I. Recovery and Renewal in Europe

II. The Emergence of the Superpower: The United States

III. The Development of Canada

IV. Latin America Since 1945

V. Society and Culture in the Western World

I. The Postwar Soviet Union 

II. The Disintegration of the Soviet Empire

III. The East is Red: China Under Communism

IV.  “Serve the People”: Chinese Society Under Communism

The Collapse of the Grand Alliance

The problems started in Europe.

At the end of the war, Soviet military forces occupied all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans (except Greece, Albania, and Yugoslavia), while U.S. and other Allied forces secured the western part of the Continent. 

Roosevelt had assumed that free elections, administered promptly by “democratic and peace-loving forces,” would lead to democratic governments responsive to the local population.

But it soon became clear that the Soviet Union interpreted the Yalta agreement differently. 

When Soviet occupation authorities began forming a new Polish government, Stalin refused to accept the Polish government-in-exile—headquartered in London during the war and composed mostly of landed aristocrats who harbored a deep distrust of the Soviet Union—and instead set up a government composed of Communists who had spent the war in Moscow.

Roosevelt complained to Stalin but eventually agreed to a compromise whereby two members of the London government were included in the new Communist regime.

A week later, Roosevelt was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, embolding Stalin to do much as he pleased.

The Totalitarian State

The rise of dictatorial regimes in the 1930s had a great deal to do with the coming of World War II.

By 1930, only two major states in Europe, France and Great Britain, remained democratic.

Italy and Germany had succumbed to the political movement called fascism, and Soviet Russia under Stalin moved toward repressive totalitarianism. 

A host of other European states and Latin American countries adopted authoritarian structures of various kinds, while a militarist regime in Japan moved that country down the path to war.

The dictatorial regimes between the wars assumed both old and new forms.

Dictatorship was not new, but the modern totalitarian state was.

The totalitarian regimes, best exemplified by Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, greatly extended the functions and power of the central state.

The new “total states” expected the active loyalty and commitment of citizens to the regime’s goal, whether it be war, a socialist society, or a thousand year Reich (empire).

They used modern mass propaganda techniques and high-speed communications to conquer the minds and hearts of their subjects.

The total state sought to control not only the economic, political, and social aspects of life but the intellectual and cultural aspects as well.

The modern totalitarian state was to be led by a single leader and a single party.

It ruthlessly rejected the liberal ideal of limited government power and constitutional guarantees of individual freedoms. 

Indeed, individual freedom was to be subordinated to the collective will of the masses, organized and determined for them by the leader or leaders.

Modern technology also gave total states unprecedented police controls to enforce their wishes on their subjects.

Although the West had emerged from World War I relatively intact, its political and social foundations and its self-confidence had been severely undermined.

Within Europe, doubts about the viability of Western civilization were widespread, especially among the intellectual elite.

These doubts were quick to reach perceptive observers in Asia and Africa and contributed to a rising tide of unrest against Western political domination throughout the colonial and semi colonial world.

That unrest took various forms but was most evident in increasing worker activism, rural protests, and a rising national fervor among anti-colonialist intellectuals.

In areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America where independent states had successfully resisted the Western onslaught, the discontent fostered by the war and later by the Great Depression led to a loss of confidence in democratic institutions and the rise of political dictatorships.

The Road to World War I

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.

Although this event precipitated the confrontation between Austria and Serbia that led to World War I, underlying forces had been propelling Europeans toward armed conflict for a long time.

Nationalism and Internal Dissent

Two Great Alliances

The system of nation-states that had emerged in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century had led to intense competition.

Rivalries over colonies and trade intensified during an era of frenzied imperialist expansion, while the division of Europe’s great powers into two loose alliances (Germany, Austria, and Italy on one side and France, Great Britain, and Russia on the other) only added to the tensions. 

The series of crises that tested these alliances in the 1900s and early 1910s had left European states embittered, eager for revenge, and willing to go to war to preserve the power of their national states.

Internal Decline or Western Pressure?

In 1800, the Qing or Manchu dynasty was at the height of its power. 

China had experienced a long period of peace and prosperity under the rule of two great emperors, Kangxi and Qianlong.

Its borders were secure, and its culture and intellectual achievements were the envy of the world. 

Its rulers, hidden behind the walls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, had every reason to describe their patrimony as the “Central Kingdom.” 

But a little over a century later, humiliated and harassed by the black ships and big guns of the Western powers, the Qing dynasty, the last in a series that had endured for more than two thousand years, collapsed in the dust. 

Historians once assumed that the primary reason for the rapid decline and fall of the Manchu dynasty was the intense pressure applied by the Western powers.

Now, however, most historians believe that internal changes played a major role in the dynasty’s collapse and that at least some of its problems during the nineteenth century were self-inflicted.

Both explanations have some validity.

Like so many of its predecessors, after an extended period of growth, the Qing dynasty began to suffer from the familiar dynastic ills of official corruption, peasant unrest, and incompetence at court. 

Such weaknesses were probably exacerbated by the rapid growth in population.

The long era of peace, the introduction of new crops from the Americas, and the cultivation of new, fast-ripening strains of rice enabled the Chinese population to double between 1550 and 1800 and to reach the unprecedented level of 400 million by the end of the nineteenth century. 

Even without the Western powers, the Manchus were probably destined to repeat the fate of their imperial predecessors.

The ships, guns, and ideas of the foreigners simply highlighted the growing weakness of the dynasty and likely hastened its demise. 

In doing so, Western imperialism exerted an indelible impact on the history of modern China—but as a contributing, not a causal, factor.

Duiker, William J. The Essential World History, Volume 2: since 1500. Thomson Higher Education, 2018. 

The Spread of Colonial Rule

In the nineteenth century, a new phase of Western expansion into Asia and Africa began. 

Whereas before 1800 European aims in the East could be summed up as “Christians and spices” and Western gold and silver were exchanged for cloves, silk, and porcelain, now European nations began to view Asian and African societies as markets for the prodigious output of European factories and as sources of the raw materials needed to fuel the Western industrial machine.

This relationship between the West and African and Asian societies has been called the new imperialism.

The Wars for Independence

By the end of the eighteenth century, the ideas of the Enlightenment and the new political ideals stemming from the successful revolution in North America were beginning to influence the creole elites (descendants of Europeans who became permanent inhabitants of Latin America).

The principles of the equality of all people in the eyes of the law, free trade, and a free press proved very attractive.

Sons of creoles, such as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin who became leaders of the independence movement, even went to European universities, where they imbibed the ideas of the Enlightenment.

These Latin American elites, joined by a growing class of merchants, especially resented the domination of their trade by Spain and Portugal.