Hopefully this will give you an understanding of the world-historical background of World War I
The term imperialism is a Latin word from the days of the Roman Empire. Imperialism means one country’s domination of the political, economic, and social life of another country. About 2,000 years ago, imperial Rome controlled most of the Mediterranean world. By 1914, the industrial nation-states of Europe dominated most of the world. Three powers -- Britain, France, and Germany -- controlled about 80 percent of the world’s inhabited surface. Those three powers also possessed about half of the world’s industrial might. Their merchants controlled half the world’s international trade.
The domination of Europeans over Non-Europeans took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries.
Here are some maps showing you how European influence had spread around the globe.
Only two countries in Africa were self-governed: Ethopia and Liberia; the rest were divided up among European powers. India was under British control.
Large sections of China were under European control; Japan was opened to trade with the threat of U.S. warships in 1853. Britain and France struggled to control the mainland areas of Southeast Asia, while the Dutch controlled the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia) and the U.S. had recently taken control of the Philippines from Spain.
You may be wondering what this has to do with World War I. Here’s the scoop: Both the economic power of the countries of Europe and their rivalry for world influence produced serious divisions and mutual suspicions among them. National groups that did not have their own states, or not one that included the territories they wanted, expressed their nationalism loudly. These groups were concentrated in Eastern Europe: Poles, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Czechs, and others. Tensions were growing between the sovereign states. There was general agreement that boundaries in Europe were fixed. One state was not supposed to covet the territory of other states.
But Germany was on the rise. It had become a unified sovereign state in 1871 and was rapidly rising as an industrial and military power. The balance of power was shifting and Europe divided into two solid alliance blocks: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, Britain, France, and Russia on the other.
The rigid alliance system made it almost inevitable that a local quarrel could become a European war, and that is what happened.
The incident that precipitated World War I was in itself a small one: the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was traveling in the town of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. While his carriage was driving through the streets, a Serbian terrorist shot him. Serbian revolutionaries regarded Austria as the special enemy of the little country of Serbia. From this incident unrolled a series of events that nobody managed to control and that led directly to the outbreak of the war in August 1914. Austria made demands on Serbia. Russia was an ally of Serbia and therefore started mobilizing its army. Germany then mobilized as well because it felt it had to stand by Austria, its ally, against Russia. Finally, France and Britain, Russia's allies, mobilized too. Germany invaded France and tried to knock it out of the war fast, but the army got bogged down in Belgium and northeastern France. This is where the trench lines were dug. This was the Western Front.
And because of the involvement of European countries with their own colonies and with other countries in Africa, Asia and America, it became a world war. Japan, China, Italy, and the US all came into the war eventually on the Allied side. Turkey joined the Central Powers. Before the war was over, more than thirty countries with a combined population of 1.4 billion people were involved.
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