İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914
Eric J. HobsbawmEn Eski İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914 Gönderileri
En Eski İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914 kitaplarını, en eski İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914 sözleri ve alıntılarını, en eski İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914 yazarlarını, en eski İmparatorluk Çağı 1875-1914 yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
It was the era when massive organized movements of the class of wage-workers created by, and characteristic of, industrial capitalism suddenly emerged and demanded the overthrow of capitalism. But they emerged in highly flourishing and expanding economies, and, in the countries in which they were strongest, at a time when probably capitalism offered them slightly less miserable conditions than before.
In terms of production and wealth, not to mention culture, the differences between the major pre-industrial regions were, by modern standards, remarkably small; say between 1 and 1.8. Indeed a recent estimate calculates that between 1750 and 1800 the per capita gross national product in what are today known as the ‘developed countries’ was substantially the same as in what is now known as the ‘Third World’, though this is probably due to the enormous size and relative weight of the Chinese Empire (with about a third of the world’s population), whose average standard of living may at that stage have actually been superior to that of Europeans.3 In the eighteenth century Europeans would have found the Celestial Empire a very strange place indeed, but no intelligent observer would have regarded it in any sense as an inferior economy and civilization to Europe’s, still less as a ‘backward’ country. But in the nineteenth century the gap between the western countries, base of the economic revolution which was transforming the world, and the rest widened, at first slowly, later with increasing rapidity. By 1880 (according to the same calculation) the per capita income in the ‘developed’ world was about double that in the ‘Third World’, by 1913 it was to be over three times as high, and widening. By 1950 (to dramatize the process) the difference was between 1 and 5, by 1970 between 1 and 7. Moreover, the gap between the ‘Third World’ and the really developed parts of the ‘developed’ world, i.e. the industrialized countries, began earlier and widened even more dramatically. The per capita share of the GNP was already almost twice that in the ‘Third World’ in 1830, about seven times as high in 1913.
in fact, the Balkan peninsula was still currently referred to as the ‘Near East’: hence South-west Asia came to be known as the ‘Middle East’.
The world was therefore divided into a smaller part in which ‘progress’ was indigenous and another much larger part in which it came as a foreign conqueror, assisted by minorities of local collaborators.
Ever since the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed in 1895 that if one wanted to avoid civil war one must become imperialist,9 most observers have been aware of so-called ‘social imperialism’, i.e. of the attempt to use imperial expansion to diminish domestic discontent by economic improvements or social reform or in other ways
Much more relevant was the familiar practice of offering the voters glory rather than more costly reforms: and what was more glorious than conquests of exotic territories and dusky races, especially as these were usually cheaply won? More generally, imperialism encouraged the masses, and especially the potentially discontented, to identify themselves with the imperial state and nation, and thus unconsciously to endow the social and political system represented by that state with justification and legitimacy
The Churches set out to convert the heathen to various versions of the true Christian faith, except where actively discouraged by colonial governments (as in India) or where the task was clearly impossible (as in Islamic regions). This was the classic age of massive missionary endeavour.v Missionary effort was by no means an agency of imperialist politics.
As for the movement most passionately devoted to the equality of all men, it spoke with two voices. The secular left was anti-imperialist in principle and often in practice. Freedom for India, like freedom for Egypt and Ireland, was the objective of the British labour movement. The left never wavered in its condemnation of colonial wars and conquests, often – as in the British opposition to the Boer War – at considerable risk of temporary unpopularity. Radicals revealed the horrors of the Congo, in metropolitan cocoa plantations on African islands, in Egypt. The campaign which led to the great electoral triumph of the British Liberal Party in 1906 was largely waged by public denunciations of ‘Chinese slavery’ in the South African mines. Yet, with the rarest exceptions (such as Dutch Indonesia), western socialists did little actually to organize the resistance of colonial peoples to their rulers, until the era of the Communist International.
"Eugenics, which was a programme for applying the selective breeding techniques familiar in agriculture and livestock-raising to people, long preceded genetics. The name dates from 1883. It was essentially a political movement, overwhelmingly confined to members of the bourgeoisie or middle classes, urging upon governments a programme of positive or negative actions to improve the genetic condition of the human race. Extreme eugenists believed that the condition of man and society could be ameliorated only by the genetic improvement of the human race – by concentrating on encouraging valuable human strains (usually identified with the bourgeoisie or with suitably tinted races such as the ‘Nordic’), and eliminating undesirable strains (usually identified with the poor, the colonized or unpopular strangers)." (from "Age Of Empire: 1875-1914" by Eric Hobsbawm)
Diğer tarihçiler, büyük süreksizliğin tersine, dönemimizi nitelemeye devam eden özelliklerin çoğunun 1914'ten önceki on yıllarda ortaya çıktığı gerekçesiyle daha çok ilgilenirler. Dönemimizin (aslında aşikar olan) kökleri ve evveliyatını araştırırlar. Siyasi alanda birçok Avrupa ülkesinde hükümeti veya Ana muhalefeti oluşturan emekçi ve sosyalist partiler 1875-1914 çağının çocuklarıdır; dolayısıyla Doğu Avrupa'daki rejimleri yöneten komünist partiler de aynı ailenin koludur.
Aslında hükümetlerin de demokratik oyla seçilmesi , modern kitle partileri ve ulusal düzeyde örgütlenmiş kitlesel işçi sendikaları ve modern refah yasaları için de aynı durum geçerlidir.
Sayfa 16