Part 26 (2/2)

In 1900, it was still good to be the king. Or the emperor, or the prince, or the archduke, for that matter. Various empires dominated the world outside North and South America. Fortified by the largest navy in the world, Great Britain supervised one quarter of the entire globe. ”The sun,” went a popular saying, ”never sets on the British Empire.” By the end of her sixty-three-year reign in 1901, Queen Victoria ruled over the British Isles, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Burma, Egypt, and a good chunk of the rest of the African continent. But the Brits were by no means alone in the ardent practice of imperialism, which could be defined as ”we can run your country better than you can, we want your natural resources, and this is a good spot for our military purposes, so welcome to the empire.”

The Hapsburgs sat atop the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Romanovs over the Russian Empire, the Manchu over Imperial China, and the Ottomans over, well, the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor. The French, Italians, Germans, Belgians, and Portuguese all had colonies. j.a.pan, after centuries of mostly trying to avoid foreign entanglement, took control of Formosa (now Taiwan) in 1895 and Korea in 1910. Even the United States, which through the Monroe Doctrine had for seventy-seven years sternly warned Europe to stay out of the New World, held Puerto Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba.

Only South America was largely free of colonial influences. With the exception of small European holdings in Guiana, the rest of the continent had shed its colonial bonds by the end of the nineteenth century.

Europe had been without major conflict since 1815. But as colonialism reached its peak, the competing empires and would-be empires began b.u.mping up against each other-and rubbing each other the wrong way.

And as industrialization continued its ascent as the dominant factor in the world's economy, some countries outstripped their neighbors. The resulting tensions escalated into various small wars around the globe, from South Africa to Korea.

But there were internal conflicts as well. Fueled by the nineteenth-century writings of a German economics philosopher named Karl Marx, socialists agitated for replacement of monarchs with the ma.s.ses as the heads of government. At the same time, ”colonials” were chafing at the empires' yokes. Nationalism began to take on imperialism.

These battles of ”isms” boiled over in the Balkans in 1912, when Montenegro successfully rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece followed. The aftershocks rippled throughout Europe, as the flagging Romanov and Hapsburg empires tried to squeeze into the gap left by the Ottomans.

As the situation festered, nations solidified alliances, and by August 1914, Europe was at war. Horrifically effective weapons such as tanks and poison gas, coupled with disease, led to the deaths of more than eight million soldiers, and more than twenty million non-fatal casualties before the war's end in 1918.

In an effort to restore some sort of order and instill real meaning to the catchphrase ”war to end all wars,” the formal peace treaty eventually signed at Versailles created a League of Nations. The league lacked any military clout, but was supposed to use economic and political pressure to exert influence. It didn't work, especially when the U.S. Senate refused to authorize America's members.h.i.+p.

While America's politics were isolationist, its status as the world's postwar banker made it indispensable. Big U.S. banks made huge loans to foreign countries. When the countries couldn't, or wouldn't, repay the debts, the banks were left high and dry. Farm failures, a growing disparity between the rich and poor, over-reliance on personal credit, and a stock market overheated by get-rich-quick speculation all contributed to a resounding crash of the U.S. economy in 1929.

From an economic standpoint, when the United States sniffled, the world caught a cold. And at the end of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, you might say the world was on the edge of pneumonia.

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN.

Jul. 2, 1900 Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin launches the first rigid airs.h.i.+p. The flight lasts 18 minutes.

Jan. 1, 1901 The five British colonies in Australia are united to become a commonwealth.

1902.

A 7,000-foot-long dam is completed across the Nile River near Aswan, in Southern Egypt.

Dec. 17, 1903 Ohio bicycle shop owners Orville and Wilbur Wright make several flights in a powered flying machine.

1905.

German physicist Albert Einstein publishes three groundbreaking papers, including his theory of relativity.

1908.

Henry Ford's factory in Detroit produces the first Model T.

Mar. 10, 1910 China abolishes slavery within the empire.

Apr. 14, 1912 The RMS t.i.tanic t.i.tanic, the world's largest pa.s.senger liner, strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks on its maiden voyage.

Aug. 5, 1914 What are believed to the world's first traffic lights begin operating at the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Ave in Cleveland.

Aug. 14, 1914 After a decade under construction, the Panama Ca.n.a.l is formally opened.

Apr. 22, 1915 The German military uses poison gas against French colonial and Canadian troops.

1918.

”Spanish” influenza kills an estimated 6 million people in Europe alone.

Nov. 2, 1920 Radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh makes the first regularly scheduled commercial broadcast.

Oct. 31, 1922 A thirty-nine-year-old former draft dodger named Benito Mussolini becomes the youngest prime minister in Italy's history.

1923.

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