The Greatest Leap

By Andrew Hatcher

A unique, readable account of the 20th century for the general reader. Informative and packed with detail, The Greatest Leap offers a clear and readable account of of the history of Britain and the World in the 20th century, one of the most exciting in the history of mankind...

Beginning with the death of Queen Victoria and ending a hundred years later with the last New Year's Eve of the century, The Greatest Leap is broken into 10 chapters, with each looking at the history of a particular decade. From the 1900s to the 1990s, each chapter covers everything you need to know about the 20th century, from the beginning and end of wars to the births and deaths of important figures and ending on the last new year’s eve of the century.

Inspired by narrative historians across the ages, The Greatest Leap is an easy read that will appeal to anyone interested in Britain and the world in the 20th century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Sep 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785894114

Andrew Hatcher

Andrew Hatcher has lived and worked in Dubai since 1992. Before that, he worked in Surrey and Oxfordshire. He studied at the Universities of East Anglia, Oxford and York. Andrew is currently working on a history of Britain since 1066.

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Copyright © 2015 Andrew Hatcher

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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ISBN 978 1785894 114

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For my mum, and in memory of my dad.

Contents

1900s White Man’s World

1910s Catastrophe

1920s Boom and Bust

1930s The Road to War

1940s War, Peace and War Again

1950s The Cold War Peace

1960s The Years of Transition

1970s Détente– The Uneasy Peace

1980s The Triumph of the West

1990s The Information Age

White Man’s World

The 1900s

January 1901

(The Death of Queen Victoria)

to

August 1911

(The Passing of the Parliament Act)

The Legacy of the Victorians

European and British Pre-eminence in the Edwardian Period

Challenges in Africa and China: the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion

The USA at the Turn of the Century

Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Russia at War and in Revolution

The Alliance System and the Deepening Divide with Germany

The Anglo-German Naval Arms Race and the First Bosnian Crisis

The People’s Budget and the Constitutional Crisis in Britain

The Legacy of the Victorians

In the early evening of 22 January 1901, Queen Victoria died of a brain haemorrhage at Osborne House, her country retreat on the Isle of Wight. The queen was related to nearly all the royal families of Europe and so, consequently, many of their number came to London to pay their last respects. After a funeral that incorporated much of the pomp and splendour that late Victorians had come to expect from large state and imperial occasions, her body was laid to rest next to that of her beloved husband, Prince Albert, in the royal mausoleum that she had built for him in the grounds of Frogmore House in Windsor.

In retrospect, this was to be one of the last great meetings of the old dynasties of Europe. The old world of the nineteenth century was crumbling away and, within a generation, most of the monarchs who followed Victoria’s cortege on horseback through the streets of London and then Windsor had been forced from their thrones. After the carnage of World War One, the old dynastic empires of Europe were torn apart, and new democratic nations were to emerge from the chaos that the war had brought.

Victoria had ruled Britain and its ever-expanding empire for over six decades, and she had seen her country come to dominate the world in a way that no other nation had ever done before. Through trade, industry and military conquest, the British under Victoria had amassed an empire upon which the sun never set, and in 1901, as the old queen was laid to rest, it incorporated a quarter of the world’s population. But Victoria did not only lend her name to the age of British domination over which she presided. She also personified the Old Order that was so well represented at her funeral. Her death, then, perhaps more than any other event at the turn of the century, symbolised the end of the old century and the beginning of the new.

The world that the eighty-one-year-old queen departed in 1901 was very different from the one in which she had been crowned in 1837. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of this could be found in the massive urban and industrial transformations that had altered the world so markedly over these intervening sixty-four years. This had all begun with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century that had made Britain a world leader, and this had been a major reason why Britain was able to wage such a long and expensive war against Napoleon. British domination at this earlier time was based on the cotton, coal and iron industries, and this had led to the massive growth of cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow and Belfast.

The products of these cities and towns, and many others like them across Britain, were sent to markets all over the world, and this domination had increased dramatically in the first decade of the new queen’s reign as a result of the great railway boom of the 1840s. This had made Britain far and away the world’s greatest industrial and commercial nation, the Workshop of the World. Britain was to maintain this domination through much of the Victorian Age and continue to claim a massive share of the flourishing global market.

But as the old century drew to a close, this was beginning to change. Britain remained the dominant industrial and imperial power, but the USA, Germany and France, as well as many other emerging nations, were all beginning to offer stiff competition to this British pre-eminence. The USA was blessed with huge economic potential and unlimited land and raw materials that stretched across a continent, Germany with industrially strong regions such as the Saar and the Ruhr, and France was rich in coal and iron reserves, especially in the north. In the Far East, Japan had also put in place a dynamic programme of industrialisation that was soon used to expand its interests into China, and later across the Asian continent.

With the spread of industrialisation in the late nineteenth century, technological improvements and developments spawned a myriad of new industries. The electrical industry was still in its infancy as the new century began, as was the manufacture of cars and other vehicles driven by the internal combustion engine. The first car had been built in Germany only fifteen years before the end of the century, but its enormous impact was soon to revolutionise both transport and warfare. Among the early beneficiaries of this new boom were the huge oil companies that grew massively in the early years of the century, especially in California and Texas. Most of the oil extracted by these companies in around 1900 had been used for street lighting. With the advent of the car and the aeroplane a little later, this was all soon to change.

Huge advances had also been made in photography and cinema since the first images had been recorded in the 1830s and the first moving pictures were shown at a theatre in Paris in 1895. In 1900, photography was made accessible to the masses when Kodak brought out the Box Brownie, the world’s first hand-held camera, at the cost of only $US1. Soon the centre of the new cinema industry moved across the Atlantic, finding a home in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood, although this was not before the first-ever narrative film, the twelve-minute-long, The Great Train Robbery, had been made in New York by Edison Studios in 1903.

At the same time, football, which was to become one of the most important social developments of the century, was beginning to draw huge crowds. Soon sport and television, which developed in the 1920s out of early developments in cinema, were to unite, and by the end of the century more than half of the world’s population were tuning in to watch events such as the football World Cup and the Olympic Games. These events over time were to generate huge profits in revenue for an advertising industry that in 1900 was also in its infancy.

Huge strides had also been made in medicine after the Frenchman Louis Pasteur had established the link between germs and disease in the 1860s. This had led to important developments in the treatment and prevention of killer diseases, and by 1900 vaccines had been found for such diseases as rabies and diphtheria. In 1905, Pasteur’s great German rival, Robert Koch, who in the 1870s had proved the link between germs and disease in humans, received the Nobel Prize for his research into a cure for tuberculosis. At the beginning of the century, this was the world’s greatest killer. The world was also massively transformed by the pioneering work of Marie Curie, the only scientist ever to win Nobel Prizes in two different subjects. Curie, whose prizes were for physics and chemistry, worked predominantly at the Sorbonne where she developed, among other things, her ideas concerning radiology in the years leading up to World War One.

By 1900, many Western European countries had already adopted vaccination programmes, although it would still be forty years until an effective and widespread answer to combating infection was developed in the form of penicillin. In 1901, the Austrian pathologist, Karl Landsteiner, discovered the existence of the four different blood groups, a discovery that paved the way for further advances that included successful blood transfusions during World War One. Crucial advances had also been made in surgery where antiseptic, and then aseptic, conditions were increasingly adopted.

Just as important was progress in the fields of chemotherapy and pharmacology, with the development in 1909 of Salvarsan 606, a chemical compound that cured syphilis, being an early example. Demand for this new wonder drug was extraordinary and, within a year, 14,000 vials a day were being produced, making huge profits for the nascent pharmaceutical companies involved. Indeed, pharmaceutical companies in time were to become some of the biggest and most profitable multinational companies of the century. All these discoveries were to save millions of lives through the century.

Great leaps forward were also taking place in many other fields of science. In 1905, the twenty-six-year-old patent clerk, Albert Einstein, published three papers in a German scientific magazine that outlined the ideas that revolutionised the scientific understanding of the universe. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity and his famous equation, E=MC², provided the cornerstone of modern physics throughout the century as scientists and astronauts looked still further into outer space and the universe beyond. Of equal importance was the work of Sigmund Freud whose book, The Interpretation of Dreams, first published in German in 1899, revolutionised the sciences of psychology and psychiatry. Freud was increasingly influential as the century went on and his visit to the USA in 1909 was widely reported. In the world of art, many changes were taking place as the new century progressed, with Pablo Picasso founding the cubist movement in 1907.

Communications had also been revolutionised during the last years of the nineteenth century, with the world technologically becoming a much smaller place. The telegraph dated from the 1830s and the telephone from the 1870s, and both were important developments of the nineteenth century that made the spread of information infinitely quicker than anything that had come before. Crucial also was the work done to develop radio communication by men such as Guglielmo Marconi who successfully sent a radio signal across the English Channel in 1899. Two years later, he bettered this when he managed to communicate with the USA across the Atlantic from his radio station in West Ireland. Coming at a time of European colonial domination, these developments in communications allowed leaders in European capitals to direct colonial affairs much more closely and remain in charge of large tracts of the world for much of the century.

Another hugely important development in the first decade of the new century was the aeroplane, which the Wright brothers, mechanics and bicycle shopowners from Ohio, flew for the first time in the small Atlantic coastal town of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. Their interest in flying had begun in 1896, and, before their success, they made over 700 trial glider flights. This first flight was piloted by Orville Wright who flew a distance of 197 feet in twelve seconds. Later in the day, Wilbur took control of their flying machine, the Wright Flyer, and flew 850 feet in fifty-nine seconds. In 1909, the English Channel was crossed for the first time by Louis Blériot, the French aviator, and within five years aircraft development had advanced so quickly that aerial warfare could be waged above the trenches of World War One. The aeroplane was to become the premier war machine of the twentieth century.

European and British Pre-eminence in the Edwardian Period

The importance of the industrial, technological and communication advances of Victoria’s reign were perhaps less obvious to the millions of indigenous people who in 1900 still remained under the yoke of European colonial rule. Britain remained the largest colonial power, with early victories over France in Canada and India in the eighteenth century and Napoleon’s defeat at the beginning of the nineteenth giving a head start over its main rival that had been maintained throughout Victoria’s long reign. In 1900, its colonies and dominions stretched across the world.

But Britain’s empire was just one of many that European countries had acquired over four centuries of foreign conquest, and this process had increased after massive industrialisation in Europe in the late nineteenth century. This led to a series of rivalries between various European nations that vied with each other for new markets and new sources of raw materials increasingly available around the world. Among those countries involved in this scramble for empire were Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, with many of the rivalries that colonialism brought ultimately settled on the battlefields of World War One between 1914 and 1918.

Economic motives often lay behind the acquisition of empire during the nineteenth century. However, various other altruistic reasons, such as the benefits to a native population of Christian enlightenment and benevolent paternalism, were often given as to why European countries claimed the right to move into vast tracts of land across the world. The reality was often very different, with many of these European empires ruled with great barbarity.

The most infamous case of this kind took place in the Congo Free State, a colony that since the 1880s had been the personal property of King Leopold II, the king of the Belgians. By the turn of the century, thousands of indigenous workers were employed in the rubber plantations there that supplied the expanding European market. As the demand for rubber increased, predominantly because of the need for car tyres, the king became richer and richer. However, scandal erupted in 1903 when accusations concerning the treatment of the plantation workers were published in Europe. It was subsequently proved that systematic atrocities, such as the severing of hands as punishment for slow work, were carried out by the king’s representatives, and in 1908 the king was forced to hand over the colony to the Belgian government.

Britain’s huge colonial possessions and its immense domestic industrial base had been, to a great extent, created by the middle classes. They ran the factories and the warehouses, the shipping lines and the railways, the insurance companies and the banks on which Britain and its empire had been built, and they increasingly had come to take on an active role in the political life of the nation. But the working class was also learning to organise and, especially after 1880, a trade union movement had begun to develop and grow in strength. From its ranks, the first working-class MPs were elected in the 1890s, and it was to be only just over twenty years before the first Labour government took office in January 1924. The working class at the beginning of the twentieth century looked at the various developments, innovations, inventions and advances that were sweeping the world, and demanded their part in this new world order under the British flag.

Through the last decades of the Victorian Age, the growing power of the working class in Britain had forced both Liberal and Conservative governments to work harder on its behalf. As a consequence, living conditions and educational opportunities for the working class had slowly improved, and by 1900 a more comprehensive public health programme had been adopted. During a similar time, the same story was being experienced in many other parts of Europe and the USA.

Many politicians, though, were shocked to find that 40% of those volunteering for service in the Boer War had to be turned down on health grounds, resulting in a series of other welfare improvements through the Edwardian period that aimed to improve the health of the nation. Free school meals for poor children began in 1906, and a year later local authorities were required by law to offer a school medical service. However, improvement in the lives of the working class was not universal and the last of the Victorian workhouses were not finally closed down until long after the end of World War One.

Despite the advances made by the working and middle classes during the last years of the old century, it was still the aristocracy who in 1900 owned much of the nation’s wealth and ran most of its more important institutions. This was despite the growing importance of the House of Commons as the central organ of government, and despite the fact that the monarch had come to play an increasingly diminished role in the political decision-making process of the nation over the previous century or so. So, Britain remained uniquely class structured in its social anatomy as the Victorian Age gave way to the Edwardian period, with the aristocracy maintaining its privileged position within British society well into the new century. The willingness of the aristocracy and the Establishment to recruit from the most successful upper reaches of the middle class was one important reason for this. Iron masters and bankers, shipping magnates and railway entrepreneurs were happy to be ennobled into a life that revolved around the country estate and the House of Lords. The public school system and the Oxbridge universities were also crucial in maintaining Britain’s distinctive class make-up.Of these, the most successful as well as one of the most private, was Sir John Ellerman, the shipowner and investor, who was made a baronet in 1905 for services during the Boer War. Ellerman, an accountant by training and the son of an immigrant German corn merchant, was for a generation, by a considerable amount, the richest man in Britain.

One issue that remained unresolved at the beginning of the century was the role of women within British political life. Some progress concerning female suffrage had been made in the nineteenth century, with the influential liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, lending his support to the idea in the 1860s. The women of New Zealand had been given the vote in the 1890s, and a similar reform was also implemented in Australia in 1902. These successes abroad, together with the enfranchisement of other sections of society, resulted in various movements for women’s suffrage in Britain that were diverse and represented many different political views.

However, it was the Women’s Social and Political Union, set up in 1903 by Emmeline Pankhurst and her two daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, that was to become the most popular of these during the early years of the new king’s reign. The WSPU was militant and sometimes violent in nature, and it played a central role in getting the issue of women’s rights onto the political agenda. The campaign continued up until the outbreak of war and became increasingly extreme, with one suffragette killing herself by throwing herself in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Others were involved in a series of hunger strikes that were thwarted by the government’s so-called ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. This allowed the hospitalisation and force-feeding of hunger strikers until such time as they were out of physical danger when they were released. Then the process was repeated again once the hunger striker had returned to a state of critical illness, and repeated over and over until such time as the hunger striker gave up.

In reality, little in substance was achieved until after World War One in which female workers played such an important role in factories and farms at home while so many men were away fighting. As a result, some women in Britain over the age of thirty were finally given the vote in 1918 although this was subject to a property qualification. In 1928, the age of voting in Britain was standardised, with both men and women over the age of twenty-one qualifying for the electoral register.

Many other women in many other parts of the world joined them in the aftermath of World War One and they followed the women of Finland who had been the first in Europe to be enfranchised in 1906. The USSR in 1917, Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1919, and the USA and Hungary in 1920 all extended their franchises. Indian women received full voting rights in 1949 and they were joined by the women of Pakistan in 1956. Most other decolonised countries also granted full voting rights to both male and female citizens after independence in the 1950s and 1960s. But the fight for female suffrage was often a hard and long battle, with Swiss women, for instance, only finally gaining full voting parity with their male counterparts in the early 1970s.

As the new century began, Britain was led by a prime minister who sat in the House of Lords along with many of his cabinet, his advisers and his senior colonial appointees. Lord Salisbury was a Conservative who had become prime minister for the first of his three terms in office in 1885. By 1900, he was at the end of a long political career that had started with his election to the House of Commons in 1853 just before the Crimean War. For most of his time as prime minister, he also held the position of foreign secretary, choosing to concern himself predominantly with colonial and imperial matters. This coincided with a time of huge expansion into Africa, with Britain adding Egypt and the East African colonies of Kenya and Uganda to its already huge empire.

Salisbury had continued Britain’s traditional overseas policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ that had, with the exception of the Crimean War in the 1850s, kept Britain out of major European conflicts since Waterloo. He ensured that Britain remained outside the series of alliances and treaties that were developing in continental Europe although his very nineteenth-century attitude to foreign policy was abandoned soon after his successor, Arthur Balfour, came to power in July 1902.

Under Balfour and his Liberal successors, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Herbert Asquith, Britain began the process of abandoning ‘Splendid Isolation’ and instead entered a series of agreements and pacts over the next few years, the most notable of which were with France and Russia. These were primarily entered into in order to protect Britain from what was seen as increasingly belligerent German aggression. Asquith had taken over from Campbell-Bannerman in April 1908 when the latter had become the only prime minister ever to die while in residence at Number 10 Downing Street. This came during a period of convalescence when he was too ill to be moved, just less than three weeks after a heart attack had forced his resignation.

Challenges in Africa and China: the Boer War and the Boxer Rebellion

However, Britain’s most immediate problem at the beginning of the century was not Germany. Salisbury and his colleagues were more concerned with resolving the Boer War, which had begun the previous year and in which a British victory was far from certain. The Boers were settlers, mainly of Dutch ancestry, who had arrived on the coast of southern Africa in the seventeenth century. From their original base around Table Mountain where Cape Town was built, they had spread out into the surrounding hinterland.

Britain had taken control of Cape Town in 1795 and was formally awarded the colony in the treaty that concluded the Napoleonic War in 1815. Britain originally intended to use Cape Colony as no more than a supply port on the way to far more important colonial possessions in India. But as more and more British settlers came to stay, tension rose between the two immigrant communities, with problems particularly focused on the question of slavery. This was banned throughout the British Empire, but it was a practice widely supported by the Boers.

After a series of struggles against not only the British but also the local African population, the Boers began their Great Trek in 1835. This northwards migration away from British interference was to last for much of the next decade, and it led to the formation of two Boer republics, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, on the high veldt 1,000 miles away to the north. Relations between the British and the Boers remained tense for many years, yet never erupted into full-scale war. This remained the case even when the discovery of diamonds and gold in the Boer republics led to a huge influx of British prospectors in the 1880s.

Indeed, the Boers originally welcomed this influx because of the economic prosperity that it brought. But as the British presence grew more and more widespread, the Boers became concerned about the threat that this posed to their unique way of life. At the same time, the amount of gold and diamonds discovered led to the adoption of an increasingly aggressive policy towards the Boer republics by the British government. This was encouraged not only by imperialists and businessmen in London, but also by many British colonists in southern Africa itself.

These colonists were led by Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist entrepreneur and founder of de Beers who had made a fortune out of diamonds and gold and who later gave his name to Rhodesia. Rhodes wanted to see the British Empire spread across the whole of Africa from Cairo in the north to the Cape in the south. But despite his wealth and political importance, he had been forced to resign as prime minister of the Cape Colony in 1896 when a pro-British raid into the Boer territory, led by Dr L. S. Jameson but sponsored by the government run by Rhodes, failed to foment rebellion.

But this Jameson Raid did galvanise anti-British feeling within the Orange Free State and Transvaal, which united behind the leadership of Paul Kruger. The political crisis intensified when Kruger published the contents of a telegram that he had received from the German Kaiser in the aftermath of the Jameson Raid. Wilhelm II made it clear in the telegram that he backed the Boers and criticised British claims in the area. Tension continued to intensify as the century drew to an end and war finally broke out in October 1899. This began with a series of Boer attacks on British interests in Natal and Cape Colony, and soon the towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley came under siege. However, by early 1900 reinforcements from Britain and India had begun arriving and a counter-attack was launched.

The twenty-six-year-old Winston Churchill arrived with these reinforcements although he had in fact just left the army, having served in the recent war in Sudan. He had been employed to go to South Africa as a war correspondent. But Churchill soon returned to active service, taking part in action around Ladysmith during which he was captured by a Boer patrol. Churchill was held captive in Pretoria for two months before escaping, with his subsequent 300-mile journey to freedom in Mozambique covered widely in the popular press. This also led to the issue of Wanted posters for Churchill, with the leader of Britain in World War Two having a price of £25 put on his head.

The British counter-attack slowly gathered pace, and the relief of Mafeking in May 1900 in particular provoked great celebrations of imperialist fervour in Britain. By June 1900, British troops had pushed deep into Boer territory and a series of British victories, which included the capture of Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, forced President Kruger into exile. He escaped to Europe where he travelled extensively in an attempt to gain support for the Boer cause. So as a conventional military affair, the war was over by June 1900, just seven or so months after it had begun.

But the conflict was to drag on as a guerrilla war for nearly two more years, with Boer forces mounting attacks on British positions throughout the captured territory. Lord Kitchener, the commander of the British forces, countered these by ordering a war of attrition that focused on burning Boer farms and homesteads in order to starve the enemy into submission. Whole Boer communities suspected of supplying or harbouring these guerrilla forces were detained in concentration camps that soon became infamous for their bad sanitary conditions, with as many as 20,000 Boers, mostly women, children and the elderly, dying in them. The repressive policies of the British aimed to break the spirit of the Boer people.

Although this was never achieved, Boer commanders were finally forced to the negotiating table with the Treaty of Vereeniging signed in May 1902. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were brought into the British Empire, but important concessions were granted to the Boer community that included a large amount of political autonomy. Eventually, the various and separate colonies of southern Africa were united in 1910, creating the Union of South Africa. Britain had needed some 400,000 soldiers to win the Boer War. These had faced an enemy that had never numbered more than 80,000.

A powerful British colonial presence, although in this case an informal one, was also challenged in China with the Boxer Rebellion. Britain’s interests in China had begun in the 1840s when it had occupied Hong Kong after the first Opium War, and a treaty of 1898 had continued Britain’s lease there until 1997. But other less formal agreements had subsequently led to the spread of British and European commercial influence to many other parts of China, and by the 1890s various European countries controlled much of the Chinese coastal trade and rail network.

The rebellion against this burgeoning foreign influence initially broke out in 1898 in the north of the country under the leadership of the Society of Harmonious Fists, an organisation commonly known as the Boxers, which was pledged to the expulsion of all Europeans from China. The Boxer Rebellion quickly spread from the north and it received the tacit support of the Empress Dowager whose political acumen had made her the most powerful person in China for forty years. With her support, the rebellion spread south with the mass expulsion of foreigners and the massacre of hundreds of Chinese Christian converts. In the summer of 1901, the rebellion had spread to Beijing where in June the German ambassador was assassinated and the area given over to the foreign legations besieged.

By August 1901, a multinational task force from six nations, including the USA and, importantly, the rapidly industrialising Japan, had arrived to quell the rebellion and relieve the foreign legations in Beijing. Consequently, the Imperial Court was forced to flee to the ancient city of Xian where representatives of the Empress Dowager‘s government were obliged to sign an International Protocol later in the year. In this protocol, the Chinese government accepted responsibility for the rebellion and agreed to pay a large amount in reparations.

The severity of the treaty heightened anti-foreign feeling throughout China, with many Chinese subsequently coming to support Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist Party. Within a decade, this had forced the collapse of the Manchu dynasty that had ruled China since the seventeenth century. The Boxer Rebellion was also important because it gave Japan an economic and political foothold in Manchuria on mainland China that remained the focus of its campaign for an overseas empire for the next forty-five years.

The USA at the Turn of the Century

While Britain fought in southern Africa and the Far East, and contemplated the emergence of an increasingly robust Germany, the entry of the USA into the new century was rudely interrupted by the assassination of President William McKinley by a young anarchist in September 1901. McKinley fought hard to survive, but succumbed to his injuries after eight days and was replaced by Theodore Roosevelt who, at the age of forty-two, became his country’s youngest-ever president.

Roosevelt remained in office until 1908 and presided over a nation of enormous contrasts between the old and the new, the antiquated and the modern. Roosevelt spent much of his time in office trying to sort out the problems that this conundrum brought, and subsequently, in the process, greatly strengthened the power and authority of both the office of the president and of the federal government over the separate state legislatures. In doing so, he also challenged the large industrial trusts that had grown up in oil, steel, construction and the railways in the late nineteenth century and so helped create the economic and political framework that, over time, was to make his country the century’s most powerful nation.

It was during this time that the USA began to give notice of the enormous role it was likely to play in the new century. Like Britain in the nineteenth century, this was most obviously shown by massive urban and industrial expansion. Cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Detroit became some of the biggest in the world, and industrial centres, especially in the north-east where there was a rich supply of iron ore and coal, churned out all sorts of different industrial products.

The country did, however, have to cope with the aftermath of one of the worst-ever-recorded earthquakes that destroyed much of San Francisco in April 1906. However, the city was rebuilt in record time and this was later to be celebrated at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition that took place in the city in 1915. This massive world fair was staged ostensibly to highlight the completion of the Panama Canal, one of the world’s biggest-ever engineering efforts that had been overseen by US engineers and financed by US banks. This linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and had taken place in August 1914, only days after the outbreak of World War One. The canal was to remain under US control until 1999. But the exposition was also used to showcase the recovery of California and the city of San Francisco from the ruin of 1906, and so, by inference, suggest the power and strength of the country itself. In the years before 1914, the USA was beginning to rival older, more mature economies across the Atlantic. It was not long before it was to surpass them.

This growth fuelled the largest migration of people in the history of the world, with some thirteen million people sailing across the Atlantic between 1900 and the beginning of World War One. These came from all parts of Europe and elsewhere in search of their fortunes in the New World. Most of those among these disparate groups that flooded to the USA didn’t find their fortunes and ended up in the sweatshops, factories, mines and warehouses that dotted the industrial, urban landscape. Some, in fact, decided to return to Europe and others became migrant workers, moving back and forth across the Atlantic, returning only to earn money in order to secure a better future in Europe. But most did stay and it was these men and women who were to give US society such diversity throughout the century.

It was also the beginning of what became the Great Migration, the massive relocation of more than six million African Americans who moved north from the old slave states of the South over the next four decades. In 1909, the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, was set up in response to race riots the previous year in Springfield, Illinois, the home town of Abraham Lincoln. It set out to challenge the discrimination and prejudice in law that many still felt. The NAACP and other civil rights groups were to have a marked effect on the development of the USA, especially later in the century when Martin Luther King led the great civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

It was not only within its own borders that the USA was to give notice of its new aspirations. Under McKinley and Roosevelt, the USA acquired new colonial possessions in the Pacific and the Caribbean that included the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam as well as considerable rights in Cuba, and it was also to wield huge economic and strategic influence in Panama as a result of the canal. Neither was Roosevelt frightened of squaring up to the powers of the Old World and faced altercations with Germany, Britain and Spain during his time at the White House.

Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Russia at War and in Revolution

With the USA beginning a process that would eventually see it politically and economically dominate the century, the old powers of Europe were continuing to deal with the threat posed by a new, vibrant and unified Germany. Originally, this dominance had been due to the efforts of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron Chancellor’, who led Germany for twenty years after unification in 1871. The emergence of Germany as an industrial and military power dominating continental Europe had provided the central narrative to European affairs over the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, and this was not a situation that had changed after the sacking of Bismarck in 1890, soon after the succession of Wilhelm II. The new Kaiser quickly embarked on a series of new diplomatic and strategic policies that aimed to transform Germany into a global power, and in 1897 his government outlined his new plan of Weltpolitik, or ‘world politics’.

Wilhelm II had become frustrated by the constrictions of a foreign policy directed only in relation to Germany’s geographical position in central Europe. As a result, Germany’s new status on the world stage was imagined increasingly through the acquisition and expansion of an empire in Africa, China, the Middle East and elsewhere, and it was clearly seen that this new ambitious policy necessitated the construction of a large navy, which he hoped would soon rival the Royal Navy of his grandmother.

Relations between Germany and its nearest rivals were not helped by the Kaiser’s plans to push German influence down into the Ottoman lands that linked Europe with the Middle East. With its capital in Istanbul, its lands stretched westwards into the Balkans and Eastern Europe, southwards into Egypt, Arabia and North Africa and eastwards towards the Caspian Sea. However, its poor political state in the nineteenth century had led it to become known as the ‘sick man of Europe’. At the same time, its lands were becoming increasingly important strategically because of the growing promise of oil in the Middle East and Persia, and the Kaiser was determined that Germany would claim its stake there. Matters were further complicated by the success of the Young Turks rebellion in 1908, which gave much more influence within the old empire to pro-Turkish nationalists.

Consequently, the two governments discussed plans for rail and pipeline links and German firms were encouraged to expand into the area. This German incursion into Ottoman land worried both Britain and France who had both long resisted foreign intervention in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. In Britain’s case, this was because of the need to maintain the security of the sea route through the Suez Canal to British possessions in India and to secure vital interests in Persia and Mesopotamia. This was, after all, why Britain had gone to war with Russia in the Crimea in the 1850s. The importance of the region to Britain was also affected by Churchill’s decision at the Admiralty in 1911 to change the fuel of the Royal Navy from coal to oil, much of which came from Persia.

The expansion of German influence into the Turkish lands of the Ottoman Empire also worried Russia, which at the beginning of the new century remained by far the most politically backward of the six Great Powers. Slavery in the form of serfdom had only been abolished in the 1860s and, throughout his empire, Tsar Nicholas II, who had come to the throne in 1894, kept an iron grip on control. Russia was also less developed industrially than its western rivals and, although this was beginning to change, most Russians at the turn of the century still lived as peasants in the countryside.

Russia’s weakness was confirmed in 1904-05 when it was soundly beaten in the Russo-Japanese War. The war had originated over rival claims on the Chinese mainland and in Korea, and began with the Russian Pacific fleet being destroyed while