Making of the Modern World: Conclusion – Week 11

Question 1

A World Transformed?

Answer 1

• Between 1780 and 1914 the world was transformed
• Modern Nation State emerged
• Democracy and Popular Government advanced
• Nationalism also advanced as did the pace are reach of imperialism
• Class structures and working-class movements moved centre stage over the course of the 19th century
• Racial slavery that had shaped 400 years of the Early Modern World came to a fitful close, even if brute forms of subordination continued
• Patriarchy and longstanding gender conventions also began hesitatingly to crack
• By the turn of the 20th century women’s suffrage movements were within sight of their goal

Question 2

Capital’s Transformations:

Answer 2

• Industrialisation had transformed the scale, pace and even the human experience of work and in turn, industrial capitalism had taken centre stage, pushing aside older forms of mercantilism and merchant capitalism
• In process of a world transformed, trade and exchange based capitalism, linked with the era of merchant capital of the 18th century had been replaced by the age of wage labour and free labour – human and economic basis of employment
• Trade and exchange based capital was being replaced by wage and manufacturing based capitalism
• As transportation improved over the 19th century, global markets formed, which drove territorial advancement
• Global world being linked by global trade by the links of industrial capitalism
• Capital was mobilised along the 19th century – from continent to continent
• Movement of capital and industry around the world – seen by the growth of cities such as Chicago, New York and London
• Movement of capital drove some of the largest migrations in human history. Some of the migrations were small scale e.g. rural to urban areas – country to town to city
• Age of capital was an age of manufacturing capitalism – away from the dependency on land and farming
• Movement of commodities and financial liquidity
• Ecological and environmental impact of these transformations and developments were vast, impact of a global world was shaped by native peoples displaced and environments changed

Question 3

Ideas in Motion…Science

Answer 3

• Movement of ideas, radical and reactionary ideas, that transformed and altered the political cultures of the modern world and began to displace the position of religion in people’s lives
• Secular humanism and the importance of scientific discovery fundamentally altered long held principles, e.g. the nature of the body, medical science – ideas that migrated and challenged questions of evolution and God
• Scientific discoveries transform medicine, manufacturing, engineering and research – world modernises in ideas rotating around the planet
• Science provided a basis for explanation

Question 4

Social Science:

Answer 4

• Social science in turn, a new discipline, born as an academic discipline in the 1870s and 1880s
• Social Science when linked with imperialism has certain implications, provides a new rational for racial segregation as Darwin’s theory of evolution applied to nationalist concerns

Question 5

Making of the Modern World, 1900

Answer 5

• Multiple ways modernity impacted individuals in the 19th century
• Emphasis on the interdependency’s and interconnectedness of political and social change across the world
• 19th century saw the rise of global uniformities, in the state, in political ideologies and in forms of economic life – see uniformities crucially in human society
• Global uniformities started shaping social assumptions and ideological frames of reference

Question 6

Nationalism – Imagined Communities

Answer 6

• When talking about interconnectedness of individuals, concepts and practice, - macro and micro scale
• Consolidation of nation state – definitive hallmarks of 19th century
• Integration of nation
• American Civil War – key example in which nationalism transformed direction of the US, consolidation of a nation, creating the US
• Nationalism ideology?
• Nationalism a political religion?
• Nationalism a cultural nation?
• Nationalism a cognitive framework of identity?
• What is the relationship of the individual to the state
• How is nationalism both a cognitive framework but also a hard and fast political reality
• Nations = imagined political communities
• Nationalism formulated over the 19th century – in Imperial Germany – with idea of Germany as the Nation State

Question 7

Fixing Chronology?

Answer 7

• Is there really a modern age?
• Some scholars contend that modernity was a process, began in the 18th century up to the present day – no turning point in a process thus no key moment that modernity was founded
• No fixed chronology but if we take the start of the modern era as the fall of the ancient regimes, overthrow of autocratic monarchies – 1776, 1789, 1791
• State building – differs from state to state – evolving in turn

Question 8

Nationalism: France

Answer 8

• The emergence of a modern nation state
• A secular system of political power and authority, legitimated by a sense of nationalism, community and identity
• Idea of modern state as secular, not religious, but political power and authority based on sense of national identity
• Rise of nation state demands centralisation of power and articulation of national loyalties
• Shared political consciousness

Question 9

Monopoly Capitalism:

Answer 9

• Emergence and complete domination of a monetised exchange economy based on the large-scale production and consumption of commodities for the market
• Extensive ownership of private property and accumulation of capital on a systematic long-term basis
• Monetised exchange economies based on mass production and consumption, industrialised production and assumption of commodities
• Transitioning to a Second Industrial Revolution would impact countries in slightly different stages as we move forward across the 19th century
• Hand technology is replaced by electricity, steam, petroleum by the end
• Transformation in commodities themselves and global commodities themselves
• Pattern in which the concentration of capital also occurs
• Monopoly Capitalism where vast business can reorganise capital and commodity markets in the 1880s and 1890s – opening overseas commercial opportunities as the multinational corporations emerged

Question 10

End of Slavery – Apprenticeship Systems

Answer 10

• Decline of traditional social orders, decline and collapse of the fixed social hierarchies and the appearance of the time of the dynamic, social and sexual division of labour and with it the reconfiguration of gender roles
• Elimination of racial slavery and the collapse of serfdom in Russia did not eliminate forced labour nor did the progress of gender reconfiguration stamp out inequalities, the politics of patriarchy, partonomy, continued to shape the 19th century but hesitatingly those traditional hierarchies began to fracture
• Slavery held on resiliently until the 1880s in Brazil and parts of Spanish America and in its place forced labour continued to shape the planation world of tropical America
• Liberal rising of the modern world – the collapsing of social hierarchies
• Yet, slavery as an institution also enjoyed a new lease of life, era of second slavery e.g. US moved from being a marginal slave nation in 1790 to the largest nation of slave holders the world had ever seen in 1860s
• Slavery was at the heart of Western capitalism
• Decline of traditional orders and social hierarchies – whether imperial, gendered or racial underwent change and dramatic reconfiguration but they also underwent strong continuities ensuring that autocracy, control and domination continued to shape the 19th century world

Question 11

Liberalism, Socialism and Landlordism

Answer 11

• Among the principle factors, modern world saw the rise of a secular, materialistic culture – individualistic, rational and scientific impulses
• Liberalism, Socialism and Science were potentially revolutionary ideas, all of which impacted in different ways the 19th century life
• Established political and religious authority came under unprecedented attack, weakening the determinative power of religion and the institution of monarchy
• The rise of “possessive individualism”, ideas and doctrines that emerge during the enlightenment that stress the importance of the rational, self-owning, self-determining individual, concepts at the heart of modern people – late 18th century concepts that evolve and accelerate in application through the 19th century
• Radical anticlericalism, radical antimonarchical – roots in emerging bourgeois, market orientated, individualistic approach certainly in the West.
• Notion of individual rights and the emphasis on the free role of the market, cultivated ideas, ideas of moral and economic independence of self-ownership which were new, recasting in turn the role of the individual in society, ensuring that those individuals were self-determining
• Rise of secularism and the self-determination of the individual presupposed the place of the autonomous individual in society
• New language of politics emerged, captured libertarian and individualistic, free market thinking
• Language of political democracy, that emerges in the US in the 1820s – most democratic of white male societies in the Western world
• New political doctrine, origins of democratic thinking
• Superstition of landlordism – power and cultural hegemony of the landlord, respect associated with authority
• Landlordism politics in the colonial world become an instrument of modernity
• Thus, central to the story of making of the modern world, the rise of the individual but the restriction placed on the individual in Western democracies
• Not one evolutionary track to modernity

Question 12

Social Science for Empire:

Answer 12

• Science = most radical of new philosophies
• Publication of the ‘Origins of Species’ in 1859 was pivotal with the science of evolution, asserting historical development rather than providential intervention
• If the idea of 19th century modernity was a process, evolution is itself a process function
• Darwinian philosophy – world = competitive zone – similar to evolutionary model of biology
• Religion did not retreat entirely, organising structure of religion remained (at least in the West) but gradually religion was fading away
• Historian Owen Chadwick – “secularisation” of the European mind and by implication the secularisation of the European mind became a dominant theme in the 19th century
• “secularisation” model largely representative of Western society, elsewhere, notably Judaism, Islam and Buddhism used to form central identities of other nation states
• Rationalisation, the decline of religion = one component of modernity across 19th century world

Question 13

Making of the Modern World:

Answer 13

• Nation state – competitive bonds of nationalism
• Concepts that displaced religion and created new civic language
• Process of integration and consolidation