The Modern World 1750–1914 CE

The rapid expansion of capitalism and European imperialism would come to engulf the modern world. The most expeditious phase of globalization arose from Europe capitalizing upon the resources, human labor, and lands of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. One painting commissioned by the East India Company, The East Offering its Riches to Britannia, offers an allegory embedded with European ideas of supremacy and entitlement. Such sentiments also bolstered manifest destiny, a nineteenth-century belief that justified American settlers’ colonization of the continent. Pervasive ideologies of European superiority over the “ways of the others” permeated science and culture, imprinting society with a deep-seated conviction in racist beliefs.

Although the Ottoman Empire had reached its height of power, accumulated minor failures began to take a toll. As Western powers strengthened their imperial potential through colonization and industrialization, Ottoman efforts to expand westward failed. The outcome of the Austro-Turkish War of 1788–1791 put an abrupt halt to Ottoman expansion and marked the beginning of the decline of the Ottoman Empire.  In the early 1800s, the Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs began seeking independence, while British intervention extended into increasingly unstable Ottoman colonies, such as the Eyalet of Egypt and Ottoman Syria. Faced with the advanced military and technological superiorities of the West, the Ottomans began to modernize, but failures in economic and political reform still led to an increased dependency on the Western empires, and a few decades later, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire (1828–1908).

In Europe, the Industrial Revolution kickstarted in 1760, coming to an end by the 1830s, and spurred the development of machinery and manufacture, allowing for gains in military and industrial production. Britain, France, Germany, and other smaller states became producers and manufacturers, exporting products based on resources imported from their colonies. These colonies with their massive labor force also helped spur the Industrial Revolution. While China did not follow Europe in industrializing, it maintained its agricultural economy and traded heavily with the European powers. Trade companies such as the East India Company subjugated India, amounting for half of the world’s trade. Beyond its economic and royal presence, British military and administration controlled the subcontinent as well, forming the heart of the British Empire.

Due to Europe’s industrialization, modern information technologies like the printing press flourished, and the world’s first photograph was taken in 1826, revolutionizing methods of historical recording. Old systems of governance, such as feudalism, aristocracy, and church authority, began to crumble from their foundations as the common people sought to reform sociopolitical and economic structures, and to gain rights and freedoms. This resulted in a wave of what were known as the Atlantic Revolutions across Western Europe, the Americas, and British-territory islands in the Atlantic, surging in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with a fight for the ideals of republicanism and the Rights of Man.

Artemis Tzioli
Art History Program, VCUarts Qatar