovative phonograph, engineers turned radio communication into a voice-transmission system for ships and airplanes. Radio also became an entertainment medium as businesspeople saw it as a way to publicize their products. Advertisers began sponsoring music, news, drama, and comedy programs as affordable receivers allowed more and more people to tune in. People over vast distances joined as a common audience for this new experience.

Radio gave birth to television. In the 1920s, inventors in the U.S. came up with devices for sending electronic pictures using radio waves. Philo T. Farnsworth invented an electronic picture scanning system in 1922, and Vladimir K. Zworkin followed with the television camera and picture tube in 1923. By the middle of the twentieth century, these devices brought huge and growing audiences a form of instantaneous mass togetherness beyond any precedent in history.

Surfing the Net

 In 1969, engineers working for the U.S. Department of Defense linked four computers together so that the machines could exchange information. Gradually, more computers were hooked up to this network. Around the same time, more and more government and university programmers and researchers found that sending messages from computer to computer was a good way to trade information. Data began flowing, although the use of this network was limited to people who were adept at computer programming.

As the use of new personal computers designed for people who weren’t computer specialists spread, the growing network became a communications phenomenon. When American universities hooked their supercomputers (super-large and super-fast in their capacity to store and process data) together in the 1980s, the Internet began to take shape. Commercial services started offering Internet access to businesses and homes over ordinary telephone lines.

 Physicist Tim Berners-Lee invented hypertext markup language (HTML) as a way for non-specialist Internet users to display their data in everyday language, pictures, and sound so that other computer users could access them over the Internet. In 1991, Berners-Lee put his creation, the World Wide Web, on the Internet. The World Wide Web quickly became the fastest growing part of the Internet as a place for businesses, political parties, activists, service organizations, and ordinary individuals to share information and exchange views. That led to music downloads, file sharing, social networking sites, and video sharing. As with the telegraph, radio, and the telephone (and as with the printing press of the fifteenth century), people became more tightly interconnected than ever before thanks to this new, evolving technology.

Fighting World Wars

 Although steamships, railroads, and the telegraph — the advances you can find out about earlier in this chapter — bridged distances for commerce and peaceful communication, they also provided advantages for admirals and generals planning attacks and invasions around the world.

Even if you’re just skimming this chapter (and by all means, feel free to skim), you may notice how European nations that had the rest of the world in a bear hug by the year 1900 seemed to fight an awful lot of wars. From ancient times onward, engaging in war was the way to build and keep empires. But with the rise of Europe’s new, global empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as all the advances in travel and communication, wars tended more than ever to spill over from one part of the world to another.

As an early example of what was coming, the Seven Years’ War had multiple fronts in India, Europe (where Prussia, Hanover, Austria, and Russia sided with Britain, and Spain sided with France), and America (the French and Indian War). The trend only got worse — lots worse. In the twentieth century, the tendency toward war and the technology to support it led to World War I and World War II.

Weapons advances, such as the more accurate, easier-to-load rifles used in the Crimean War of the mid-nineteenth century, kept right on until, by 1945, one U.S. airplane carrying one bomb would destroy a major Japanese city, Hiroshima. In one stroke, it killed 66,000 people and injured another 69,000. Even that wasn’t enough, though. Soon nations had the ability to push a single button and launch a missile attack capable of wiping out all civilization on the planet.

This section focuses on the weapons and wartime advances of the World Wars. To find out more about how technology changed war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, turn to Chapter 18.

Redefining war: World War I

At the time, nobody gave the Great War a number, because they weren’t planning to have another. One was quite enough, thanks.

Later called World War I, this conflict proved uglier, bigger, longer, more widespread, and more brutal than many people realized a war could be. From 1914–1918, two lines of infantry soldiers stretching across northern France and Belgium faced each other month after month, year after year, hunkered down in muddy, rat-infested, soul-killing trenches only a few hundred yards apart.

 Mechanized as no war before it had been, World War I took to the skies as airplanes dropped bombs and fought the first-ever air-to-air battles. World War I also brought about submarine warfare. German U-boats (the “u” stood for “underwater”) sank enemy warships and neutralized transports without warning. Troops moved by way of trucks and armored personnel carriers. Guns were bigger, faster-firing, longer-range, and more numerous than those of any war before. And there were also so-called advances in chemical warfare, such as crippling mustard gas.

Precipitating events and attitudes

You may have learned in school that WWI started when a Serbian terrorist shot an Austro-Hungarian archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1914. That’s true, but the origins of the war are much more complicated than that.

For one thing, the Serbians were angry with the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a combination Austria and Hungary) for annexing Bosnia (even though Bosnia still technically belonged to the Ottoman Empire, which was weakened by its own internal revolt). The Austro-Hungarians worried about the Serbs potentially uniting all the Slavs in southeastern Europe, in a mountainous region called the Balkans. Such unification would have threatened the Hungarian part of their empire. Russian leaders, meanwhile, believed that the Balkans, with its largely Slavic population, rightfully belonged in the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire, also largely Slavic. Although they had no legal claim over it, the Russians felt especially protective about Slavic Serbia.

Russia didn’t declare war on anyone, but it mobilized troops. That was enough provocation, though, to prompt the Germans — who were allies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — to declare war on both Russia and its ally France. The Germans cut through neutral Belgium on the way to attack the French.

Britain had no formal quarrel with Germany, but relations between the two countries were strained by an undeclared race for naval superiority. Starting in the 1890s, Wilhelm II, the German kaiser (meaning “emperor”), aggressively built more and bigger ships. Britain responded by stepping up its own shipbuilding. German troops crossing into Belgium in 1914 solidified anti-German feeling in Britain because the incursion violated international law, giving the British an excuse to mobilize troops.

Adding combatants to the war

The war grew as more countries entered the fray. Here’s the breakdown of the two sides:

The Entente, or Allies: Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Serbia, Italy, Portugal, Romania, the United States, and China

 The U.S. joined the Allied side in 1917 after Germany’s submarine blockade of Great Britain began sinking neutral ships.

The Central Powers: Germany, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire

Reacting to the carnage

World War I helped create the Soviet Union, but the war changed more than Russia. Four empires — the Russian, the Ottoman, the German, and the Austro-Hungarian — collapsed in that war.

Besides rearranging the map, the Great War brought famine, collapsed economies, and demonstrated to a shocked public that war brought little more than widespread disaster. The war ground up and spit out entire towns, villages, and even countries. Even people not directly hit by WWI realized by the time it was over that maybe war wasn’t so great, after all. This wasn’t the heroic warfare of patriotic songs, but rather a blight.

A leader in this line of thinking was Woodrow Wilson, a former Princeton University professor turned politician. As president of the United States, Wilson worked on the terms of peace in Europe, making sure the peace process included the League of Nations— an international body created expressly to prevent future wars.

 The League of Nations, established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, helped Europe rebuild after the war. Fifty-three nations joined by 1923, including Britain, France, Italy, and Japan.

Unfortunately, the League of Nations didn’t work, especially not for Wilson. The U.S. Senate refused to approve Wilson’s terms or let the U.S. join the league. Wilson suffered a massive stroke while trying to drum up public support to make the senators change their minds, and he spent the rest of his term, until 1921, as an invalid.

Although Germany joined the league in 1926, it withdrew, along with ally Japan, in 1933. Italy withdrew three years later. The organization subsequently proved helpless to stop German, Japanese, and Italian expansionism. By the late 1930s, the world was in for another big one.

Nobody before him ever tried regulating international life the way President Wilson envisioned. So, maybe his brainchild was bound to fail, but the League of Nations was a step toward something new.

Returning to conflict: World War II

World War I sowed the seeds for the Second World War. In Germany after WWI, impoverished citizens and resentful leaders alike bitterly opposed the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which included the following:

A war guilt clause that blamed everything on Germany

Lost territories — Alsace-Lorraine to France, the Rhineland turned into a demilitarized zone, and most of Germany’s overseas colonial holdings going to other empires

Cash reparations that the war-ravaged country could not pay

Adolf Hitler, the populist party boss of the National Socialists, or Nazis, used this national anger to take over the government of Germany. He called his administration the Third Reich — heir to the medieval Holy Roman Empire (the first Reich, or empire) and to the German Empire of 1871–1918.

Breaking the treaty: Hitler moves his troops

Hitler secretly rearmed the country in the 1930s and then started moving his troops in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty. He occupied the Rhineland (so much for a demilitarized zone), annexed Austria, and headed for Czechoslovakia, a country that had been created after World War I. He considered himself within his rights there, because he worked out a deal with the governments of Italy, France, and particularly Great Britain to extend Germany’s power in Czechoslovakia.

Hitler asserted that the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia rightly belonged to Germany, and the German-speaking residents of the region agreed. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, whose post-WWI rise was not unlike Hitler’s, arranged the meeting in Munich at which Hitler, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who was bending over backwards to avoid conflict with Germany), Mussolini, and French Prime Minister Edouard Deladier carved up Czechoslovakia, without consulting the Czechs.

Hitler also signed the Nazi-Soviet Pact with Josef Stalin, Lenin’s successor in Moscow. (There’s more about both Lenin and Stalin in the earlier section “Revolting in Russia.”) After claiming the Sudetenland, the Nazis plunged into Poland with the idea of dividing that country with the Soviet Union.

Choosing sides

Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland proved too much even for peace-seeking Chamberlain. London didn’t want another war, especially not a war against formidable Germany, but the British woke up to the reality that there was no avoiding it. Britain declared war that year.

Even more nations than in WWI took sides or were overtaken and forced into the fight that became WWII. A majority of the nations of the world participated. Here’s an incomplete breakdown:

Axis: Included Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Romania, Iraq, Thailand, and many more, including vast swaths of Asia and Africa controlled by Axis nations.

The Soviets, originally on Germany’s side, were forced to switch allegiances abruptly when Hitler violated his pact with Stalin and sent an invasion toward Moscow. France was a leader of the Allies until Germany overran the country in June 1940, after which three-fifths of France became a puppet state of Germany. Many other states also shifted their allegiances during the war, often because neutral or pro-Allied governments, as in Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium, were overcome by invading Axis powers.

Allies: Included Great Britain and the worldwide British Empire (notably British India), France (until June 1940), Vichy France (the part the Germans failed to conquer), Poland, the Soviet Union, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and later the United States, China, Cuba, the Philippines, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Haiti, and more.

When Japan attacked the U.S. fleet in Hawaii in 1941, the U.S. was still officially neutral, although leaning toward Britain. Immediately after the attack, the Americans declared war on Japan and its Axis allies.

Assessing the war’s damage

Ending in two atomic blasts, WWII killed 15 million military personnel — 2 million of them Soviet prisoners of war. About 6 million of the 35 million civilians killed were Jewish victims of the Holocaust, organized anti-Semite mass murders and concentration camps in Germany and Eastern Europe.

The weapons of this war grew faster, deadlier, and bigger than those in the previous war. Massive bombs devastated many European cities.

 The Allied bombing of Dresden, Germany, in 1945 killed 80,000 civilians in a night. That was the work of hundreds of bombers, but later that year, on August 6, 1945, an American plane dropped a single bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, that demolished everything in a four-mile radius of where it went off. That atomic blast and a second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a few days later remain the only nuclear weapons ever used on people. The war ended soon after those atomic bombings.

Redrawing the map

World War II rearranged Europe much as World War I had done. Among the more dramatic changes after WWII, Germany emerged as two nations —West Germany, aligned with the U.S. and other Western powers; and East Germany, a satellite of the Soviet Union.

The war also brought profound changes to Asia and Africa, largely because of the way it drained power and money from the European colonial powers. Britain, on the winning side but nearly ruined, had neither resources nor will to maintain its remaining overseas holdings.

The years after WWII were big on independence movements. Britain withdrew from India in 1947, and France tried for almost two decades to hang onto Algeria before finally letting it go in 1962.

 China, at war with Japan from 1937–1945 (Japan surrendered on that front, too), promptly plunged right back into a civil war between Nationalist and Communist parties. The Communists won, and under the Marxist leader Mao Ze-dong (or Tse-tung), the ancient civilization became the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

Hot and Cold Running Conflicts

The years after World War II weren’t peaceful, but they didn’t erupt into World War III either (knock on wood). For much of the era, major world powers were preoccupied with a game of nuclear standoff.

The post-war major powers, by the way, turned out to be the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The U.S. expected to enjoy its nuclear monopoly for 20 years or more, but the Soviets surprised everyone by developing their own atomic bomb in 1949. Although they were allies on the winning side of WWII, the nations soon became bitter rivals.

Soviet foreign policy reflected Josef Stalin’s viciously paranoid behavior toward any rival — real or imagined, internal or abroad (see more about Stalin in “Not really progress for the people” earlier in this chapter), and it became increasingly exclusionary and closed off. Soviet goals included maintaining control over satellite Communist states, several of which were set up in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe in the wake of World War II, while keeping out foreign cultural and economic influences.

The U.S. emerged as leader of the West — meaning Western Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and developed nations anywhere that resisted communism and promoted (or at least permitted) the private pursuit of profit in their trade policies.

Daring each other to blink in the Cold War

With their nuclear arsenals, the Soviet Union and U.S. engaged in the Cold War, a diplomatic, political, and military standoff.

In diplomatic and military terms, the Cold War took the form of each side daring the other to fire the first nuclear shot. Both nations built increasingly more and increasingly bigger missiles and warheads that were capable of delivering a nuclear bomb from a Nebraska wheat field into downtown Moscow, for example. Both nations developed the ludicrously tragic ability to blow up the Earth several times over.

This madness was tempered a bit by a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, numerous arms talks, and arms reduction agreements, but the two nations basically kept guns pointed at each other’s heads until the economically ruined Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. Along the way, other countries built nuclear arsenals as well — China prominent among them.

Seeing no end to violent conflicts

Regional wars raged during the Cold War. Among them, the U.S. was embarrassed in a futile attempt to keep Vietnam, a former French colony in Southeast Asia, from going communist. During the 1980s, the Soviets failed to quash Muslim rebels in Afghanistan.

 The 2007 drama Charlie Wilson’s War is based on the true story of a Texas congressman who conspired with a CIA operative and a Houston socialite to supply weapons to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

When the Jewish state Israel was established in 1948 in what was British-ruled Palestine, surrounding Arab nations joined Palestinian Arabs in opposing it. The disagreement turned violent many times from the 1950s into the twenty-first century. These decades were also scarred by many terrorist bombings in the region — often motivated by support for the Palestinian cause — that killed many innocent civilians. Then in the 1990s, Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. A U.S.-led international force turned the Iraqis back.

On September 11, 2001, 19 extremist Muslim terrorists hijacked four American passenger jets to use as weapons. They crashed two planes into the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone onboard and thousands more in the twin skyscrapers, which were destroyed. A third plane crashed into the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C. All onboard that plane died, as did 125 people in the building. When they learned of the crashes in New York and D.C., passengers onboard the fourth jet attacked the hijackers flying their plane. It crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all 40 people onboard.

 The 2006 film United 93 dramatizes the events onboard the United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. It focuses on the heroism of the passengers who rebelled against the hijackers and ultimately prevented the loss of more lives by forcing the plane down in a remote area.

The U.S. responded to this slaughter — whose victims were overwhelmingly civilians — by invading Afghanistan, where a theocratic Muslim government called the Taliban had been harboring the terrorist organization behind the attacks, Al Qaeda. President George W. Bush adopted a hard-line stance against terrorism (and specifically against Islamic terrorists), and in 2003 he ordered an invasion of Iraq, although that country had not been involved in the attack on New York. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. troops ousted the reigning governments, but insurgent violence against U.S. troops and by rival groups among Afghans and Iraqis required long and costly military occupations.

After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia fought against an Islamic independence movement in Chechnya, a region between the Black and Caspian Seas. In the summer of 2008, war erupted between Russia and the Republic of Georgia, another former part of the USSR.

Horrible violence also broke out in Africa, most shockingly in Rwanda, where militias formed mostly of members of the Hutu majority conducted a genocidal mass killing of members of the rival Tutsi tribe in 1994. Beginning in 2003 in Sudan, a government-supported militia, the Janjaweed, began a campaign of brutal attacks against farming villages, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and many more displaced and starving.

Clearly, humanity has not come close to achieving a world without war.

Let’s Get Together: The United Nations

So what happened to Woodrow Wilson’s splendid, post-WWI idea of a League of Nations (see “Reacting to the carnage” earlier) dedicated to preserving international peace and security by promoting disarmament and intent on preventing or quickly settling disputes?

 Wilson’s idea is still around. The term United Nations emerged during World War II, when 26 nations pledged themselves to continue the fight against the Axis Powers (primarily Germany, Italy, and Japan). After the war, 51 countries signed a charter creating the United Nations (see Figure 9-2). The League of Nations turned its functions over to the new UN.

 The charter defines the UN as a world community of independent sovereign states. It says that by preserving this community, the UN will protect international peace and will take collective action against war or against forces that threaten war if necessary. By late 2008, the UN’s membership total was up to 192 nations — many of them former colonies of European masters.

Some people see the UN as a plot to undermine the sovereignty of individual nations. The UN has been less than effective in many of its attempts to keep international conflicts from turning into wars, but it also has scored some moderate successes. As it was with the League of Nations, this business of internationalism is still new to humankind.

The UN may be beside the point as transportation and communication continue to accelerate. The world keeps shrinking, and political borders may even blur in the future. Western European nations, for example, spent the last decades of the twentieth century forging a unified economic force that even shares a common currency, the euro. International trade agreements are transforming global business and sparking fierce debates.

© AFP/Getty Images

With communications satellites and the Internet, every place is simultaneously in touch with the rest of the world. United Nations or not, national sovereignty may come to mean less and less as cultural intermingling speeds up. Civilization, whatever that funny word means, may finally become truly global. Whether or not that’s a good thing remains to be seen.

Tracking the Centuries

1788: Britain establishes a penal colony in Australia.

1808: Napoleon puts his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, on Spain’s throne.

1837: American Samuel Morse invents Morse code.

1848–1849: Revolutionary movements sweep Europe.

1890s: Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II begins an aggressive shipbuilding campaign, alarming Britain, the world’s top naval power.

1914: In Sarajevo, Bosnia, a Serbian terrorist assassinates the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, triggering World War I.

1939: Germany invades Poland, beginning World War II.

1991: The government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapses. Russia reemerges as an independent sovereign state.

2001: Islamic terrorists crash three hijacked airliners into iconic buildings in New York and Washington, D.C., killing thousands. A fourth hijacked plane crashes in Pennsylvania.

2003: The U.S. invades Iraq and deposes its ruling dictator, Saddam Hussein.