Chapter 20

Collapse at the Center


The First World War: European Civilization in Crisis, 1914– 1918 B
   -Legacies of the Great War
  • The war shocked almost everyone
  • Most expected a short war that would be over within a few months
  • Industrial technology did not make it a quick war but rather a war of attrition, with each side trying to bleed the other dry battles could take the lives of over a million men
  • Because of the labor shortage, large numbers of women were brought into the workforce back on the home front
  • Conservative forces tried to undo the cultural changes of the war
  • British authorities urged women to leave their new jobs, and in France, conservatives pushed Mother’s Day as a celebration of women who had little French boys for the army
  • However, the war induced major changes in women’s lives with many nations giving them the vote and new work opportunities
  • The postwar era was also the Jazz Age with liberated women dressing like “flappers” and drinking and dancing in night clubs, in sharp contrast to earlier conventions of bourgeois respectability
Capitalism Unraveling: The Great Depression
  • Various socialist movements critiqued capitalism and its social injustices. B. Sudden unraveling of the economic system, 1929
    •  The stock market crash of October 24, 1929 shocked many as paper fortunes were lost in a day
  • The sudden crash seemed as if the whole system was rapidly coming apart
    • the generations of growth to this point, this was all the more stunning
  • A crisis of overproduction, international loans, and stock speculation
    • There were multiple causes of the crash, including an American crisis of overproducing agricultural and manufactured goods, weak loans from the United States of America to European countries so that they could buy American products, and rampant and unregulated stock speculation
  • When these crises converged, they brought down the economic core of the Euro-American world
  • Impact on global suppliers of raw materials and food
    • As the industrial economies could no longer afford or use the raw materials from the rest of the world (such as rubber and oils) and supplies of food (such as coffee and cocoa) 
  • The crisis was quickly globalized, putting farmers, miners, and plantation workers in the colonies and Latin America out of business
  • Import substitution industrialization in Latin America
    • In Latin America, the depression saw the rise of military-backed authoritarian regimes that pursued policies of industrializing in one sector to substitute for importing specific products

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