USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
Nationalism and Conflict
12017-06-09T11:00:49-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192377plain2020-08-23T06:59:50-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cWith rise and rapid spread of nationalism, there was, forming in the distance, like a thunderstorm, a volatile mix of elements. There was a rising sense of inclusion and exclusion developing in each state and within each national movement. Minorities, who lived within larger states, increasingly rejected the legitimacy of that state’s rule on nationalist grounds. Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Greeks, Romanians, Hungarians, the Irish, the Basque, the Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, and more desired freedom from imperial, foreign governments. In addition to this, there was an increasing notion of national hierarchy, which was beginning to be linked to ethnicity and race. Germans, for example, saw themselves as more civilized than Slavs and Jews, the English more civilized than the Irish, and so on. Above all, as the idea of the nation became more concrete and real to the masses of participants in new parliamentary governments, competition between nations increased sharply. This nationalist competition created the atmosphere for the sudden wave of new European imperialism in Africa and Asia in the late 19th century. What started in the 15th century as a race for markets, trade, and merchant profit became in the late 19th century a race for raw materials, colonial subjects, strategic naval and military positions, and, ultimately, an increased slice of the global economic pie (or at least the imaginary pie). The prevailing theory held that if one country’s slice grew, the rest of the pie shrank. England, France, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Russia, and to some extent Austria and the United States scrambled to seize as much territory as possible. The most extreme cases of such a scramble were the U.S. Navy’s Robert Peary planting a U.S. flag in what he thought was the North Pole in April of 1919 and the race to discover the South Pole, which ended in the 1911 victory of Norwegian Roald Amundsen, who, like Peary, flew his country's flag in the harsh and barren landscape, "claiming" the territory to the surprise of the continent's bemused community of penguins.
12017-08-14T23:08:07-07:00Colonial East Africa2East Africa from the late 19th century until the end of the First World War became one of the most complex colonial regions. It is no surprise that East Africa became one of the key areas of conflict in Africa during WWI.plain2020-08-23T06:55:10-07:00
