This would become a defining feature of Western civilization, and amongst other things would give rise to of the secular society which we know today. The rise of secularism was given a huge boost by the development of scientific knowledge which had been going on since the Renaissance. Such figures as Copernicus, Galileo and Isaac Newton had transformed the way Europeans thought about the universe. They had also shown that using scientific thinking and methodology was an extraordinarily powerful tool in expanding knowledge.
This encouraged the rationalist thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment to scrutinize everything — religion, society, government — in a new way: causes and consequences rooted in the material world were sought, and traditionally-accepted notions of divine providence were relegated to the margins. Since the time of the Renaissance, several European countries had been building overseas empires.
Fierce rivalry developed, and European forces found themselves fighting each other across the globe, in North America and the Caribbean, and in India. By the midth century the European colonies in North America had become fully functioning societies in their own right. The colonists felt a growing sense of their ability to determine their own future, and this led to the American Revolution By the end of this, a new country, the United States of America, had made its appearance on the world stage.
American Constitution Constitutional Convention — U. National Archives and Records Administration. The constitution by which it set to govern itself was consciously modeled on Enlightenment principles of rational government.
This example acted as a powerful stimulus to critiques of traditional forms of hereditary monarchical government back in Europe, and, combined with internal problems within France itself, led to the French Revolution breaking out in The revolution challenged the very basis of government of the hereditary monarchies of Europe, and soon the entire continent of Europe was convulsed in war.
Eventually Napoleon was defeated at the battle of Waterloo, in ; but Europeans had had a taste of a new kind of government, and there could be no return to more traditional ways for long. This, along with a diplomacy based to a large extent upon paying subsidies to allies in the fight against Napoleon, did not come cheap; it would have been completely beyond the economic strength of any European power before this period.
This had been gathering pace since the midth century in Britain , and had been greatly boosted by the efficient application of steam power to mechanical devices. By the end of the century, large industrial towns were growing up in the Midlands, the north of England and Scotland, in which hundreds of factories churned out vast quantities of manufactured goods. Used under Creative Commons 3. The early 19th century saw this economic expansion continuing in Britain, and beginning to spread to North America and particularly after the end of the Revolutionary wars in Europe.
The application of steam power to transport further stimulated this trend, with railways spreading their tentacles throughout Britain, Europe and North America. These in turn acted as a powerful boost to the expansion of the United States and Canada across the North American content, and by the midth century these two countries had reached the Pacific coast.
By this time, steam ships were beginning to take over from sailing vessels on the sea routes of the world. With the introduction of refrigeration, meat and other perishables could be transported between continents, and the world was being linked by an ever denser network of trade routes.
Back in Europe, the legacy of the French Revolution and the wars which followed it were a yearning for greater democracy, and for greater national self-determination. Much of central Europe and the Balkans were all under large, multinational states the Austrian, Russian and Ottoman empires , and the many different nationalities within these states began to agitate for self-rule or independence.
In Germany and Italy , meanwhile, two nationalities split amongst many small states, people agitated for the creation of unified states through which these nations could govern themselves. The political history of Europe is largely taken up with these struggles, and in the later 19th century large new European states appeared in Germany and Italy.
In the same period many countries made great strides towards fully-fledged parliamentary democracy. This was true not only for continental nations, but also for Britain , with its long-standing experience of parliamentary rule.
The 19th and early 20th centuries saw near-universal male suffrage being introduced, and mass-party politics taking over from the much more limited and aristocratic political game which had gone before. Across the Atlantic the expansion of the United States had led to an increasing divergence between its different regions, especially between a slave-owning plantation society in the south and a more industrial and egalitarian society on the north.
The differences between these regions led to a bloody civil war With the North triumphant, slavery was abolished in the USA. The civil war was followed by unprecedented industrial expansion.
The later 19th century also saw Europe industrializing on an unprecedented scale. Towns and cities ballooned in size, the middle classes became a large and influential part of the social mix, and a vast urban working class emerged.
Revolutionary social change was accompanied by revolutionary changes in thought. For many people, this theory meant that the concept of God could be done away with, while others happily incorporated it into their world-view alongside with their Christian faith.
But for both groups the theory meant that the development of life including human beings could have a rational and scientific explanation. Sigmund Freud and others pioneered a scientific understanding of the mind and the emotions, previously, as the development of the natural world, regarded as the preserve of spiritual sphere. Karl Marx and others analyzed society in fundamentally new ways. This went hand in hand with calls to work towards radically new economic and social structures. The early 20th century continued the trends of the late 19th century.
This was the age when the motor car began to take to the roads, when airplanes were first invented, and other innovations — radio, telephones, electric lighting — began to make an impact. This also began the wholesale shift towards a global economy based on oil. Portrait of Henry Ford ca. Hartsook, photographer. In the military sphere, European and American armies and navies were being affected by industrialization, with machine guns, barbed wire, dreadnought battleships, torpedoes, mines and submarines making their appearance.
These innovations gave Western military forces massive advantages over those of other societies, and the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw Western empires expand to cover most of the surface of the world. Western trade networks, their reach extended by the spread of railways around the globe, disrupted local economies; Christian missionary activity challenged local beliefs and traditions; local elites adopted Western-style education, clothing, architecture.
Even lands which were not actually ruled directly from Europe, such as China , Thailand and Iran , were absorbed into the Western-dominated global economy, in such a way that deprived them of much of their political independence as well. The only country to successfully enter the Western world on its own terms was Japan — and indeed was soon carving out an empire of its own.
Britain ended up with the largest of these Western empires, and London was, by the end of the 19th century, the de facto financial capital of the world. Yet critics of renewables question Securing Data Transfers With Relativity.
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Just a Game? You Need a Chickadee Brain. Living Well. Currently offered at Tsinghua, the course Plato, Socrates, and the Birth of Western Philosophy, teaches the origins and development of Western societies, institutions, and thought from the ancient world through the Middle Ages. You can also examine the role violence has played in the rise of Western Civilization by taking a course currently offered by the University of Newcastle Australia.
A History of Violence examines the origins, changing nature, uses, and attitudes towards human violence in western history. Like many liberal arts degrees, a background in Western Civilization can be applied to a wide array of professional interests. The written and verbal communication skills gained by studying Western Civilization lend themselves to career opportunities in writing, editing, and research for popular media or in academia. A strong Western Civilization background can similarly lead to a career in broadcast journalism.
Learn more about how the Western world developed and how cultural movements, tragedies, and triumphs have shaped the globalized and Westernized worlds we live in today.
Sign up for classes in Western Civilization and prepare yourself for a career that engages in critical dialogue with the past and the present! Western Civilization Courses.
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