The 20th Century Lecture 43
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 effectively burn out the internal organs of its victims.
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ow, after 13 billion years, we enter the era of our own lifetimes! After 1900, the pace of change accelerated and the Modern Revolution began to transform societies throughout the world. A fourth, ¿fth, and sixth wave of change shaped the history of the 20th century. The fourth wave began in the late 19th century and continued into the early 20th century. It began to transform regions well beyond the new Atlantic core region. Russia and Japan both underwent revolutionary transformations and became major industrial and military superpowers. Then there was a slowdown for much of the ¿rst half of the 20th century as the engine of growth seemed to stall in an era of global wars and global depression. The vast casualties of these wars provided a gruesome demonstration of the increasing “productivity” of modern weapons. This violent era culminated in the Nazi Holocaust and the dropping of the ¿rst nuclear weapons. A ¿fth wave of innovation began after the Second World War and ran until the last decade of the century. It launched the most sustained era of global economic growth ever known—growth built partly on wartime innovations. Atomic power, rocket technology, and the electronic transistor were developed. Some multinational corporations, such as oil companies, became as powerful as medium-sized states. From the 1920s until 1990, the world was divided into capitalist and communist regions, each of which sought to inÀuence the rest of the world (the “third world”). Communist countries included highly industrialized societies in Eastern Europe, Russia, and (after 1949) China, which preserved many elements of tributary societies. Though their elites actively encouraged industrial growth, they rejected commercial activity and relied largely on the power of the state to engineer growth.
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