“World domination” is a concept we don’t mention too often in casual
conversation these days, but 100 years ago it was an ordinary frame of
reference.
In 1800, at the beginning of the 19th century, European
powers controlled about one-third of the world’s land mass. By 1914—before the
start of World War I—those Western powers could claim domination of about 84 percent of the planet.
It wasn’t a stretch to acknowledge that “the sun never sets on the
British Empire.”
Margaret Macmillan, in The War
That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, says
"Europe's countries dominated
much of the earth's surface whether through their formal empires or by informal
control of much of the rest through their economic, financial and technological
strength. Railways, ports, telegraph cables, steamship lines, factories around
the world were built using European know-how and money and were usually run by
European companies.”
"The march of knowledge throughout the nineteenth century, in so
many fields from geology to politics, had, it was widely assumed, brought much
greater rationality in human affairs. The more humans knew, whether about
themselves, society, or the natural world, the more they would make decisions
based on the facts rather than on emotion.”
As we sadly know now, such self-serving and blithely ignorant claptrap
was brutally exposed when the “guns of August” commenced firing in 1914 after
the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Copyright
© Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.
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