The 20th Century

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.

Now, 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 in uence 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.

A sixth wave of innovation began at the end of the 20th century. Computerization and the Internet transformed communications, business, and information exchanges. Genetic engineering promised to transform medicine and agriculture. Communist societies, lacking the innovative drive of their capitalist rivals, eventually collapsed or reintroduced market economies, leaving capitalism as the dominant form of society. Accelerating globalization allowed instant global transfers of information and money. It also generated new cultural con icts as groups with very different values and traditions were forced into closer contact with each other. When those con icts turned violent, the availability of modern weaponry ensured that even small guerilla armies could wield signi cant military power. Asian economies revived, challenging the dominance of the Atlantic hub zone.

The pace of change itself accelerated. Between 1900 and 2000, world population quadrupled, rising from 1.6 billion to more than 6 billion. The urban population multiplied by 13 times, and by the end of the century, almost half the world’s population lived in communities of more than 5,000 people.

Population increases were made possible by increasing industrial and agricultural The dropping of the atomic production. Global economic output bomb in Japan ended World increased by about 14 times, and industrial War II. output by about 40 times. Global grain production rose 5 times, from about 400 million tons to about 2,000 million tons. Agricultural productivity tripled, with increased irrigation, increasing use of arti cial fertilizers and pesticides, and the introduction of more productive genetically engineered crops. Because food production outstripped population growth, we have not yet seen a global Malthusian crisis in the Modern era (that is, a crisis caused by underproduction), though there have been many regional famines. Energy use increased by about 16

Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 342-AF-58189.

times, mainly through increased use of the three fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas.

The lethality of weapons increased even faster. World War I artillery shells could kill hundreds; the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, killed 70,000 people, and a similar number died from wounds or radiation sickness. In the 1950s, the U.S. and the USSR developed even more powerful bombs that used hydrogen fusion, the energy that drives all stars.

Capitalism emerged as the dominant social and economic system. But it also evolved in new directions. I have argued that capitalism was a fundamental driver of the Modern Revolution. That conclusion looks even more plausible after the collapse of the communist societies that had seemed, brie y, to offer an alternative.

Yet the impact of capitalism was contradictory, for it generated unprecedented wealth as well as new forms of poverty. This is because in capitalist societies, innovation is driven by the gradient in wealth and power between entrepreneurs, who own signi cant capital resources, and wage earners whose main asset is their own labor. Without inequality, capitalism cannot work.

In the wealthiest societies, capitalism evolved into “consumer capitalism,” in one of the most important transformations of the century. Karl Marx had argued that as capitalism developed it would impoverish most wage earners, generating huge revolutionary movements that would eventually bring about its collapse. By the end of the 20th century it was clear that this prediction had proved wrong. Why? Marx had missed something that would be seen clearly by industrialists such as Henry Ford, economists such as John Maynard Keynes, and politicians such as Franklin Roosevelt (1882–1945). As productivity outstripped population growth, producers had to work harder to nd markets for the massive numbers of goods they produced. Early20th-century pioneers such as Henry Ford saw that wage earners themselves provided a huge potential market. But they could only purchase goods if their wages rose. So it was in the interests of capitalists to raise wages and increase consumption. Such arguments were tested in the American “New Deal” and analyzed in the work of economists such as John Maynard Keynes.

In the most developed capitalist societies, led by the U.S., average consumption levels rose, creating a large, af uent middle class. Af uence de ected the revolution Marx had anticipated, as prosperous wage earners became contented supporters of consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism also generated a new rhythm of change. For the rst time in history, major economic crises (such as the Depression) were more likely to be caused by overproduction than underproduction. We can describe these new cycles of boom and bust as “Keynesian” cycles. Whereas in all earlier societies, slow growth had limited consumption, in the Af uence de ected the revolution era of developed capitalism, consumption became the Marx had anticipated, as prosperous main driver of growth.

wage earners became contented

supporters of consumer capitalism. Yet as living standards rose Consumer capitalism also in the developed capitalist societies, global inequalities generated a new rhythm of change. increased. Between 1913 and 1992, the gap between average income levels in the poorest and wealthiest countries grew from 11:1 to 72:1. Poverty affected health and life expectancies. In 2000, life expectancies in the U.S. were 74 (for men) and 80 (for women); in Burkina Faso in West Africa, they were 45 for men and women. Land shortages forced many peasants off the land, and the number living in extreme poverty increased. Paul Harrison’s vivid accounts of life in Burkina Faso show what this meant to individuals. Is the widening gap a warning of new crises? Or will the living standards of the very poor slowly rise as consumer capitalism spreads to regions where, so far, it has been experienced just by elite groups? We have seen that, far from slowing, the pace of change continued to accelerate in the 20th century, reshaping societies throughout the world in the process. This suggests that, far from the revolution of modernity being over, as some have claimed, it may be just beginning.

Essential Reading

Supplementary Reading

Questions to Consider

Christian, Maps of Time, chap. 14.

Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes. Maddison, The World Economy.

1. What evidence is there that change was more rapid in the 20th century than ever before in world history?

2. How and why did capitalism morph into “consumer capitalism” during the 20th century?