International History Script 01: Long-term Trends 19th Century PDF

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century 1. Since the late 18th century, many processes and events have contribute...

International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century 1. Since the late 18th century, many processes and events have contributed to reshaping the international system. The American independence war (1776-81) and the French Revolution (1789-99) drastically redefined the same idea of what a political system was and delivered a heavy blow to the traditional forms of political legitimisation. Despite the efforts to restore it, the Ancient Regime did not survive the abolition of the Bourbon monarchy in 1792. The American and French revolutions were the product of the radical transformations that affected cultural life in the previous decades under the loose label of Enlightenment. These transformations affected almost all fields of knowledge and shaped new kinds of relationships among men and between man and nature. First, they conveyed that the world could be reshaped physically and socially, challenging common wisdom and time-honoured traditions. This attitude would have been one of the most relevant traits of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its impact was multi-folded. In politics, it challenged the divine right of the king and the idea that political hierarchies had been defined, once and for all, in a remote past. In economics, physiocracy and, later, the free trade principles challenged mercantilism, while guilds’ weight declined after the spreading of the industrial revolution. The scientific method finally consolidated in science and culture, and new research fields emerged in chemistry, physics, mathematics, etc. Hand in hand, the speed of ideas’ circulation increased, a process that technical development promoted, making communications easier, faster, and cheaper and allowing a larger number of people to move and access greater stocks of information. 2. All these transformations did not happen overnight. Scientific literature increasingly highlights the long-term nature of the changes that affected Europe between the late 18th and the early 19th century. Cataclysmic political events like the French revolution traced their roots back to the discontent of the previous decades. The industrial revolution resulted from a long string of adaptive transformations affecting existing technologies and practices and was rooted in the innovations of the agriculture sector that started in the 1750s. Enlightenment was the final product of intellectual dynamics that remounted to the 17th century when ‘modern’ science emerged, and a more critical attitude started permeating philosophical speculation. In the technological field, another crucial aspect was that innovation was not a top-down process but a ‘distributed’, bottom-up one. Typically, innovators were not scientists or professionals but practitioners, often of humble origins, who innovated to solve immediate problems in their everyday activities. In this perspective, industry coexisted with semi-industrial or para-industrial activities for quite a long time. Even after the industrial revolution’s takeoff in the early decades of the 19th century, innovation often retained a sort of ‘artisanal’ character. Only at the time of the ‘second industrial revolution’, in the 1870s, did the link between science, academic research and technological innovation consolidate and assume its contemporary traits. Unsurprisingly, the ‘cradle’ of the first industrial revolution was Great Britain, where, for several reasons, social mobility was higher and ingenious craftsmen, even of humble origins, had greater opportunities to enrich and climb up the social ladders. 3. The Napoleonic experience marked another key turning point. Between 1792 and 1815, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars reshaped the political map of Europe, destroying the existing geopolitical order and making France the European hegemon once 1 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century again. In the meantime, the military campaign contributed to spreading the ideas behind the French revolution, among others, that of the nation as something different from one country’s ruling dynasty. In the coming years, nationalism proved one of the main driving forces in the international system and retained this role until at least the end of World War II. Quite paradoxically, nationalism was also one of the elements that led to Napoleon’s final defeat. At its apogee, the First Empire provided a new model for state administration. Greater centralisation, more effective bureaucracy, more power to state’s officers and their constant presence over the territory were some elements that the post-Napoleonic states would have saved from the previous experience. In this perspective, the Restoration was not a return to the status quo ante but an effort to merge the Ancient Regime’s ideology with a new vision of the state and its role. With the Napoleonic reforms, new figures rose to social and political pre-eminence. Civil servants, sometimes with a humble background (such as many Napoleonic marshals), emerged as a new social class, wider, more open and dynamic than the noblesse de robe. This new group merged with the aristocracy blurring the old distinctions and increasing social mobility. Something similar happened to the urban bourgeoisie, which strengthened its role by benefitting from the opportunities that the new political system offered. 4. Since 1792, Europe has been engaged in an almost uninterrupted string of wars that made many political subjects disappear. The Holy Roman Empire, for instance, was dissolved in 1806 and never restored. The maps of Germany and Italy were drastically simplified, and many existing states dissolved. On the other hand, the Kingdom of Poland, dismembered in the second half of the 18th century by Austria, Prussia, and Russia, was re-established in 1807 as the Duchy of Warsaw. New rulers were installed on the existing thrones, such as in the Kingdom of Naples (Joseph Bonaparte, r.: 1806-1808, and Joachim Murat, r.: 1808-15), the Kingdom of Westphalia (Jérôme Bonaparte, r.: 1807-13), and Spain (Joseph Bonaparte, r.: 1808-13). Defeated enemies sometimes became subaltern to the French system (as happened to Prussia in 1807, after the treaty of Tilsit) or were heavily maimed in their territorial possession, as happened to Austria on several occasions. In several states, the defeat favoured a process of political and military modernisation. For instance, in Prussia, reformers like Karl vom Stein, Karl August von Hardenberg, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, August von Gneisenau, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, each in his field, laid the foundations for both the country’s short-term recovery and its future rise to European hegemony. In the military field, the Napoleonic experience introduced a new way of waging war. Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies were far larger than the previous ones, and new ways of commanding them had to be devised. With this aim, Napoleon adopted, among others, the staff system and the army corps structure, while from an operational point of view, 18th-century tactics based on complex field manoeuvres were replaced by the search for a single decisive clash. 5. Although the world was far less interconnected than it would have been in the following decades, European events had global impacts and were placed into a global context. For instance, even before the Revolution’s outbreak, tight bonds connected France and the US intellectual circles, contributing to the spreading of republicanism and fuelling the debate on issues like the nature of power, the different government systems and human rights. In the political field, Bourbon France and the Kingdom of Spain participated in the US Independence War (1775-83), siding with the Thirteen Colonies and playing a pivotal role in the defeat of the British troops. In 1778, the Colonies entered an alliance with France that the US inherited after independence and was abrogated just in 1800. The 2 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century French revolution spread its message also in the Americas, triggering rebellions in the Western Hemisphere, such as that of Haiti’s black population led by Toussaint Louverture (1791-1804). In the Middle East, Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1801) had a momentous impact on the Ottoman Empire, demonstrating the European powers’ military, technological, and organisational superiority. Among others, the invasion introduced Western inventions (such as the printing press) and ideas (such as liberalism and incipient nationalism) to the Middle East, paving the way to the establishment of Egyptian independence and modernisation under Muhammad Ali Pasha in the first half of the 19th century. The Napoleonic invasion of Egypt is also widely regarded as the first act of modern European imperialism and criticised for its role in shaping the “civilising mission” narrative of 19th-century European colonial empires. 6. The Egyptian campaign also connected Europe with the country’s ancient culture and civilisation, making Egypt ‘fashionable’ and feeding a new interest in antiquities. Understanding the ‘Other’ increasingly became a professional activity. This trend strengthened in the 19th century when colonial expansion exposed European countries to a growing number of foreign influences. In this framework, history, anthropology, and the other social sciences (which developed all over the century) became tools not only to understand the ‘Other’ but also to ‘frame’ it into a ‘scientific’ discourse that reaffirmed Europe’s superiority. After the Napoleonic war, Europe’s expansion benefitted from many factors. Scientific and industrial development widened the technological gap between European powers and their potential rival; the speeding up of economic growth widened the wealth gap; military innovation tested after 1792 widened the gap in terms of hard power. It was a self-feeding process. The spreading of territorial control provided Europe with the resources it needed for further expansion and, at the same time, increased the advantage it enjoyed over its rivals. At the beginning of the 19th century, this process was still in its early stages, although the British East India Company was already India’s paramount power. Over time it evolved, leading to growing tensions both among the European countries and between them and their colonial subjects. At the same time, it promoted global integration, favouring the circulation of goods, people, and ideas in a flow that, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, laid the foundation of the post-World War II decolonization process. 7. People’s awareness of these dynamics also increased over time. Culture and information were other fields that the industrial revolution affected, both directly and indirectly. Urbanisation provided a new market for a lively cultural industry. While selling entrainment, theatres and books contributed to spreading ideas and values, sometimes conveying openly political messages, as in Italy during the Risorgimento. Penny journals made information available even to lower classes, shaping an embryo of public opinion and making the press a new pressure group. On the supply side, technological innovation made printing books, journals, leaflets and illustrations cheaper and faster, widening and speeding their circulation. Since the mid-century, the laying of telegraph lines made Europe more thoroughly interconnected. In the following decades, a network of undersea cables expanded the system, providing further impulse to European colonial expansion and gaining stimulus from it. For information, the telegraph was a quantum leap. Since the mid-1830s, the spreading of railways had already started a global integration process, which also benefitted from the success of steamers and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Another effect of the telegraph’s success was greater political centralisation. In the second half of the 19th century, European governments were far more able than in the past 3 International History (Prof. Gianluca Pastori) Script 01 – Long-term trends at the beginning of the 19th century to control what their local representatives did and to control them at home and abroad. As a consequence, the states’ machinery grew in power, dimension, complexity and responsibilities; the cabinet system consolidated, and by the mid-century, representative government was the rule in most European countries. 8. From many perspectives, the beginning of the 19th century was an age of transition. At the same time, it was an age when many previous decades’ trends coalesced and reached their maturity. In this period, nationalism and liberalism marched hand in hand, and the quest for more political representation was strictly linked to national recognition. With its rediscovering of a largely mythical ‘ancestral past’, Romanticism gave nationalism a new argument. At the same time, its emphasis on blood, soil and common historical heritage as key elements of one people’s identity sounded a sharp criticism of the cosmopolitism of the 18th-century elites. The link between liberalism and nationalism shaped domestic and international politics until the 1860s. After that date, things radically changed, and nationalism became increasingly aggressive, chauvinistic and antiliberal. Mediatisation of politics had something to do with this evolution. Moreover, political leaders had to take into increasing consideration public opinion’s feelings (and often appease it), while new pressure groups affected their room for manoeuvre. Increasing people’s participation in politics (with its pros and cons) was another great trend of the 19th century, although general universal suffrage for men and women would have been reached only during the 20th. However, such increasing participation must be seen in relative terms. Within and outside Europe, the vast majority of everyday people were de jure or de facto excluded from politics and this state of things only partially changed during the century. Until after World War I, politics was largely a notables’ affair, and only the war could transform masses into a political subject. 4