Culture, Science, and Technology, 1750-1900 Flashcards
~Characteristics of Western culture
● Rapid evolution ● Increased literacy ● Greater access to culture ● More scientific and secular worldview ● FOrmation of modern political philosophies, which remain influential today
~Enlightenment
● Cultural modernization is considred to have begun in the 1700s
● Also referred to as hte Age of Reason
~Enlightenment thinkers
● Put great faith in the power of human logic and in the recent discoveries of the Scientific Revolution
● Pondered how to make society and governemnt more efficient and humane
● John Locke, Montesquieu, Voltiare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
● Generally opposed tyranny, or arbitrary exercise ofmonarchical power and favored great respect of individual rights
~Deism
● Belief in a divine being but not the literal truth of aspecific doctrine
● Some Englightenment thinkers adpted hte vaguer religious stance
~Romanticism
● The principal cultural movement in the West from the late 1700s into the early 1800s
● Against the rational Englightenemtn
● Emphasized emtion, heroism, individuality, and the imagination
~Realism
● Around 1840s, when romanticism started to decrease in prominance
● Concerned with everyday life, social problems, and the psychology of their characters
~Modernism
● Started in 1870s, artist and writers (van Gogh and Picass) broke hte urles of traditional culture and experimented with a dazzling array of new styles
- Impressionism
- Post-impressionim
- Cubism
- Abstraction
● Asian and African art powerfully influenced this generation of artist
~Cultural blending in Middle East
● Ottoman authors adopted European styles like romanticism and realism in the mid-1800s during the Tanzimat reforms
● At the same time, and partly in opposion to Westernizing trrends, a resurgence of Arabic culture–which had long been overshadowed by Turkish and Persian art and literature–began to make itself felt throughout the region
~Cultural blending in Africa
● Oral tradition remained dominant, as witnessed by the continued popularity of griot storytelling and other forms of poetic and epic recitation
● As more of the continent fell under imperial control after the mid-1800s, foreign colonists and Christian missionaries imported Western culture on a much larger scale than before
● Non-representational art
~Non-representational art
● Inspired innovative modernist style, such as primitivism and abstration in European and America
● Originated in Africa
~Dream of Red Chamber
● Written by Cao Xueqin in the late 1700s
● Narrates the tragedy of two young lovers caught up in the decline of a wealthy and powerful clan
● One of the greatest novels in Chinese literature
~Ukiyo-e
● Style of woodblock painting reached its highest peak of development during the first half of the 1800s in Japan
● Artists like Hokusai and Hiroshige both gained international reputations and influenced impressionist and post-impressionist painting in Europe
~Westernization in South and Southeast Asia
● Influx of missionaries and colonial authorities, it experience a high level of westernization
● In India, Mughal culture did not fade away completely, but yielded much of its preeminence to the Compnay style
● Catholicism and Frenhc language were imported into Indochina during the late 1800s and Siam (Thailand) decided to Westernize thoroughly as a way to avoid foreign conquest and colonization
~Company Style
● Art and architecture heavily conditioned by admixtures brought tot he subcontinent by the British East India Company
~Gateway to India arch
● Built in early 1900s, Bombay (Mumbai) to celebrate British imperial control over India
● Cultural fusion
~John Locke
● Argued during the late 1600s and early 1700s that hte governemnt’s power to govern should depend above all on the consent of the governed
● Favored freedom of religion and opinion and hte protection of private property
● The concepts of natural rights, the social contnract and hte separation of church and state became cornerstones of Enlightenment social and oliticla thought
~Social contract
● The mutual obligations owed to each other by governemnts and their pwople
~Baron Charles de Montesquieu
● Author of (1748)
● Proposed the separation of powers as a way to avoid tyranny
- Executive, legislative, and judicial
~Voltaire
● Versatile playwright, novelist, and philosopher best remembered as a champion of freedom of expression
● Ememy of organized religion which he viewed as corrupt and hypocritical
~Jean-Jacques Rousseau
● Philosopher who felt more strongly than many of his fellow cohorts htat ordinary people deserved more political power
● (1762), a forceful continuation of Locke’s thinking of the subject
~America’s founding fathers
● Thomas Jefferson, George Washingotn, Benjamin Franklin, Thoman Paine, and others who led the American Revolution and designed hte US consitution
● FIrst to establish an entire political system on Enlightenemtn principles
~Revolutionary documents
● Declaration of Indepence
● Declaration of the RIghts of Man and the Citizen
● Jamaica Letter
~Conservatism
● Regarded the changes brought about by the Atlantic revolutions as completely undesirable or as having taken place too quickly and with too much violence
● Feared many of the social and political effects of industralization
~Reaction
● THe more uncompromising form of conservatism
● Typified by leaders at the Congress of Vienna like Autria’s Klemens von Metternich
~Moderate form of conservatism
● Argued for gradual reform rather than sudden cahnge
● Associated with thinkers like the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke
~Liberalism
● Favored hte extension of political privileges and individual freedoms, at least to the middle class, but not alwasy tot he lower classes or to women
● Faovr the free-market capitalism preached by Adam Smith and other classical economists
● John Stuart Mill of England
~Repercussion of 1848 revolutions
● Pure capitalism could not remain as it was without causing severe socioeconomic stress
● Liberals and reformers worked to keep capitalism in place by gradually eliminating the worst of its abusesa nd sharin its benefits more fairly
~Trade-union activism
● many members of hte working class turned to trade-union activism to gain concessions like pensions, better hours, and higher wages
~Anarchism
● Rejected all forms of govenment
~Socialism
● Appeared in many forms in during the 1800s
● All sharing the belief that economic competition is inherentl unfair and eventually leads to injustic and inequality
~Utopian socialists
● Believed that governments and business owners hsould forego maximum profits to pay workers better and care for them more porperly
● Many of their demands and suggestions became standard policyduring the late 1800s and early 1900s
● Most practical was the Welsh businessman Rober Owen, foudned a number of factory-based communities along these cooperativist lines, both in the British Isles and hte US
~Communism
● Originated by the Germna philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and most famously outlined in (1848) and (1867–1894)
● Argued that all historical development was driven by a class struggle
● An economic state of perfect justice, equality, and prosperity
~Class struggle
● Between the upper class (controls capital or hte means of economic production) and the lower class (which is forced to labor for hte upper class) ● Marx predicted htat the age of industrial capitalism with its struggle between the bourgeoisie and the working-class proletariat was hte final stage of human history before hte realization fo socialism ● Society would then move on to communism
~Revolution
● To achive socialism, Marx and Engels believed that revolution would most likely be needed
● Advocated force as a possibly necessary means to overthrow capitalism
~Revisionists
● Many who agreed with Marx’s critique of capitalism began to question whether violent reovlution was desirable/necessary
● Began to seek legal ways to bring about socialism, such as trade-union activims and parliamentary politics
● Foudned social democractic parties
~Social democratic parties
● Gained large followings in countries like France and Germany before WWI and which sometimes opposed communists who remained more radical
● Quarrel between Russia’s Mensheviks and Lenin’s Bolsheviks is typical of htis split
~Mensheviks
● Communists who favored gradual chagne and workign within the system
~Bolsheviks
● Communists who favored faster change and revolutionary action
~Nationaslim
● Became a political force in Europe and the Americas in the late 1700s and early 1800s
● Related to the rise of nation-state
~Nation-state
● Increasingly equated citizenship with belonging to a distinct ethnic/linguistic group
● Dominant form of political organization in the West
~Militarism
● Encouraged by nationalism
● COntirbuting factor to Europe’s armed conflicts of the late 1800s (wars of Italian and German unification)
● Aroused feelings of ethnic and racial superiority
~Ethnic and racial superiority
● Further reinforced by pseudo-scientific notions regarding racial difference and the interaction of peoples
● Social Darwinism
~Social Darwinism
● A misguided interpretation of Darwin’s insight of natural selection
● Popularized by the English social scientist Herbert Spencer
● Used to justify numerous forms of inequality, including ethnic prejudice and colonical domination
● Regarded women as the provably weaker sex and felt that the poverty of the lower classes was a natural product of human competition
~Young Turks
● Ardent nationalists in the Ottoman Empire, tying to keep their country on a technological par with Europe
~National-liberation movemnets
● Grow increasingly potent in the twentieth century where foreign colonists ruled
● Began to emerge as a way to protest imperialism’s abuses or even to overturn it altogether
~Jose Marti
● Poet-philospher who used his eloquence to awaken Cuba’s nationalist movemnet against Spain
● Launch its 1895-1898 war of independence
~Katipunan
● The Filipino national-liberation society
● Fought against Spanish colonization in the 1890s, only to face US occupiers after Spain relinquished control over hte Philippines in 1898
~Indian National Congress
● Consisting mainly of British-educated native elites
● Formed in 1885 to gain more rights for natives in British India
● Eventualy end colonial rule there
~Boxer Rebellion
● Seen as a national-liberationist backlash agains thte West’s growing domination of CHinese ports and coastal territories in 1900
~Social Darwinism in Japan
● As Japan industrialized, militarized and defeated neigjbors, many Japanese became convinced that they were not just more technologically advanced htan their fellow Asians, but innately supeiror to them
● Expressed in “Goodbye Asia”
~Goodbye Asia
● Influential 1885 essay that foreshadowed hte “master race” thinking Jpana would later adopt
● Demonstrated racial superiority
~Public education
● Greater access to it became a normal part of life in NA and most parts of Europea throughtout the 1800s
● Literacy rates rose as a result
~Technological change
● Profound, rapid, and thorough in many parts of the world affected by industrialization
● National economics, transportation, networks, and personal lives were all influenced by constant and increasingly affordable innovations that involved machine power, fossil-fuel energy sources such as coal and oil, and near the end of the 1800s, electricity
~Scientific, secular worldview
● Increasingly paramount during this era (at least in the Western world)
● Does not mean that religions lost teir political and social importance
● Separation of church and state became the norm and less risk and scandal was attached to deism or atheism
● Religion became less convincing to many as a justification for keeping certain rulers in power/maintaining social or gender-based hierarchies
~Rosetta Stone
● Unearthed by Napoleon’s armies in Egypt
● Used to decipher hieroglyphs
● Improved archaeologicla nad linguistic research in the Middle East and Asia
● Revealed that certain cultures and ancient languages (Sanskrit) predated even the older described in the Judeo-Christian Bible
~Charles Lyell
● Discovered fossils
● Indicated that the world was orders of magnitude older than the 10,000 years or less accounted for in the Bible
~Evolution
● Came to be widely accepted among most scientists during the early 1800s, although explaining how evolution worked remianed a formidable challenge
~Charles Darwin
● Explained the process of evolution with his theory of natural selection
● (1859)
● (1871)
● His ideas, along with discoveries in geology and archaeology, did much to erode faith in traditional religion and encouraged a more secular worldview in the West
~On the Origin of Species (1859)
● Darwin caused a scientific and cultural storm by arguing htat evolution is a random process in which physical changes that incease an animal’s chance for survival are passed on to that animal’s offspring
~The Descent of Man (1871)
● Applied the principles of natural selection to human beings and postulated htat humans and apes share a common evolutionary ancestry
~Crisis of faith
● Scientific insights like Darwin’s made it harder to sustain a literal belief in the Christian Bible
● The crisis shook the Western mindset during the late 1800s and early 1900s
● German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclained famously that “God is dead”, and argued that all systems of morality were valueless in the materialistic modern age
~Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and Quantum theory
● Elaborated in 1905
● Opened up new and mathematically unsettling questions in the fields of physics for hte first time since the days of Isaac Newton
~Sigmund Freud
● Early theories of hte Austrian doctor about dreams and the subconscious advanced the new science of psychology
● His insights into how poorly most individuals understand themselves mad emany people uneasy, both before and after WWI
~What religion were Enlightenment thinkers and why?
● Some remained devoutly Christian
● Some adopted vaguer religious stances (deism)
● Some became atheistic
● Freedom of opinion and religion were important to Enlightenment thinkers
~What did the Enlightenemt influence?
● American and French revolutions
~How did women help shape Enlightenment culture?
● Organizaing salongs at which philosophicla deabte took place
● Participating directly as authors, activists, and political actors
- Mary Wollstonecraft of England
- Russia’s Catherine the Great
~What did both romanticism and realism react strongly to?
● The process of industrialization in Europe and America
● William Blake’s poetic contrast of England’s “green and pleasant land” with the “dark Satanic mills” of industry
● Romantics tended to idealize nature and view industrialization as a blgiht upon it
- Authors like Victor Hugo and Charles Darwin disapprovingly protrayed the social misries of the industrial era
● Realist painters and writers regularly addressed themse such as poverty and inequality
~How did Western forms of art and writing influence other parts of the worls?
● Western forms of art and writing often blended with indigenous styles, whether because of voluntary adoption or because they were imposed by colonial masters as they built empires in non-Western regions and trained native elites according to Western norms
~How did social contracts help foster nationalism?
● Individual owed certain obligations to his or her nations
- Obedience, taxes and military service
● THe individual was owed certain things in return by his or her nation
- Makign the nation something worth belonging to and worth feeling pride in
~Where did nationalism flare (not including existed nations)?
● Germans and Italians (each of whom would unify during the 1800s)
● Irish, Polish, East European and Balkan peoples who lived under Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman rule
~What are examples of nationalist tendencies in non-Western parts of the world?
● Young Turks in Ottoman Empire ● National-liberation movements - Poet-philospher Jose Marti -- Cuba - Katipunan -- Philippines - Indian National Congress -- India - Boxer Rebellion -- China
~What were hte Western feelings about the century’s scientific and technological developments?
● OScientific and technological progress and the rising economic prosperity that accompanied it infused Western culture with excitement and confidence
- This sense of optimism continued until the eve of WWI
● Particularly among intellectuals and artists, this was a time of growing uncertainty and anxiety
- Crisis of faith
