This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
The World of 1830
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Del curso dictado por University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
1295 calificaciones
University of Virginia
1295 calificaciones
De la lección
Revolutionary Wars (1800-1830)
Conoce a los instructores
Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Welcome back.
All right, let's put all together what we've been talking about this week.
I'm just surveying the world that now exists in 1830.
On the one hand,
especially in Europe there's a strong renewal of the importance of tradition.
There is a great yearning for peace, after years of disorder and war.
There's a renewed devotion to throne and altar.
To the ceremonies, traditions, rituals.
Indeed, a renewed burst of Christianity, even in kind of a mystical Christianity
for example, Tsar Alexander I was quite taken for
a while with messianic beliefs that all of these wars
were the harbingers of the coming of a messiah, who might come from the north.
A very powerful set of views coming out of Germany, called pietism.
As part of this phenomenon of mystical Christianity.
So both the Catholic church is restored in its strength,
protestant Christianity and mystical strengths.
This is also a period in which comforting tradition
gathers itself around the symbol of a nation of national communities.
Battered by revolutionary attacks, instead people are trying to seek community in
their traditions, in their language, in their folklore, in their history.
Academics are working hard to recover this.
However every child who's sort of glimpse fairy tales, Hansel and Gretel or
this one, this is an illustration from the tale of Rapunzel,
who lets her down hair and her rescuer comes through, what happens here is that
the academics of their day, the German professors starts systematically compiling
traditional folklore as handed down from generation to generation and
published this as something that's distinctive about their nation.
And that search for
the spiritual essence of things is at the heart of the Romantic Movement.
Romanticism in literature, music, art.
There are a lot of ways of trying to understand
this movement we can wall romanticism.
But, let's listen to an example.
You might recognize this piece of music.
[MUSIC]
That's a snatch of music many of you probably recognize.
It's from the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven.
Beethoven, himself,
is a really good representative of the romantic movement in music.
The spirit, the fire, that he's trying to capture, not the classical mechanics of
Mozart, or of Bach, but, a pure feeling, and, in this case,
in this last symphony that he's composing, he's using a coral accompaniment.
Those words that you were hearing are in German,
there from a poem by Friedrich Schiller called Ode to Joy.
He's putting to music Schiller's poem, which itself,
he's hailing as a poem that's exalting the virtue of brotherhood.
Between rich man and poor man, all brought together by the wonderment of joy.
Another example of romanticism we can find in the literary movements of the 1820s,
1830s, and 1840s.
This is an example.
Sir Walter Scott was very widely read in multiple languages during this generation.
This is a picture of Scott.
And a perhaps it's best known noble IVANHOE.
IVANHOE is a romance it's actually set century's earlier in a time of
Richard de Lion heart and knights and ladies and jaws.
The age of chivalry.
You see he's trying to recover in English historical tradition.
Folklore all bringing it to life as part of the essence of the English nation.
So, on the one hand we've talked about the renewal of comforting tradition,
peace, order ceremony, the triumph of the spirit.
At the same time this is also the period in which we see the rise of what
you could call the engineers, the tankers, the mechanics,
the revolutionary wars had obviously been a huge boost of people making cannon.
But in general this is an era in which people are getting much better at
iron working.
Iron is beginning to replace wood as core building material but I use it here
more just symbolize the replacement of a fundamentally natural material
the wood I cut down from trees with the iron that I'm producing in a process
that requires experts to know how to mold it into something useful.
Paralleled with that is the rise of economic liberalism.
When I use the word liberal here, I don't mean liberal in the way we
use it nowadays saying United States as a liberal is someone on the political left.
Liberal in the way people understood that term in the 1820s and
1830s is again someone who is free thinking.
Willing to experiment and try new things.
Someone who'd believe that there ought to be less government, less authority from
crowned rulers and more openness to experimentation and to private business.
So for example, this is a period in which there's a huge reaction,
both religious reaction and from natural philosophers against slavery.
The slave trade will be banned in Britain and by the early 1830's,
Britain will be among the leading nations to outlaw slavery in all of its domains.
Really an extra ordinary social political and cultural movement.
Perhaps the figure we most identify with economic liberalism is this man,
Adam Smith, and this book that he wrote.
An inquiry into nature and causes of the wealth of nations.
This is the book that celebrates the virtual of a free market.
That by allowing the free exchange of goods, natural advantages will emerge.
And you can get a level of productivity and
prosperity that would be inconceivable if we simply relied on central command.
This economic liberalism, with its encouragement to the,
freedom to trade, free of monopolies like say that of the East India company.
Is also accompanied by political liberalism.
And again, don't confuse political liberalism necessarily with a democracy.
Political liberalism in this context is still about free thinking,
the willingness to experiment, to reinvent, to reform, reform of all kinds.
A really good illustration of political liberalism might be the works of this man,
Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham was not a revolutionary figure.
Bentham was just a man who believed that you should be about solving problems.
He was, above all, a practical philosopher.
His great ideal was utility.
What will accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number?
And we should be open minded to find whatever solution works.
Another real leader of political liberalism,
especially on the continent of Europe, is this man, Benjamin Constant.
Constant's political career was made in France,
he to was an a of not so much overthrown in the established or
trying to find a consensus that allow opportunities to reform.
Allow opportunities for people willing to try new things.
He is a big believer in constitutions, in parliaments, in separations of power.
He had spent a lot of his early life in Britain.
He was also impressed by aspects of the American Republic.
And he tried to bring some of those ideas back into French political life.
Trying to find a consensus between royalist reaction and revolutionary zeal.
Another dimension of the world of 1830 is the sense in which the bastions of
the traditional world are increasingly being encircled by modern forces.
We can see this in a few different dimensions.
For example, even within Europe there's this feeling in divided
societies as if you have outposts of tradition.
The established church, royal families,
increasingly encircled by modern innovations.
By modern thinkers, by pressures from reformers.
And then the more modern parts of Europe, Western Europe are increasingly encircling
the more traditional parts of Europe dominated by large land owners.
In places like the Russian Empire or other parts of Eastern Europe.
There's also a sense in which modern ideals are pressuring the classical
traditions of Islam and East Asia.
Gosh what do we mean by classical traditions?
Think about a society in which very few people are illiterate.
And you prove yourself by the mastery of the canonical text.
I mastered the Koran.
I've mastered classical Arabic in this very difficult script.
Or in China, I've mastered the Analects of Confucius.
I can actually write this extremely complicated script.
I can even pass examinations that test how well I know and
have memorized these things.
And there's this really clear hierarchy of assent in which then there
are these learned people at the top who cultivate a rarified and
lovely atmosphere of poetry and literature.
That's a kind of classical tradition.
But you can see how this is a tension, with so much of the way that culture is
evolving in other parts of the world that are increasingly encircling them.
There's another sense of encirclement.
The world's commerce is more and more enclosed by commerce dominated
by Europeans, sheltered by the Pax Britannica, the British peace.
The British peace doesn't mean that wars have stopped.
Or even that wars have stopped in Europe.
They haven't.
What it does mean is that the oceans are peaceful.
There's not another kind of general war like the Napoleonic Wars.
That's disrupting trade and sinking and seizing merchant ships all over the world.
Here's a map of the world in 1830.
You could think of the traditional world as still encompassing,
Most of this part of the world.
But also think of the way in which commerce now,
is protected by the British piece.
The British have established naval outposts extending out of Britain here
in South Africa, in India, in Singapore.
In Java, British ships and commerce regard the Indian ocean as a protected ocean in
the same way they dominate the Atlantic ocean in which both Britain and
the United States of America, as well as the new republics of South America
have an interest in protecting and safeguarding that trade too.
With the commerce comes goods and ideas that also increasingly encircle and
encroach the traditional societies.
You'll notice I haven't talked much yet about the industrial revolution.
As of 1830 the industrial revolution isn't yet a dominant thing.
And these traditional societies, in places like China, are still very strong.
But these modern pressures are really going to manifest themselves
in the coming generation that we'll talk about next week.
See you then.
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