The 20th Century .............................................................................

LECTURE

Nineteenth-century military innovations ensured that World War I

would be particularly bloody. New weapons included machine guns,

tanks, airplanes, and chemical weapons such as mustard gas, which

could effectively burn out the internal organs of its victims.

N

ow, after 13 billion years, we enter the era of our own lifetimes! After
1900, the pace of change accelerated and the Modern Revolution
began to transform societies throughout the world. A fourth, ¿ fth,
and sixth wave of change shaped the history of the 20th century. The fourth
wave began in the late 19th century and continued into the early 20th century. It
began to transform regions well beyond the new Atlantic core region. Russia
and Japan both underwent revolutionary transformations and became major
industrial and military superpowers. Then there was a slowdown for much
of the ¿ rst half of the 20th century as the engine of growth seemed to stall
in an era of global wars and global depression. The vast casualties of these
wars provided a gruesome demonstration of the increasing “productivity” of
modern weapons. This violent era culminated in the Nazi Holocaust and the
dropping of the ¿ rst nuclear weapons.

A ¿ fth wave of innovation began after the Second World War and ran until
the last decade of the century. It launched the most sustained era of global
economic growth ever known—growth built partly on wartime innovations.
Atomic power, rocket technology, and the electronic transistor were
developed. Some multinational corporations, such as oil companies, became
as powerful as medium-sized states. From the 1920s until 1990, the world
was divided into capitalist and communist regions, each of which sought
to inÀ uence the rest of the world (the “third world”). Communist countries
included highly industrialized societies in Eastern Europe, Russia, and (after
1949) China, which preserved many elements of tributary societies. Though
their elites actively encouraged industrial growth, they rejected commercial
activity and relied largely on the power of the state to engineer growth.