World History: Revolutions and World Wars Notes

Between 1776 and 1945 the modern world was made twice over: first by four revolutions that destroyed monarchy, feudal privilege, handicraft production and tsarist autocracy, and then by two wars that destroyed the empires the revolutions had left standing. Competitive examinations draw a steady six to ten questions a year from this stretch of world history because it is made of hard facts, a date, a treaty, a leader, a slogan, that can be asked in one line. The notes below take the revolutions in order and then the two wars, and every fact in them is one that has appeared in a paper.

The American Revolution, 1775 to 1783

Thirteen British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America resented being taxed by a Parliament in which they were not represented, and the cry of no taxation without representation became the slogan of the resistance. The Stamp Act of 1765 and the tea duty led to the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when colonists threw chests of East India Company tea into Boston harbour. Fighting began at Lexington in 1775. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, drafted mainly by Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington commanded the colonial army. The victory at Saratoga in 1777 brought France into the war on the American side, the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, and the Treaty of Paris of 1783 recognised the independence of the United States. Washington became the first President in 1789.

The French Revolution, 1789

France in 1789 was divided into three estates, and the burden of taxation fell on the third estate of peasants, artisans and the middle class while the clergy and the nobility were exempt. The writings of Rousseau, whose book The Social Contract argued that sovereignty belongs to the people, of Montesquieu, who proposed the separation of powers in The Spirit of the Laws, and of Voltaire gave the discontent a language. Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General in May 1789 for the first time since 1614; the third estate declared itself the National Assembly and took the Tennis Court Oath in June; and on 14 July 1789 a crowd stormed the Bastille, the date now celebrated as the French national day. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen followed in August 1789, feudal privileges were abolished, Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794 was directed by Robespierre through the Committee of Public Safety. Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the motto of the revolution, became the vocabulary of nationalism across Europe.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century, where coal, iron, colonial markets and capital came together. Textiles led the way: John Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1733, James Hargreaves the spinning jenny in 1764, Richard Arkwright the water frame and Edmund Cartwright the power loom. James Watt improved the steam engine, patenting his separate condenser in 1769, and steam turned factories, railways and ships. George Stephenson built the locomotive Rocket, and the first public railway ran from Stockton to Darlington in 1825. The social results were the factory system, crowded industrial cities, child labour and, in answer to them, trade unions and socialist thought, including the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848.

The Russian Revolution, 1917

Tsarist Russia entered the twentieth century with an autocratic monarchy, a hungry peasantry and a small but militant industrial working class. The firing on a peaceful procession in St Petersburg on Bloody Sunday in 1905 produced the first revolution, which won a Duma but no real democracy. Defeat in the First World War broke the regime. The February Revolution, which took place in March 1917 by the Western calendar, forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate and set up a provisional government under Kerensky. Lenin returned from exile with the slogan of Peace, Land and Bread and the demand for all power to the soviets. In the October Revolution, carried out on 7 November 1917 by the Western calendar, the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd, with Leon Trotsky organising the Red Guards. Russia left the war by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed in 1922.

The First World War, 1914 to 1918

The war grew out of militarism, the system of alliances, imperial rivalry over colonies and aggressive nationalism in the Balkans. Its immediate cause was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914 and the alliances pulled in the rest of Europe. The Central Powers were Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria; the Allies were Britain, France, Russia, later Italy, and the United States, which entered in 1917 after German submarine warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania. The armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919, held Germany guilty of the war, took away its colonies, limited its army and imposed reparations. The League of Nations, proposed in the Fourteen Points of President Woodrow Wilson, began work in 1920 with its headquarters at Geneva.

The Second World War, 1939 to 1945

The harshness of Versailles, the Great Depression that began in 1929, the rise of Fascism under Mussolini in Italy and of Nazism under Hitler, who became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and the failure of the League of Nations to stop aggression in Manchuria, Abyssinia and the Rhineland led to a second and larger war. Britain and France accepted Hitler claims at Munich in 1938, and Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France declared war two days later. The Axis Powers were Germany, Italy and Japan. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 brought the United States into the war, and Germany had already invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Allied landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944, remembered as D-Day, opened the western front in Europe. Germany surrendered in May 1945, and after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August and Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, Japan announced its surrender on 15 August and signed it on 2 September 1945. The United Nations came into existence on 24 October 1945, and the war ended Europe ability to hold its empires, hastening the freedom of India and of Asia and Africa.