PART II
Up ASSIGNMENTS PART II NOTES

 

PART II. 
THE 19TH CENTURY & THE REVOLUTIONS OF MODERNIZATION

During the 19th century the West grew in  power until by the beginning of the 20th century it dominated the world. In this sense historians might call that era the European Century. Europe's power was rooted in three interconnected movements that are the focus for Part II of the course. 
The development of strong nation states buttressed by nationalism
The development of powerful economies and transformed societies by the Industrial Revolution
The development of a deep shift in culture connected to new ways of looking at the world and  new ideas about human nature, religion, and behavior.

Each of these movements were part of a process that some scholars call "modernization." That process challenged, transformed and sometimes overturned long-established institutions and traditions.  We have already seen the roots of that process at work in the preceding centuries. By the last quarter of the eighteenth these forces had so undermined the Ancien Regime that an Age of Revolution came to mark the turn of a new century.

For our purposes we can see the nineteenth century running from the end of the Age of Revolution in 1815 to 1914 when the First World War began. It that century the revolutions of modernization created the world inherited by the twentieth century.