0CHAPTER 28 OUTLINE – THE CRISIS OF THE IMPERIAL

ORDER, 1900-1929
I. Origins of the Crisis in Europe and the Middle East
A. The Ottoman Empire and the Balkans
1. By the late nineteenth century, the once-powerful Ottoman Empire was in
decline and losing the outlying provinces closest to Europe.
2. The Young Turks conspired to force a constitution on the sultan, advocated
centralized rule and Turkification of minorities, and carried out modernizing
reforms. The Turks hired a German general to modernize Turkey’s armed forces.
B. Nationalism, Alliances, and Military Strategy
1. The three main causes of World War I were nationalism, the system of alliances
and military plans, and Germany’s yearning to dominate Europe.
2. Nationalism was deeply rooted in European culture, where it served to unite
individual nations while undermining large multiethnic empires. Because of the
spread of nationalism, most people viewed war as a crusade for liberty or as
revenges for past injustices.
3. The major European countries were organized into two alliances: the Triple
Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain,
France, and Russia). The military alliance system was accompanied by inflexible
mobilization plans that depended on railroads to move troops according to
precise schedules.
4. When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914, the alliance
system, in combination with the rigidly scheduled mobilization plans, meant that
war was automatic.
II. The “Great War” and the Russian Revolutions, 1914–1918
A. Stalemate, 1914–1917
1. The nations of Europe entered the war in high spirits, confident of victory.
German victory at first seemed assured, but as the German advance faltered in
September, both sides spread out until they formed an unbroken line of trenches
(the Western Front) from the North Sea to Switzerland.
2. The generals on each side tried for four years to take enemy positions by
ordering their troops to charge across the open fields, only to have them cut
down by machine-gun fire. For four years, the war was inconclusive on both land
and at sea.
B. The Home Front and the War Economy
1. The material demands of trench warfare led governments to impose stringent
controls over all aspects of their economies. Rationing and the recruitment of
Africans, Indians, Chinese, and women into the European labor force
transformed civilian life. German civilians paid an especially high price for the
war because the British naval blockade cut off access to essential food imports.
2. British and French forces overran Germany’s African colonies (except for
Tanganyika). In all of their African colonies, Europeans requisitioned food,
imposed heavy taxes, forced Africans to grow export crops and sell them at low
prices, and recruited African men to serve as soldiers and as porters.
3. The United States grew rich during the war by selling goods to Britain and
France. When the United States entered the war in 1917, businesses engaged in
war production made tremendous profits.
C. The Ottoman Empire at War
 1. The Turks signed a secret alliance with Germany in 1914. Turkey engaged in
unsuccessful campaigns against Russia, deported the Armenians (causing the
deaths of hundred of thousands), and closed the Dardanelles Straits.
2. When they failed to open the Dardanelles Straits by force, the British tried to
subvert the Ottoman Empire from within by promising emir Hussein ibn Ali of
Mecca a kingdom of his own if he would lead a revolt against the Turks, which
he did in 1916.
3. In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the British suggested to the Zionist leader
Chaim Wiezman that they would “view with favor” the establishment of a
Jewish national homeland in Palestine.
D. Double Revolution in Russia, 1917
1. By late 1916, the large but incompetent and poorly equipped Russian army had
experienced numerous defeats and had run out of ammunition and other essential
supplies. The civilian economy was in a state of collapse, and the cities faced
shortages of fuel and food in the winter of 1916–1917.
2. In March 1917 (February by the old Russian calendar), the tsar was overthrown
and replaced by a Provisional Government led by Alexander Kerensky. On
November 6, 1917 (October 24 in the Russian calendar) Vladimir Lenin’s
Bolsheviks staged an uprising in Petrograd and overthrew the Provisional
Government.
E. The End of the War in Western Europe, 1917–1918
1. German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare brought the United States
into the war in April 1917.
2. The Germans were able to break through and push within 40 miles of Paris. The
arrival of U.S. forces allowed the Allies to counterattack in August 1918. The
German soldiers retreated; an armistice was signed on November 11.
III. Peace and Dislocation in Europe, 1919–1929
A. The Impact of the War
1. Between 8 and 10 million people died in the war. The war also created millions
of refugees, many of whom fled to France and to the United States, where the
influx of immigrants prompted the U.S. Congress to pass immigration laws that
closed the doors to eastern and southern Europeans.
2. One byproduct of the war was the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, which
started among soldiers headed for the Western Front and spread around the
world, killing some 20 million people. The war also caused serious damage to
the environment.
B. The Peace Treaties
1. Three men dominated the Paris Peace Conference: U.S. President Wilson, British
Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Premier Georges Clemenceau.
Because the three men had conflicting goals, the Treaty of Versailles turned out
to be a series of unsatisfying compromises that humiliated Germany but left it
largely intact and potentially the most powerful nation in Europe.
2. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell apart. New countries were created in the
lands lost by Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary.
C. Russian Civil War and the New Economic Policy
1. In Russia, Allied intervention and civil war extended the fighting for another
three years beyond the end of World War I. By 1921, the Communists had
defeated most of their enemies, and in 1922, the Soviet republic of Ukraine and
Russia merged to create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
2. Years of warfare, revolution, and mismanagement had ruined the Russian
economy. Beginning in 1921, Lenin’s New Economic Policy helped to restore
 production by relaxing government controls and allowing a return of market
economics. This policy was regarded as a temporary measure that would be
superseded as the Soviet Union built a modern, socialist, industrial economy by
extracting resources from the peasants to pay for industrialization.
3. When Lenin died in January 1924, his associates struggled for power; the two
main contenders were Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. Stalin filled the
bureaucracy with his supporters, expelled Trotsky, and forced him to flee the
country.
D. An Ephemeral Peace
1. The 1920s were a decade of dissatisfaction among people whose hopes had been
raised by the rhetoric of war and dashed by its outcome.
2. In 1923, French occupation of the Ruhr and severe inflation brought Germany to
the brink of civil war. Currency reform and French withdrawal from the Ruhr
marked the beginning of a period of peace and economic growth beginning in
1924.
IV. China and Japan: Contrasting Destinies
A. Social and Economic Change
1. In the first decades of the twentieth century, China was plagued by rapid
population growth; an increasingly unfavorable ratio of population to arable
land; avaricious landlords and tax collectors; and frequent, devastating floods of
the Yellow River. Above the peasantry, Chinese society was divided among
many groups: landowners, wealthy merchants, and foreigners, whose luxurious
lives aroused the resentment of educated, young, urban Chinese.
2. Japan had few natural resources and very little arable land. While not troubled by
floods, Japan was subject to other natural calamities. In Japan, industrialization
and economic growth aggravated social tensions between westernized urbanites
and traditionalists, and between the immensely wealthy zaibatsu and the poor
farmers, who still comprised half the population.
3. Japanese prosperity depended on foreign trade. This made Japan much more
vulnerable than China to swings in the world economy.
B. Revolution and War, 1900–1918
1. China’s defeat and humiliation at the hands of an international force in the Boxer
affair of 1900 led many Chinese students to conclude that China needed a
revolution to overthrow the Qing and modernize the country. When a regional
army unit mutinied in 1911, Sun Yat-sen’s Revolutionary Alliance formed an
assembly and elected Sun as president of China, but to avoid a civil war, the
presidency was turned over to the powerful general Yuan Shikai, who rejected
democracy and ruled as an autocrat.
2. The Japanese joined the Allied side in World War I and benefited from an
economic boom as demand for their products rose. Japan used the war as an
opportunity to conquer the German colonies in the Northern Pacific and on the
Chinese coast and to further extend Japanese influence in China by forcing the
Chinese government to accede to many of the conditions presented in a
document called the Twenty-One Demands.
C. Chinese Warlords and the Guomindang, 1919–1929
1. At the Paris Peace Conference, the great powers allowed Japan to retain control
over seized German enclaves in China, sparking protests in Beijing (May 4,
1919) and in many other parts of China. China’s regional generals—the warlords
—supported their armies through plunder and arbitrary taxation so that China
grew poorer while only the treaty ports prospered.
 2. Sun Yat-sen tried to make a comeback in Canton in the 1920s by reorganizing
his Guomindang party along Leninist lines and by welcoming members of the
newly created Chinese Communist Party. Sun’s successor Chiang Kai-shek
crushed the regional warlords in 1927.
3. Chiang then split with and decimated the Communist Party and embarked on an
ambitious plan of top-down industrial modernization. However, Chiang’s
government was staffed by corrupt opportunists, not by competent
administrators: China remained mired in poverty.
V. The New Middle East
A. The Mandate System
1. Instead of being given their independence, the former German colonies and
Ottoman territories were given to the great powers as mandates. Class C
Mandates were ruled as colonies, while Class B Mandates were to be ruled under
League of Nations supervision.
2. The Arab-speaking territories of the former Ottoman Empire were Class A
Mandates, a category that was defined to lead the Arabs to believe that they had
been promised independence. In practice, Britain took control of Palestine, Iraq,
and Trans-Jordan, while France took Syria and Lebanon as its mandates.
B. The Rise of Modern Turkey
1. At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire was at the point of collapse, with
French, British, Italian, and Greek forces occupying Constantinople and parts of
Anatolia. In 1919 Mustafa Kemal formed a nationalist government and
reconquered Anatolia and the area around Constantinople in 1922.
2. Kemal was an outspoken modernizer who declared Turkey to be a secular
republic; introduced European laws; replaced the Arabic alphabet with the Latin
alphabet; and attempted to westernize the Turkish family, the roles of women,
and even Turkish clothing and headgear. His reforms spread quickly in the urban
areas, but they encountered strong resistance in the countryside, where Islamic
traditions remained strong.
C. Arab Lands and the Question of Palestine
1. Among the Arab people, the thinly disguised colonialism of the Mandate System
set off protests and rebellions. At the same time, Middle Eastern society
underwent significant changes: the population grew by 50 percent from 1914 to
1939, major cities doubled in size, and the urban merchant class adopted western
ideas, customs, and lifestyles.
2. The Maghrib (Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco) was dominated by the French
army and by French settlers, who owned the best lands and monopolized
government jobs and businesses. Arabs and Berbers remained poor and suffered
from discrimination.
3. The British allowed Iraq to become independent under King Faisal (leader of the
Arab revolt) but maintained a significant military and economic influence.
France sent thousands of troops to crush nationalist uprisings in Lebanon and
Syria. Britain declared Egypt to be independent in 1922 but retained control
through its alliance with King Farouk.
4. In the Palestine Mandate, the British tried to limit the wave of Jewish
immigration that began in 1920 but only succeeded in alienating both Jews and
Arabs.
VI. Society, Culture, and Technology in the Industrialized World
A. Class and Gender
1. Class distinctions faded after the war as the role of the aristocracy (many of
whom had died in battle) declined and displays of wealth came to be regarded as
 unpatriotic. The expanded role of government during and after the war led to an
increase in the numbers of white-collar workers; the working class did not
expand because the introduction of new machinery and new ways of organizing
work made it possible to increase production without expanding the labor force.
2. In the 1920s, women enjoyed more personal freedoms than ever before, and
women won the right to vote in some countries between 1915 and 1934.
B. Revolution in the Sciences
1. The discovery of subatomic particles, quanta, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and
the discovery that light is made up of either waves or particles undermined the
certainties of Newtonian physics and offered the potential of unlocking new and
dangerous sources of energy.
2. Innovations in the social sciences challenged Victorian morality, middle-class
values, and notions of western superiority. The psychology of Sigmund Freud
and the sociology of Emile Durkheim introduced notions of cultural relativism
that combined with the experience of the war to call into question the West’s
faith in reason and progress.
C. The New Technologies of Modernity
1. The European and American public was fascinated with new technologies like
the airplane and lionized the early aviators: Amelia Earhart, Richard Byrd, and
especially Charles Lindbergh. Electricity began to transform home life, and
commercial radio stations brought news, sports, soap operas, and advertising to
homes throughout North America.
2. Film spread explosively in the 1920s. The early film industry of the silent film
era was marked by diversity, with films being made in Japan, India, Turkey,
Egypt, and Hollywood in the 1920s. The introduction of the talking picture in the
United States in 1921, combined with the tremendous size of the American
market, marked the beginning of the era of Hollywood’s domination of film and
its role in the diffusion of American culture.
3. Health and hygiene were also part of the cult of modernity. Advances in
medicine, sewage treatment systems, indoor plumbing, and the increased use of
soap and home appliances contributed to declines in infant mortality and
improvements in health and life expectancy.
D. Technology and the Environment
1. The skyscraper and the automobile transformed the urban environment.
Skyscrapers with load-bearing steel frames and passenger elevators were built in
American cities. European cities restricted the height of buildings, but European
architects led the way in designing simple, easily constructed, inexpensive,
functional buildings in what came to be known as the International Style.
2. Mass-produced automobiles replaced horses in the city streets and led to the
construction of far-flung suburban areas like those of Los Angeles. On farms,
gasoline-powered tractors began replacing horses in the 1920s, while dams and
canals were used to generate electricity and to irrigate dry land.
VII. Conclusion
A. Postwar Realignments
1. France and Britain emerged from the war economically weakened. Russia was
left in civil war and revolution. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires
were divided into smaller, weaker nations.
2. Japan and the United States came out of the war in a more strengthened position
than before.
B. Postwar Promise
 1. The fall of the Ottoman Empire generated hope among Turks, Arabs, and Jewish
immigrants of sovereign nation status.
2. French and British mandates thwarted those aspirations.
C. Postwar Society
1. Women remained in the workforce and demanded voting rights while
governments took on more responsibility for citizens’ health and well-being.
2. Science and technology brought entertainment, electricity, better health, and
faster transportation to western nations.