Introduction

Recovering Native Histories

This chapter turns to two continents — the Americas and Australia — where European settlement fundamentally displaced the peoples who already lived there. From the eighteenth century onward, growing numbers of European immigrants settled across South America, Central America, North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, pushing many native peoples out of the lands they had long occupied. Wherever Europeans settled permanently, the settlements were called ‘colonies’; when the European inhabitants of a colony eventually became independent of their ‘mother country’, the colony became a country or state in its own right. From the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people from Asian countries migrated to many of these same places as well. Today, in most of these countries, the descendants of European and Asian settlers form the majority, while the original native inhabitants are a small minority, rarely visible in the towns — even though the names of many rivers and cities still come from native languages: Ohio, Mississippi and Seattle in the United States, Saskatchewan in Canada, Wollongong and Parramatta in Australia.

How this history has been told has itself changed a great deal. Until the middle of the twentieth century, American and Australian textbooks typically described how Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas and Australia, barely mentioning native peoples except to suggest they had been hostile to the newcomers. Native societies were studied by anthropologists from the 1840s onward, but it was only from the 1960s that native peoples themselves were actively encouraged to write, or dictate, their own histories — a method historians call oral history. Today it is possible to read historical works and fiction written by native authors, and museums in these countries now hold galleries of native art and dedicated exhibitions on native ways of life; in the United States, the National Museum of the American Indian has been curated by American Indians themselves.

The story of the modern world is not just a story of machines and factories. It is also a story of how different societies, with their own histories and ideas, understood the idea of 'modernisation' and tried to achieve it in their own way. This section sets the stage for that story by looking at the two great forces that created the modern world — industrialisation and nationalism — and by showing how these forces played out differently in different parts of the globe.

The Context of Modernisation

The medieval and early modern world saw crucial developments — feudalism, the European Renaissance, and the first encounters between Europeans and the peoples of Asia, Africa and the Americas. From the mid-fifteenth century onwards, some of the phenomena that helped make our modern world gradually evolved. But two further developments in world history created the specific context for what has been called 'modernisation'.

The first was the Industrial Revolution. The second was a series of political revolutions that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the American Revolution (1776–81) and the French Revolution (1789–94).

Rethinking the Industrial Revolution

Britain was the world's first industrial nation. For a long time, it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model for industrialisation everywhere else. Historians have now begun to question this idea. Each country drew upon the experiences of other nations without necessarily reproducing any model.

The differences are striking. In Britain, coal and cotton textile industries were developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the invention of railways initiated the second stage. In Russia, which began to industrialise much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase itself. The role of the state and of banks in industrialisation also differed from country to country.

The British case certainly influenced the industrial trajectories of other nations, especially the USA and Germany, two significant industrial powers. But Britain's path also displayed the human and material costs of industrialisation — the plight of the labouring poor, especially of children, environmental degradation, and the consequent epidemics of cholera and tuberculosis. (In a later theme, you will read how industrial pollution and cadmium and mercury poisoning in Japan stirred people into mass movements against indiscriminate industrialisation.)

Colonisation and Competing Notions of Civilisation

European powers began to colonise parts of America, Asia and South Africa well before the Industrial Revolution. The story of what European settlers did to the native peoples of America and Australia is told in a later theme.

The bourgeois mentality of the settlers made them buy and sell everything, including land and water. But the natives, who appeared uncivilised to European Americans, asked a pointed question: 'If you do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can one buy them?' The natives did not feel the need to own land, fish or animals. They had no desire to commodify them; if things needed to be exchanged, they could simply be gifted.

The natives and the Europeans clearly represented competing notions of civilisation. The natives did not allow the European deluge to wipe out their cultures, even though the US and Canadian governments of the mid-twentieth century desired natives to 'join the mainstream', and the Australian authorities of the same period attempted to simply ignore their traditions and culture.

This raises a deeper question: what is meant by 'mainstream'? How does economic and political power influence the making of 'mainstream cultures'?

Three Variants of Imperialism

Western capitalisms — mercantile, industrial and financial — along with early twentieth-century Japanese capitalism, created colonies in large parts of the third world. These took different forms:

• Settler colonies, where Europeans settled and displaced native peoples.
• Direct imperial control, such as British rule in India.
• A third variant — the case of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Here Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan meddled in Chinese affairs without directly taking over state power. They exploited the country's resources to their own advantage, seriously compromising Chinese sovereignty and reducing the country to the status of a semi-colony.

Almost everywhere, colonial exploitation was challenged by powerful nationalist movements. But nationalisms also arose without a colonial context, as in the West or Japan.

Nationalism: A Modern Concept

All nationalisms are doctrines of popular sovereignty. Nationalist movements believe that political power should rest with the people, and this is what makes nationalism a modern concept.

There are two broad types of nationalism:

• Civic nationalism vests sovereignty in all people regardless of language, ethnicity, religion or gender. It seeks to create a community of rights-exercising citizens and defines nationhood in terms of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion.
• Ethnic and religious nationalisms try to build national solidarities around a given language, religion or set of traditions, defining the people ethnically, not in terms of common citizenship. In a multi-ethnic country, ethnic nationalists might limit the exercise of sovereignty to a chosen people, often assumed to be superior to minority communities.

Today, most western countries define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. One prominent exception is Germany, where ideas of ethnic nationalism have had a long and troubling career going back to the reaction against the French imperial occupation of German states in 1806.

Ideologies of civic nationalism have vied with those of ethnic/religious nationalism the world over — and this has been so in modern India, China and Japan as well.

Distinctive Paths to Modernisation

As with industrialisation, so with paths to modernisation: different societies have evolved their distinctive modernities. The Japanese and Chinese cases, along with the stories of Taiwan and South Korea, are very instructive.

Japan

Japan succeeded in remaining free of colonial control and achieved fairly rapid economic and industrial progress throughout the twentieth century. The rebuilding of the Japanese economy after a humiliating defeat in the Second World War should not be seen as a mere post-war miracle. It resulted from certain gains already accomplished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, by 1910, tuition fees for studying at a primary school had more or less ended and enrolment had become universal.

Japan's path to modernisation, like that of any other country, has had its own tensions: those between democracy and militarism, ethnic nationalism and civic nation-building, and between what many Japanese describe as 'tradition' and 'westernisation'.

China

The Chinese resisted colonial exploitation and their own bureaucratic landed elite through a combination of peasant rebellion, reform and revolution. By the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party, which drew its strength from peasant mobilisation, had begun confronting the imperial powers as well as the Nationalists who represented the country's elite. It had also started implementing its ideas in selected pockets of the country.

Its egalitarian ideology, stress on land reforms and awareness of women's problems helped it overthrow foreign imperialism and the Nationalists in 1949. Once in power, it succeeded in reducing inequalities, spreading education and creating political awareness. Even so, the country's single-party framework and state repression contributed to considerable dissatisfaction with the political system after the mid-1960s.

But the Chinese Communist Party has been able to retain control over the country largely because, in embracing certain market principles, it reinvented itself and has worked hard to transform China into an economic powerhouse.

The Story Ahead

The different ways in which various countries have understood 'modernity' and sought to achieve it, each in the context of its own circumstances and ideas, make a fascinating story. This section introduces you to some aspects of that story.

The timeline that accompanies this section gives an idea of what was happening in different parts of the world in the last three centuries — the slave trade in Africa and the establishment of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, social movements in Europe and the formation of nation states, the expansion of imperial powers and the process of colonisation, and the democratic and anti-colonial movements that swept through the world in the last century. It also refers to some of the inventions and technological developments associated with modernity.

As with all timelines, this one focuses on a few dates. There are others that are important. When you see a series of dates in a timeline, do not think that those are the only dates you need to know. Find out why different timelines focus on different types of dates, and what this selection tells us.