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Downloaded-ND from 4.0 Brill.Com09/23/2021 License 6. Th e Closing Circle: 1880–1 6. Th e Closing Circle: 1880–1920 Th e Turn of the Century Th e North Pole and the South Pole have now been reached, and ships have meandered their way through the Northwest and the Northeast Passages. After half a millennium of unimaginable eff orts, the last white spots on the map have been fi lled. Th e northern nations have fi nally fulfi lled one of their ancient dreams, that of conquering the last remaining frontiers of the planet. Is it purely coincidental that this fi nal conquest was performed only a few years before those same nations clashed in a war, at once murderous and suicidal, sacrifi cing perhaps more than forty million of their people? Or was the conquest of the icy frontiers the last triumph of northern supremacy in the world; did the same conquest herald a gradual decline? Th e above is not a quotation, but in the years around 1920 such a questioning, tentative statement could have been made in an attempt to take, with the benefi t of hindsight, a comprehensive view of recent events in the centre as well as the periphery of western civilisation. During the decades before and after 1900, the world could be said to have made the fi nal transition into modernity. In numerous areas, a world relying primarily on human and animal power, and where life was intimately connected with nature and what it could yield, was replaced by one of a very diff erent fi bre. Also, for good or ill, it was a period in which the globe became in some senses truly one. In 1874, a year after the publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the Treaty of Bern had been signed, which eff ectively created a world-wide postal system, and the First International Polar Year (1882–83) made polar research into a global concern for the fi rst time. On the bottom of the world’s oceans telegraph cables were already connecting the continents, and the continents themselves were shrinking with the building of train lines across enormous distances: the Canadian Pacifi c Railway was completed in 1885 and the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903, creating effi cient bands of communication across the world’s most northern and sparsely populated continents. In Paris the tradition of world exhibitions was marked in 1889 by the building of the Eiff el Tower, a 7,000 ton iron edifi ce that satisfi ed the “virtual obsession of nineteenth-century engineers” of building a structure rising more than a thousand feet into the air, thereby making it an icon of the age (Harriss 1976, 10). Similarly, in 1898 the world’s fi rst international urban planning conference was organized in New York (Morris 2007, 1), © PETER FJÅGESUND, 2014 | DOI 10.1163/9789401210829_008 Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NCDownloaded-ND from 4.0 Brill.com09/23/2021 license. 02:39:59PM via free access 414 Th e Dream of the North based on the realisation that the new century was that of the city. With the arrival of technologies that could rapidly transport not only human messages but also man himself from one corner of the world to another, humanity had entered upon a new phase, in which its surroundings, which had always been extendable, were no longer so. Th e last geographical frontiers were conquered; man had come, literally, to the ends of the earth and had thus fi nally embraced his entire possible sphere of action, a situation that was to last until the age of space travel.1 In this transformative period, which profoundly aff ected man’s sense of his own place and role in the world, the extremes of the planet – north as well as south – played an important role. Th ere was another side to the coin, however, and the more unpleasant aspects of modernity and globalisation were suggested by the publication in April 1896 of the article “On the Infl uence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground” in Th e London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science. Written by the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), this rather inconspicuous article off ered the fi rst calculations suggesting a possible connection between human emissions of carbonic acid (i.e. carbon dioxide) and long- term variations in the climate. Th us the scientifi c discussion about such twenty- and twenty-fi rst century issues as the greenhouse eff ect and global warming was in reality a late-nineteenth-century phenomenon – a direct result of the very instrument of progress, namely industrialism. Technology and industry were also behind the fi rst military hostility of global (although primarily Western) proportions – the First World War. Because of a technological development that promised a brighter future for everyone, it ironically also became possible to produce weapons that would have been unthinkable only a few years earlier: machine guns, tanks, submarines, airplanes and mustard gas. “Th e cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins”, D.H. Lawrence wrote at the beginning of his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1928, looking back on the War and refl ecting the feelings of a whole generation. It was the northern world that led the way in this gigantic metamorphosis, in which an ever greater part of the population lived their lives surrounded more and more by technology, tarmac, noise and pollution, and less and less by fi elds, sea and mountains.2 Th ere were at least two important elements in this transformation: fi rst, the imbalance between northern and southern Europe in terms of population and GDP referred to in the previous chapter, was further strengthened as the period progressed. 1 With the exception of the highest mountains. Having failed to conquer the poles, the British were quick to name Mount Everest “the Th ird Pole”. Th e fi rst serious attempt to conquer this last frontier was made as early as 1922. 2 Tarmac was patented in 1901 by the British engineer Edgar Purnell Hooley. Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 02:39:59PM via free access Th e Closing Circle: 1880–1920 415 It is not within the scope of the present study to discuss the development of capitalism, but Max Weber’s Die Protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (Th e Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904–05) clearly links this instrument of growth precisely to the cultural and religious climate of the northern nations from the Reformation onwards. For a long period these indications were not particularly obvious, and in the early nineteenth century, the troika of France, Spain and Italy still had a signifi cantly larger population than that of Britain, Germany and the Nordic countries. But the two groups reached a balancing point in the years around 1870, after which the northern nations took the lead.3 Th us by 1880, the South had a population of 82 million and the North 90 million. By 1910, the North had more than retained the lead, having risen to 102 million against 94 million in the South. Th e GDP, however, showed an even more dramatic trend; whereas the diff erence between South and North in 1870 had been 132 against 187 billion dollars (i.e. 1990 equivalents), the fi gures for 1913 were 280 against 500 billion. By the outbreak of the First World War, in other words, the economy of the northern nations was nearly twice as big as that of the South. Russia and the United States, too, experienced a massive growth. Th e Russian population increased from 97 million in 1880 to a spectacular 160 million in 1910, causing grave concern in the rest of Europe. Th e Russian GDP similarly rose from 84 billion dollars in 1870 to 232 billion in 1913. During the 1880–1910 period the US population rose from 50 to 92 million; correspondingly, the GDP for 1870 was 98 billion, but by 1913 it had risen to a staggering 517 billion dollars. However these fi gures are read and compared (whether Russia and the United States are grouped among the northern nations or not), they do confi rm that the relative and absolute signifi cance of the southern nations was radically reduced in the second half of the nineteenth century and the fi rst decade of the twentieth. Th e second element worth noting about the turn-of-the-century period is the rather radical reshuffl e that takes place internally between the northern nations. Since the Reformation, Britain had slowly and systematically strengthened its position in relation to all its neighbours and built an empire that covered a quarter of the globe, whereas Germany in particular had remained for centuries a divided, almost scattered collection of small and insignifi cant states. Th e latter’s unifi cation process, which ended after the Franco-Prussian War with the offi cial proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871, transformed this internal power balance. Th is second major defeat of France 3 Th e following population statistics for European countries are taken from Mitchell 1992. Statistics on GDPs are taken from Angus Maddison’s Contours of the World Economy, 1–2003 AD (OUP, 2007), as listed in Wikipedia s.v. “List of regions by past GDP (PPP)”. Peter Fjågesund - 9789401210829 Downloaded from Brill.com09/23/2021 02:39:59PM via free access 416 Th e Dream of the North in half a century thus did not just contribute to a further weakening of the South in relation to the North; it also provided Germany with a powerful platform that was more or less bound to cause tensions with Britain.
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