Greatest Leap

Andrew Hatcher

Description

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.

Sujets

• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785894114
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Hatcher
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978 1785894 114
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
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