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Unit 7
10–15% of examBetween 1815 and 1914, nationalism redrew the map of Europe: Italy and Germany became single countries, while older empires with many peoples struggled to hold together. Industrial power let Europeans conquer huge empires in Africa and Asia, and new ideas from Darwin, Freud and Einstein shook the belief that the world was orderly and predictable. The rivalries built in these years set the stage for World War I.
Longer videos that cover the whole unit. Good for a first pass or a final review.
After the revolutions of 1848 failed, a new generation of practical leaders learned to use nationalism to strengthen the state instead of fighting it. The Crimean War (1853–1856) exposed the Ottoman Empire's weakness and helped break up the Concert of Europe, which opened the door for Italy and Germany to unify.
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Nationalism is the belief that people who share a language, culture and history should have their own state, and in the 1800s it took many forms, from romantic and liberal to aggressive and openly racist. Leaders like Napoleon III used it to build support, and Austria tried to calm its Hungarians by creating the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. Rising anti-Semitism, seen in France's Dreyfus affair, helped convince Theodor Herzl to launch modern Zionism, a movement for a Jewish homeland.
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Cavour's diplomacy and Garibaldi's military campaigns united most of Italy by 1861, and Bismarck used Realpolitik and three short wars (against Denmark, Austria and France) to create the German Empire in 1871. Bismarck then built alliances to keep France isolated, but after Kaiser Wilhelm II dismissed him in 1890 Europe split into rival alliance blocs, and repeated Balkan crises, like the Bosnian crisis of 1908 and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, kept pushing the Great Powers toward war.
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In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin argued that living things change over time through natural selection. Others twisted his biology into Social Darwinism, the claim that nations, races and classes compete and only the "fittest" deserve to win, which was used to justify imperialism, racism and eugenics.
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Positivism taught that science alone gives real knowledge, and many Europeans trusted in steady progress. By 1900 that confidence was cracking: Nietzsche praised struggle and the irrational will, Freud argued that hidden, unconscious drives shape what we do, and Planck's quantum theory and Einstein's relativity showed that Newton's physics was not the full picture.
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From about 1870, European powers raced to claim Africa and much of Asia, driven by the hunt for raw materials and markets, rivalry and national prestige, and claims of racial and cultural superiority like the "civilizing mission." Industrial technology made conquest possible: machine guns and breech-loading rifles, steamships and the telegraph, and quinine to protect Europeans from malaria.
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The scramble for colonies strained European diplomacy, from the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) that set rules for dividing Africa to the Fashoda crisis (1898) and the Moroccan crises (1905, 1911). At home, critics like J. A. Hobson and Lenin attacked empire, and abroad colonized peoples pushed back through uprisings like India's 1857 rebellion and China's Boxer Rebellion, nationalist groups like the Indian National Congress, and Japan's rapid modernization in the Meiji Restoration.
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Romantic painters, writers and composers rejected cool Enlightenment reason for emotion, nature, the individual and national history. After 1848, Realists like Gustave Courbet painted ordinary people and social problems, and from the 1870s Impressionists, then Post-Impressionists and, by 1914, Cubists moved away from lifelike images toward personal, abstract art that often shocked audiences.
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This wrap-up topic asks you to explain causes and effects across the whole unit, such as how nationalism and imperial rivalry made Europe less stable before 1914. Practice naming a cause, its effect, and exactly how one led to the other, with specific evidence.
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