World History For Us All: Big Era 9

Big Era Nine is different from all earlier eras because we do not yet know where it is leading. So our choice of major themes is somewhat more uncertain than it has been for earlier eras. We will focus on three historical developments that capture important transformations of this era:

Humans and the Environment

n Big Era Nine, global population grew so fast and technologies became so powerful that for the first time in history humans began to have a significant impact on the entire biosphere. Indeed, increasing human effect on the environment has been the most important of all the changes that occurred in the twentieth century.

The number of humans on earth grew from 2.5 billion in 1950 to about 6 billion in 2000. Between 1955 and 1990, average life expectancies throughout the world also rose from about 35 years to 55 years Approximately 6 per cent of all the humans who ever lived on earth may have lived in this brief era. And because they lived longer, approximately 12 per cent of all the years lived by all humans were lived in these 50 years. People lived longer and reproduced faster because of the spread of new medicines, such as antibiotics, and improved sanitation and health care, particularly in the world’s burgeoning cities. Death rates fell throughout the world in both rural and urban regions. Remarkably, increasing irrigation, the use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, and the new, genetically engineered crops of the Green Revolution ensured that food production kept up with population growth, at least on a global scale. Agricultural production rose about 2.7 times between the 1950s and the 1990s, while population grew a little more than 2 times.

Unprecedented population growth magnified human impact on forests, crop lands, pastures, and seas. These effects were particularly devastating in poorer countries, which did not have the resources to limit environmental damage. The spread of human populations threatened many species with extinction by reducing the land and resources available to them. In 1996, about 20 per cent of all vertebrate species on earth may have been in danger of extinction. In fact, the rate of extinctions today may be approaching the rates attained in the five or six eras of most rapid extinction over the past several hundred million years.

New technologies increased the scale and transformed the nature of environmental change. By 1990, roads and other spaces set aside for automobiles and trucks took up 5-10 per cent of the total land surface in North America, Europe, and Japan, and about 1 per cent in the world as a whole. Modern transportation systems helped spread diseases such as AIDS and the SARS virus throughout the world within just a few years or even just a few months. Scientists have created thousands of new chemicals, from plastics to fertilizers to Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC). Many of these substances are harmful to humans and animals. By the 1970s, the Rhine River carried such high levels of chromium, nickel, copper, zinc, and lead that a Dutch expert complained that the river was ‘metal-plating Holland’.

Increasing use of fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil, has pumped such huge quantities of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere that these gases threaten to raise average temperatures and thus transform global weather patterns. “Global warming,” as this process is known, could have a devastating impact on low-lying areas and transform the world’s climate. Nuclear power, which many at first saw as a source of virtually limitless clean energy turned out to be costly and dangerous. Its waste products not only take thousands of years to decay but also provide the raw materials for new and terrible weapons. Nuclear bombs have given humans the power, if they choose, to destroy much of the biosphere within just a few hours. For the first time in planetary history, a single species has become a major force for change in the biosphere as a whole.

Though global in their scale, these environment effects have differed from one region to another. Many of the wealthier industrialized nations have begun to reverse some forms of environmental damage by improving water and air quality in large cities, replanting forests, checking soil degradation in arid areas, and slowing the spread of diseases such as AIDS. But in dry and forest regions, farmers have often been compelled to use the land in unsustainable ways in order merely to survive. Poorer countries have also found it harder to deal with diseases. The number of adults suffering from AIDS has been held below 1 per cent in the US, but in some regions, the disease’s impact has been far more devastating. In the mid-1990s, for example, almost one quarter of all adults in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zambia had the HIV virus that causes AIDS. While many in richer countries have begun to see environmental degradation as a future danger, many in poorer regions already live with environmental crisis.

Fortunately, the scale of environmental change has ensured the emergence of powerful environmental movements in many countries. Some have been able to influence the policies of governments and international agencies, including the United Nations. Also, there have been some notable successes in the campaigns to protect the environment. Global population growth has slowed since the 1960s because birth rates have fallen, particularly in the wealthiest and most urbanized regions. It now seems likely that human populations will level out at about 9 or 10 billion in the middle of the twenty-first century. In the long run, a slowing of demographic growth is bound to help reduce human impact on the environment.

Also, environmental projects exit in many poorer countries. They are often initiated by local communities and aimed at conserving local resources such as fresh water forests. On occasion, wealthier and poorer regions have cooperated successfully to deal with environmental problems that affect the entire world. In the 1980s, it became clear that the release of CFC chemicals used mainly in refrigeration threatened to break down the thin ozone layer that shields the earth from the sun’s ultra-violet radiation. In 1987, an international agreement limited the production and use of CFCs, and it seems that the ozone layer may slowly be repairing itself as a result. New energy technologies, such as wind power and hydrogen fuel cells, may also help reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

Though the full consequences of humanity’s rapidly increasing impact on the biosphere are not yet clear, humans began for the first time in Big Era Nine to grapple with environmental problems at a global level.

Humans and Other Humans

Accelerating economic and technological changes have brought humans throughout the world into closer contact than ever before, with results that have varied greatly from region to region and group to group.

In Big Era Nine, technological change was more rapid than ever before. Research and development, like warfare, have become planned operations. They are organized by governments and large corporations and conducted in commercial laboratories, universities, and government research institutes. World War II stimulated this trend, as the major combatant nations organized research teams to create new weapons. In the US, 40,000 people worked on the Manhattan Project, whose goal was to create the first nuclear weapon. These wartime projects prepared the way for even larger programs, including the Soviet and US space programs. Most of the more important technological innovations of Big Era Nine depended on such large research projects. They included the discovery of the structure of DNA (and its recent decoding), the invention and development of microchips, and the systematic use of biotechnology in medicine and agriculture.

New technologies of transportation and communication speeded up the movement of people and information and magnified the effects of innovation in general. Almost 13 million migrants moved to North America and Australasia alone between 1950 and 1973. In the same period, West Indians migrated to Britain, Turks migrated to Germany, and Indians and Pakistanis moved to North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Chinese migrated to Xinkiang Province in the far west of the country and to Inner Mongolia. Russians moved to the steppes of Kazakhstan.

People also communicated with each other faster than ever before. By 2000, more than 1 billion phones were in use throughout the world, and several hundred million computers were linked to the Internet. The spread of mass media—newspapers, cinema, radio, television, and the Internet—ensured that images, news, and advertising also became global. Turkmen nomads in Inner Eurasia used satellite dishes to watch American soap operas, and young women and men throughout the world, responding to images of life in the US, began to wear baseball caps backwards. As the philosopher Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s, the world seemed to be turning into a single “global village.”

Students at the American University of Sharjah in the
United Arab Emirates. This independent, coeducational
university, founded in 1997, follows an American
model of higher education.
Photo by R. Dunn

Globalization has been closely linked to economic growth. Between 1950 and 1973, global GDP grew at about 4.91 per cent per year before falling to the still respectable rate of 3.01 per cent after 1973. In just under fifty years, global GDP multiplied by more than six times. There were many causes of growth. In the capitalist world, the dominant powers, above all the US, learned the lesson of Big Era Eight: ruthless competition and severe breakdown of global trade can stifle growth. The major capitalist powers deliberately engineered a revival of world trade after World War II, focusing primarily on Europe and Japan. The US pumped huge amounts of money into the reconstruction of both regions, and the major states collaborated to create an international financial system linked to the United Nations. Its aim was to help finance reconstruction and modernization throughout the world.

International trade revived so fast after the war that the proportion of goods traded on international markets, which had fallen between 1913 and 1950, tripled between 1950 and 1995. The number of wage earners grew globally as rural workers migrated to towns and as more and more women took up paid employment. In the Communist world, high rates of growth in the 1950s and 1960s depended mainly on government-led industrialization drives. In the Soviet Union growth began to slow in the 1970s. In China, however, rates accelerated beginning in the 1970s, as the government in the period after the passing of Mao Zedong began to allow more commercial activity. Chinese growth rates rose from 2.9 per cent per year between 1950 and 1973 to 6.4 per cent for most of the 1990s.

The benefits of growth, however, were distributed unevenly. Living standards rose most rapidly in the most industrialized capitalist regions, and more slowly in parts of the Communist world. In the leading capitalist areas, rising mass consumption became an integral part of economic growth. After the Great Depression, capitalist governments and producers learned how important it was to sustain demand by ensuring that ordinary consumers could keep buying things. As the great economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) argued, this meant making sure that consumers could buy goods even in times of difficulty. This could be done by allowing wages to rise and by creating unemployment schemes and welfare nets that limited the number of people who fell into absolute poverty. The importance of mass markets for goods such as refrigerators, televisions, and cars first became apparent in the US between the two world wars. After the second world war, mass consumption of these and other goods also helped sustain growth in other capitalist economies, especially during the boom years before the 1970s. In the wealthier countries, rising living standards also helped to defuse political radicalism and maintain the stability of democratic institutions.

For consumers in the richest nations, these changes meant an unprecedented rise in living standards. In the world as a whole, however, economic differences between richer and poorer regions became greater than ever, especially in the later 1970s, when the world economy slowed. The table below reveals these differences.

Economists in the wealthier regions kept insisting that eventually even the poorest areas would benefit from the dynamism of world capitalism. Industrial growth did in fact spread, particularly in China, Taiwan South Korea, and India. In these newly industrializing countries (NICs), large middle classes began to emerge. They aspired to the high material living standards enjoyed in the US and Western Europe.

There were as many regions, however, where industrialization did not take hold. In some countries, it seemed that attempts by local producers to participate in global growth by selling commodities such as tobacco, coffee, or cotton on the world market merely damaged their economies. Often, such “cash crops” removed land from food production, but at the same time it put local producers at the mercy of sudden shifts in world demand for their goods. Gradually, many less industrialized countries became deeply indebted to banks and governments in wealthier regions. This has made the task of industrialization even more difficult. In the second half of Big Era Nine, growth stagnated and even began to fall, particularly in parts of Africa and Latin America. So, despite rapid world economic growth in the first part of the era, many were left behind. As late as 2002, 3 billion people had never used a telephone, and 1 billion people had no access to electricity.

Global inequalities were highlighted by the prolonged ideological, political, and military contest known as the Cold War. By the end of World War II, the dominant powers were the US and the Soviet Union. The United Nations, created in April 1945 in San Francisco, provided a forum for meetings between the major powers and all other independent states, but real power remained with the richest states. Even in the UN, the US, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and China (first Taiwan and later the Peoples Republic on the mainland) got the right, as permanent members of the Security Council, to veto substantive proposals. While leaders in the West promised freedom, democracy, and rising living standards, the Soviet leadership offered an ideology of equality and claimed that the entire capitalist system was on the verge of collapse. Soviet leaders tried, wherever they could without upsetting the uneasy balance of power with their capitalist rivals, to support local anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Their greatest success came in 1949, when China, the most populous country in the world, fell to a Communist government. The two Communist superpowers soon fell out with each other. Even so, after 1949, more than a third of the world’s population lived under Communist rule.

In the capitalist West, that is, the United States and the European countries allied with it (plus Australia, New Zealand, Canada and a few other lands with populations of predominantly European origin) governments had good reason to be nervous about the Communist world. In the 1950s, the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons, and in the same decade Soviet scientists sent the first unmanned and then manned rockets into space, thereby showing that they had the technology to fire nuclear weapons long distances. The military stand-off between the USSR and the US came to a head in 1962, when the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, tried to base Soviet missiles in Cuba, its Communist ally in the Caribbean. To check this threat to US power, President John F. Kennedy went to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviet government backed down. But of course nuclear weapons still exist today in the hands of several countries.

Beneath the political surface, the Cold War was fought through ideology and economics. Both sides sought client states, and they supported propaganda wars to attack the ideologies and beliefs of the other side. Many smaller states found that they could get military or economic aid from one side or the other by offering at least temporary allegiance. China, India, Cuba, Egypt, and many other countries benefited from Soviet aid, normally directed at large construction projects such as Egypt’s Aswan dam on the Nile. On the other side of the ideological divide, Europe and Japan benefited from massive US reconstruction loans after the war.

The Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet “command economy” was really a huge, state-run monopoly, and it proved incapable of innovating fast enough to keep up with its capitalist rivals. By the 1980s, the Soviet leadership could no longer supply its military with up-to-date weaponry, partly because the computer revolution had largely passed it by. Nor could it supply its population with the high living standards of the wealthier capitalist nations. After the Soviet Union broke up into more than a dozen new states and all the Communist governments of Eastern Europe fell, the world was once again integrated, as it had been in the late nineteenth century, into a single international system dominated economically by market capitalism. Even China took an increasingly active role in world trade. The dominant nation in the system was now the US, but its power did not go unchallenged. The economic and political influence of Europe grew as nations there formed the European Union. Economic growth in China and India gave those countries political clout, and the new Russian Federation, smaller than the Soviet empire but still in possession of a nuclear arsenal, could not be ignored.

The Cold War played a significant role in the collapse of Europe’s colonial empires. The world wars of Big Era Eight had undermined the authority of the colonial powers and exposed their military vulnerability. After World War II, the Soviet Union and Communist China supported anti-colonial regimes throughout the world, and leaders in most colonies organized independence movements. In the forty years after 1945, roughly 100 nations achieved independence from their former European overlords. This rapidly multiplied the number of independent nation-states represented in the UN, which became the first organization in world history to give some form of political representation to all regions of the world. In 1945, fifty countries came together to write the charter of the UN. IN 2003, there were 191 member states.

In many cases, including India and many countries of Africa, colonies won their freedom through constitutional change backed by vigorous political action and protest. Some, including Algeria, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Portuguese colonies in Africa, fought prolonged and bloody revolutionary wars against colonial masters. Indeed, in Big Era Nine, these anti-colonial struggles dominated world conflict, which involved strategies and tactics of guerrilla warfare. In an increasingly unequal world, wars have largely become David-and-Goliath contests, in which terrorism, lightning strikes, and psychological tactics are as important as direct military confrontation.

In principle, decolonization should have created a world of equal, independent nations. In reality, the direct imperialism of the late nineteenth century gave way to more indirect forms of domination, in which the most powerful states used both economic muscle and military pressure to exercise at least partial control over former colonies. The Cold War had given leaders of small states some room to maneuver between the capitalist and Communist blocs. When the Cold War ended, they lost even this flexibility. Part of the problem was that, despite their theoretical commitment to free trade, powerful states and organizations, including the US and the European Union, continued to protect important sectors of their economies, notably agriculture, with high tariffs. This closed off opportunities for poorer regions to compete on world markets.

Big Era Nine brought slow destruction to the world’s rural peasantry. For thousands of years, most people in the world had been peasants farming small areas of land. Following the industrial revolution, however, more and more peasants become wage earners. They either stayed in rural areas to work for commercial farmers, or they left for the major towns in search of wage work. The decisive changes occurred in the first five decades of Big Era Nine, when peasants came to represent a minority of the world’s population. Between 1950 and 2000, the number of people living in cities rose from about 30 per cent to over 50 per cent. In Japan, the number of farmers fell from over 50 per cent of the population in 1950 to less than 10 per cent in 1985. In Columbia, Brazil, and Mexico, the percentage of farmers fell by half within just twenty years. By the late 1980s, peasants remained a majority of the population only in Africa south of the Sahara, South and Southeast Asia, and China. Even in these regions, the proportion of rural farmers fell rapidly. The “death of the peasantry” meant the end of a lifeway that had shaped the experiences of most humans since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years earlier.

Another major change of Big Era Nine was the challenge to prevailing relations between women and men in much of the world. Lifeways in cities were very different from those in peasant villages. Better health care allowed more babies to survive to adulthood and fewer children were necessary to achieve a family’s economic success. New forms of contraception made it easier to plan births, and bottle feeding made it easier for women to share child-rearing tasks with men. Finally, new energy sources reduced the importance of sheer physical strength in most forms of work. All these changes undermined the traditional division of labor between women and men and encouraged women to seek more equal status within both the family and the society at large. Particularly in more traditional environments, many men regarded women’s demands for rights to education, personal freedom, and political participation as profoundly threatening. Despite this resistance, increasing global exchanges of ideas and values, especially through mass media, has ensured that the re-negotiating of gender roles will continue almost everywhere.

Humans and Ideas

By forcing people on all continents to confront one another’s ideas, values, and practices, globalization has transformed the way in which nearly everyone thinks about the world. In some ways, globalization seems to have created a more homogenous world, because styles, tastes, and material goods from the more industrialized countries have spread to the rest. For example, the McDonalds chain of fast-food restaurants, which first opened in the US in 1955, now has thousands of outlets throughout the world, selling variations on the same basic menu. In most parts of the world, city-dwellers started dressing, at least some of the time, in the jeans, suits, and ties of the industrialized world, while English has become the international language of business, computers and diplomacy. The films of Hollywood have shaped cinematic tastes around the world, and Elvis look-alike competitions are held Bangkok, Thailand, and in small towns in rural Australia.

Many people, however, have resisted cultural globalization, seeing the values and images of the West, meaning mainly the US and Western Europe, as serious threats to national religious and cultural traditions. With films, videos, and material goods came new ideas about consumption, the value of money, gender roles, sexuality, and relations between the old and the young. The Mao jacket, so prominent in China in the 1960s and 1970s, or the head coverings of pious Muslim women became powerful symbols of cultural identity. Religious movements aimed at conserving and revitalizing tried-and-true values and customs in such countries as Iran, India, Russia, and even Western Europe and the United States generated powerful support.

Acceptance or rejection, however, has not been the only possible response to globalization. In much of the world, cultural change reflects a complex synthesis of the traditional and the modern, the local and the Western. Perhaps, the most conspicuous example of this is “world music,” the movement to combine musical forms and traditions from different parts of the globe. On occasion, the synthesis may appear disorienting to some. In 1996, for example, an Iranian designer created “Sara” and “Dara” dolls, figures dressed in conventional Muslim clothing, as an alternative to the “Western” Barbie and Ken dolls that were also sold in Iran.

As people throughout the world encountered one another’s ideas and values, the deepest ideas about the meaning of life have been challenged. All religions have rethought their relationships to other religions and to the secular and scientific traditions of the twentieth century. Many small, localized belief systems have either died out or managed to preserve some of their traditions within the structures and practices of larger traditions. One example is the continuation of elements of Maya religion within the Mexican Roman Catholic tradition.

The major religions have also been transformed. African Christianity has incorporated many local religious practices and ideas, and these influences have seeped into religious life in the older Christian countries. For example, Christian music today owes a huge debt to African and African American musical traditions. Modern technologies have also served the major faiths. Mass communication and rapid long-distance transport have greatly enhanced the Pope’s authority over international Roman Catholicism, and the pilgrimage to Mecca is now accessible to millions of Muslims, who fly to Saudi Arabia from around the world.

Christ Taken Down from the Cross
Art in the Anglican Cathedral
Harare, Zimbabwe
Photo by R. Dunn

Beginning in Big Era Seven, modern science presented a formidable challenge to religious faith. The prestige of modern science derives from its universality. That is, the same scientific experiment should work as well in New York as in New Delhi, as well in a Jewish laboratory as in a Muslim one. Science has also been astonishingly successful at manipulating and controlling the material environment in ways that benefit human health and quality of life. For all its achievements, however, science remains a rapidly evolving tradition. In Big Era Nine, fundamental new ideas, or “paradigms,” emerged in several crucial disciplines, including cosmology, nuclear physics, biology, and geology. In cosmology, the “Big Bang Theory” provided an explanation of the origins of the universe. Physicists have gained deep understanding of the nature of sub-atomic particles. Biologists now grasp the role of DNA in evolutionary change. In geology, the theory of plate tectonics has provided a platform for new understanding of the development and evolution of life.

The successes of science also led to new problems. The biotechnological revolution gave scientists the ability to manipulate genes and, in principle, to clone (make individual genetic duplicates of) animals, including human beings. Should such techniques be used? What might the consequences be? Should humans tinker with life and death in such fundamental ways? Similarly, the spectacular power humans now have over the environment poses new challenges. Should we restrain our consumption to save the environment, even if this means reducing living standards in wealthier countries and slowing, rather than speeding up, the development of poorer countries? Is it legitimate for any country to arm itself with nuclear weapons whose release would spell disaster for everyone?

Big Era Nine has been an era of staggering change and has left us with more questions than answers. Perhaps the most important question is whether or not humans will succeed at managing a global system that as the twenty-first century moves ahead is both complex and fragile.

Abstract Painting of the Post-World War II Era
Jackson Pollock, No. 1 (1949)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Photo by R. Dunn

Teaching Units for Big Era Nine

Definition of Landscape Teaching Units

9.1	World politics and global economy after World War II	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.2	The two big powers and their Cold War	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.3	A multitude of sovereign states	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.4	Wealth and poverty since 1950	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.5	The world at warp speed: science, technology, and the computer revolution	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.6	Population explosion and environmental change since 1950	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader
9.7	Globe-girdling cultural trends	Summary of Teaching Unit	Complete Teaching Unit PDF Format Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader

Big Era Nine
In Development

This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions

Humans and the Environment

Humans and Other Humans

Humans and Ideas

Teaching Units for Big Era Nine

Big Era Nine In Development

This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions

Humans and the Environment

Humans and Other Humans

Humans and Ideas

Teaching Units for Big Era Nine

Big Era Nine
In Development