Responses To Global Crisis, 1920-1939: Alide DIB

CHAPTER
28 Responses to Global
Crisis, 1920–1939
The Great Depression, 1929–1939 (p. 815)
Fascism, Communism, and Authoritarianism (p. 818)
Authoritarian Regimes in Asia (p. 826)
Anticolonial Nationalism in Asia and Africa (p. 828)
The Road to War (p. 834)
A fter she had participated in the struggle for the creation of the new Turkey
after the First World War, the novelist Halide Edib (1884–1964) was
forced into exile in 1926 after falling out of favor with the country’s president.
For the next thirteen years she traveled to France, Britain, and the United States,
writing books and lecturing at universities. In 1935 she went to India, a trip
that resulted in the book Inside India and speculation about the future shape
of the world. From her own experience in Turkey she understood the struggle
of formerly powerful societies to overcome more recent Western domination
and the difficulties in reconciling ancient cultures
(Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, ed. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and
with modern influences. Edib’s musings about
the future importance of India and China were
Basima Qattan Bezirgan, University of Texas Press, 1977, p. 166)

far-sighted:
[India] seemed to me like Allah’s workshop: gods, men and nature

abounded in their most beautiful and most hideous; ideas and all
the arts in their ancient and most modern styles lay about pell-mell.
Once I used to think that first-hand knowledge of Russia and
America would enable one to sense the direction which the world
was taking; but this India must certainly have its share in shaping HALIDE EDIB
the future. Not because of its immemorial age, but because of the
new life throbbing in it! Perhaps the same is true of China. . . . How much must one see and
understand before being able to have any idea of the working of history?1
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The Travels of Halide Edib Peshawar 0 250 500 Km.
Halide Edib’s journeys
.
Lahore H I
Indus R
City visited by Edib M 0 250 500 Mi.
AL
AY
Other city NORWAY Delhi A M
TS.
Lucknow
SWEDEN Ganges R
Aligarh .
N Benares Patna
Ahmadabad Calcutta
to/ INDIA B URMA
Edib observes the from
IRELAND London
Depression in New Bombay Edib teaches in
UNITED DENMARK
York, 1928–1929 and Arabian Hyderabad India, 1935.
1931–1932. KINGDOM Sea
London Bangalore Madras Bay of
Bengal
NETHERLANDS Berlin
POLAND
to
BELGIUM British Ceylon
New York
City GERMANY territory INDIAN OCEAN
Paris
CZ EC
HOS L
OVAKIA
Bay of RUSSIA
Biscay FRANCE SWITZ. (U.S.S.R. after
AUSTRIA
HUNGARY 1922)
ROMANIA Halide Edib fights for
PORTUGAL Bla ck
Turkish independence,
Madrid YUGOSLAVIA Sea
1920.
Istanbul
Rome BULGARIA (Constantinople
S PA I N before 1923)
ITALY ALBANIA
Ankara
GREECE TURKEY
Athens Izmir
Sicily (Smyrna)
Aleppo
MOROCCO ALGERIA SYRIA
M Cyprus
ed Crete
(Gr. Br.)
ite Beirut
IRAQ
TUNISIA rra LEBANON Damascus
ne
an PALESTINE Amman
Sea Jerusalem
Alexandria Port TRANSJORDAN
Suez
l l l l l l l
Said
Canal
Cairo
0 200 400 Km. SAUDI
LIBYA EGYPT ARABIA
0 200 400 Mi. to
In di a
1920 1925 1930 1935 1940

Lifetime of Halide Edib
(b. 1884) (d. 1964)
Republic Igbo Women’s Invasion of Italian invasion Rape of
of Turkey War Manchuria of Ethiopia Nanjing
AFRICA
AND ASIA 1923 1929 1931 1935 1937
Growth of Indian National Congress
1920s and 1930s
Mussolini controls Italy Soviet collectivization and Great Purges

EUROPE
1922 1930s
Hitler takes
power in Germany Spanish Civil War
1933 1936 1939
814 CHAPTER 28 Responses to Global Crisis, 1920–1939
Halide Edib (hall-ee-DEH eh-DEEP) was the daughter of a progressive Ottoman

• Halide Edib (1884−
1964) Turkish nation- official who made sure she learned Arabic and studied the Quran but also had her
alist best known for her tutored by an English governess and sent her to a Greek-run school. In 1901, flu-
many popular works of
fiction featuring women ent in Turkish, English, Greek, and Arabic, Edib was the first Muslim girl to gradu-
protagonists. Was part ate from the American College for Girls in Istanbul. As a child of privilege, she had
of the army that formed the luxury of exploring many different ideas and forming her identity in a safe
the Turkish nation and
later served as a member and secure environment. She remained a practicing Muslim.
of the Turkish parliament After graduation Edib married and had two children: “My life was confined
and as a professor of
within the walls of my apartment. I led the life of an old-fashioned Turkish woman.”
literature.
But over the next two decades her life was thrown into turmoil. She grew beyond
traditional gender roles, publishing her first novel in 1908 and helping to found
the Society for the Elevation of Women. In 1910 she left her husband after he mar-
ried a second wife, in conformity with Muslim law but against her wishes. After her
divorce Edib became even more active in public affairs. In 1912 she was involved
with the Turkish Hearth Club, where, for the first time, men and women attended
public lectures together. It was the outbreak of war in 1914, however, that thor-
oughly transformed her life.
The Ottoman government sent Edib west to Damascus and Beirut to organize
schools and orphanages for girls. Before long, however, the Ottoman armies were
in retreat, and she returned to Istanbul with her second husband, a medical doctor.
After British forces occupied Istanbul, she fled east in disguise, wearing a veil and
carefully concealing her manicured fingernails as she and her husband rode on
horseback to join the Turkish nationalist army headquartered at Ankara. She was
given official rank and served the cause as a translator and press officer.
Though the nationalists were victorious—Turkey was recognized internation-
ally in 1923—Edib’s voyages were not over. During her years of exile, from 1926
to 1939, the uncertainties of the postwar world were turning into genuine global
crises. When she came to New York as a visiting professor of literature at Columbia
University in 1931–1932, the United States was suffering from the economic col-
lapse that became known as the Great Depression. She witnessed the global effects
of that economic downturn in Britain and France, from where she also viewed the
emergence of fascism with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf
Hitler in Germany. Under these fascist regimes the liberal tradition was under as-
sault, with state power growing at the expense of individual liberties. In the Soviet
Union, Joseph Stalin was further consolidating his communist dictatorship.
With the global economy in crisis and political tensions on the rise, fewer
people defended liberal ideals such as free trade and free political association. Ide-
ologies that magnified the role of the state grew in popularity, while extreme nation-
alism allowed authoritarian rulers in many parts of the world to concentrate ever
greater power. Even the liberal institutions of democratic states were sorely tested
by the challenges of the 1930s. Authoritarian tendencies were reinforced wherever
liberalism was weak or absent, such as in Russia, the European colonial empires,
and the new nation of Turkey.
Nationalism could also be a positive force, however, providing a source of
hope for many colonized Africans and Asians. The great Indian nationalist leader
Mohandas K. Gandhi personified these hopes, while giving the entire world a model
The Great Depression, 1929–1939 815
of peaceful political change. Like Halide Edib, Gandhi saw the fight for national in-
dependence as inseparable from the fight for justice, including equality for women,
who had few rights under colonialism. Gandhi’s peaceful philosophy, a source of
inspiration to many, stood in sharp contrast to the renewed militarism that would
soon lead to another world war.
Focus Questions
How did governments in different parts of the world respond to the crisis of the
Great Depression?
Why did liberal democracy decline in influence as fascism, communism, and
other authoritarian regimes rose in power and popularity?
How successful were anticolonial nationalists in Asia and Africa during this
period?
What major events led to the outbreak of the Second World War?
The Great Depression, 1929–1939

I n October 1929 prices on the New York Stock Exchange spiraled downward; within
two months, stocks had lost half of their value. The next year a string of bank fail-
ures across Europe and the Americas spread economic turmoil around the world,
bringing the Great Depression and years of misery. Massive unemployment struck • Great Depression
industrialized countries, while plummeting agricultural prices brought difficult Depression beginning in
1929 with the crash of
times to the world’s farmers. In spite of various government policies intended to stock prices in New York
correct the problem, by 1939 global markets had still not recovered. followed by a series of
bank failures in Europe.
Was marked by sustained
deflation, unemployment
The Great Depression in The Great Depression revealed the central role now in industrial nations, and
the Industrialized World played by the United States in the global economy, depressed crop prices.
as well as the degree to which finance and trade in-
tegrated nearly all the world’s people into a single economic system. Historians con-
tinue to debate the causes of the Great Depression, but two factors clearly stand
out: the speculative excesses of the American stock market, and the international
debt structure that emerged after the First World War.
Financial markets reflected the frenetic pace of life in the United States during
the “jazz age” of the 1920s, with its glamorous movie stars, mass-produced auto-
mobiles, and sensational gangsters. Speculators bought stock on borrowed money
www.cengage.com/history/hansen/voyages1e
The Great
Depression Those and, trusting that markets would endlessly increase in value, used paper profits to
left unemployed by the extend themselves even further. Then on October 24, 1929, the bubble burst. When
Great Depression were the stock market collapsed, both investors and the bankers who had lent them
often left homeless. Here money were ruined. As capital investment dried up, the stock market collapse
a Canadian man takes turned into a general economic crisis.
shelter on a cot in an The problem was magnified by a sharp division between rich and poor. By
office, his plight seem- 1929, only 1 percent of the U.S. population controlled 20 percent of its wealth.
ingly left unsolved by his Unable to purchase all the products being churned out of American factories, more
government’s efforts to and more workers found themselves staring at locked factory gates. By 1932, one-
provide relief vouchers fourth of workers in the United States were unemployed.
to “temporarily solve” During World War I the United States had replaced Great Britain as the world’s
the problem. (Library leading source of investment capital, and European governments were in debt to
and Archives Canada)
American banks. The vulnerability of this system was revealed when the stock mar-
ket crash led to a general run on banks. The banking crisis was particularly acute in
Germany, where the Weimar government was forced to borrow heavily to make the
huge payments to France required by the Versailles treaty (see Chapter 27). Finan-
ciers in the United States lent money to German banks, which paid it over to France
in the form of reparation payments, and then the money came back to the United
States as French payments on American loans. After the stock market collapse, Amer-
ican investors called in their loans to German banks, weakening them to the point
of collapse. In the spring of 1931 the largest bank in Vienna declared bankruptcy as
the Great Depression became global. By 1933 German factories produced only half
the goods they had manufactured in 1929, and half the workforce was idle.
The policies of Western politicians, which sought domestic solutions to global
problems, exacerbated the crisis. In 1930 the United States adopted high tariffs meant
to protect American manufacturers from foreign competition. Great Britain followed
The Great Depression, 1929–1939 817
suit in 1932, increasing interchange within its empire instead of participating in glo-
bal free trade. Though designed to save jobs by protecting local manufacturers from
international competition, such protectionist measures caused a steep decline in in-
ternational trade and a further loss of jobs. By the early 1930s the world was locked
in a vicious cycle of deflation, a downward spiral of both wages and prices.
In the United States, France, and Britain, governments responded with policies
that gave the state a much larger economic role than before the war. In the United
States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (r. 1933–1945) implemented his New • Franklin Delano
Deal programs, intended to stimulate the economy through government spending Roosevelt (r. 1933–
1945) President of the
while taking care of those most in need. Social Security created a “safety net” for United States during the
many of the nation’s elderly, and the Works Progress Administration put the unem- Great Depression and
ployed to work on public infrastructure. Price subsidies helped stabilize farm prices World War II. Created
while legislation strengthened workers’ rights to unionize and strike. Government the New Deal, which
intended to stimulate
protection of depositors’ accounts restored faith in the banking system. Although the economy through
conservatives complained that Roosevelt was taking the country down the path of government spending,
socialism, the New Deal was quite popular. But it did not get at the root of the financial sector reform,
economic problem, and in 1939 unemployment in the United States still stood at and a safety net for
those most in need.
16 percent.
The same pattern of government economic activism unfolded in France and
Britain, where socialist parties were actively involved in framing policy in the 1930s.
The economic role of the state was most strongly developed in the Scandinavian
countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Here Social Democrats were elected
to office who pledged to construct a “welfare state” that would protect their citizens
through comprehensive education, health care, housing subsidies, and unemploy-
ment insurance. But while such measures reduced suffering, they did not, any more
than Roosevelt’s policies, resolve underlying economic issues. No merely national
solution could possibly solve the problem of depressed global markets caused by a
shortage of credit.
The Great Depression Depressed agricultural prices hit hardest in those parts
in Global Perspective of the world most dependent on farming, except where
peasant producers could withdraw from market pro-
duction and simply grow crops for their own consumption. By 1930, however, few
such producers were left. In Africa, for example, peasant production of commodi-
ties for export became the norm. Many small-scale African farming families grew
crops like cocoa, cotton, and coffee not only to get the cash for imported com-
modities like cloth, kerosene lamps, and bicycles but also to pay the taxes demanded
by European colonial governments. In the 1920s, African parents with extra money
after paying their taxes often invested in school fees for their children. Thus in some
areas, access to Western education was another stimulus for rural families to grow
commercial crops.
When the world market price of coffee and cocoa fell by over half in early
1930, many African producers were unable to fully meet their tax obligations or
pay the debts they had previously accumulated. Years of hardship followed during
which school attendance dropped. Since Western manufactures had increasingly dis-
placed indigenous industries, many African peasants had come to depend on im-
ported goods like iron hoes and cotton clothing; now they could no longer afford
them. A sensible strategy was to opt out of the market altogether and grow their own
food. But colonial governments, unable to afford the loss of tax revenue that would
follow, forced African villagers to plant cash crops for export even when they had
little financial incentive to do so.
Conditions were equally bleak where export commodities were produced on
plantations. Brazil, by far the world’s largest producer of coffee, experienced a steep
fall in prices when consumption of coffee in the United States and Europe declined.
Exporters destroyed huge stockpiles of Brazilian coffee hoping that decreasing the
supply would increase global prices, but stagnant global demand ensured that the
deflationary cycle would continue. Agricultural workers left the plantations to scratch
a living out of the soil or moved to cities like São Paulo to join the ranks of the
destitute in the burgeoning favelas, or slums. The situation was similar in South-
east Asia, where a global decline in automobile and bicycle production caused the
world market price of rubber to crash. In Vietnam, as in Brazil, unemployed plan-
tation workers were left destitute.
In the villages of India, the drop in value of commercial crops further squeezed
farmers who were already, in the words of Halide Edib, “at the mercy of rain, money-
lender, and tax-gatherer.” By 1932 peasant incomes had fallen by half, resulting in
greater levels of debt for village families. To avoid losing their land, many families
sold the gold jewelry they were saving for the dowry payment they needed before
another family would consider their daughters for marriage. In the 1930s billions
of rupees worth of such “distress gold” were sold, and many marriages were delayed
or canceled. At the same time, declining incomes meant that many South Asian
Muslims were forced to cancel plans to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and
Medina that could take a lifetime of planning. As cotton prices plunged and textile
factories in Europe and the United States cut production or closed, Egyptian farmers
were struck equally hard. Whereas over 16,000 people a year traveled from Egypt to
Arabia before 1929, only about 1,700 were able to make the pilgrimage in 1933.
These were also troubled times in Halide Edib’s native Turkey. To build up its
own industrial base and make the country less dependent on foreign imports, the
government pursued a policy of “import substitution,” using high tariffs to shield
local producers from global competition. Also adopted in some of the larger Latin
American countries, this approach was meant to stimulate local industry. But even
if some new industrial jobs were created, the policy was, in global terms, economi-
cally dysfunctional. Like the protective tariffs imposed by the leading industrialized
nations, the effect was to decrease international trade even further, hampering glo-
bal economic recovery.
Fascism, Communism, and Authoritarianism

E ven in countries where the liberal traditions of private enterprise and individ-
ual liberty had the deepest roots—such as the United States, Canada, Britain,
France, Australia, and New Zealand—both total war in the 1910s and global depres-
sion in the 1930s brought greater government economic intervention. In Italy,
Germany, and the Soviet Union, where liberalism had much shallower roots, the
challenges of the early twentieth century created a climate in which explicitly anti-
liberal political ideologies—fascism and communism—flourished.
Fascists, most notably Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany,
were contemptuous of representative government. Weak, vain, and vacillating pol-
iticians should be replaced by strong leaders who represented not self-interested
Fascism, Communism, and Authoritarianism 819
factions but the people as a whole. Only then, they promised, could national great-
ness be achieved. Unity of purpose and the role of the state in organizing the collec-
tive will were more important in fascist thinking than individual rights. Fascists were
extreme nationalists, and while racism was strongly present across the world—from
the segregated cities and schools of the United States to the racially based empires
of Britain and France—the German Nazis imposed racial policies of unprecedented
severity. Germany’s Jews were the principal target.
Communists also had no use for liberal democracy, following Karl Marx’s idea
that representative governments were merely committees for managing the affairs
of the property-owning bourgeoisie (see Chapter 23). But in opposing the liberal
emphasis on individual rights, communists traditionally underplayed national unity
and emphasized class solidarity. The workers of each nation, after uniting to over-
throw their oppressors, would unite to create global socialism. In reality, the Soviet
Union was the only existing socialist society in the 1930s, and Stalin had already
declared that his state would oversee the development of “Socialism in One Coun-
try.” As Stalin collectivized agriculture, hastened the pace of industrialization, and
purged the state and the army of his perceived enemies, the Soviet people lived in
perpetual conditions of fear and deprivation.
Although fascists and communists were bitter enemies and hated each other
passionately, they did share a common loathing for liberal democracy. Following
the Great Depression, with the democratic nations struggling without much suc-
cess to restore their economic vitality, many came to believe that the more radical
prescriptions of fascism and communism were the cure.
Mussolini and the For Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) the bond tying the peo- • Benito Mussolini
Rise of Fascism ple together was the Italian state: “Everything for the state, (1883–1945) Prime
minister of Italy and the
nothing against the state, no one outside the state.” The term world’s first fascist leader.
fascism derives from an ancient symbol of authority: the Roman fascio, wood Also known as Il Duce,
branches tied tightly together around an axe. The idea was one of “strength through he founded the Italian
unity”; individual branches can be snapped, but when they are firmly bound they Fascist Party and formed
an alliance with Hitler’s
become unbreakable. Mussolini was bitterly disappointed by the lackluster perfor- Germany.
mance of the Italian government and military during World War I, and he was also
offended that Italy had been treated as a second-class citizen at the Paris Peace Con-
• fascism Authoritar-
ference. In the postwar period he organized quasi-military groups made up largely of ian political doctrine
former soldiers, the infamous Blackshirts, who used violence against Italian social- based on extreme nation-
ists and communists. Their belligerence also intimidated middle-class politicians, alism, elevation of the
state at the expense of
whose weakness, Mussolini thought, could allow Russian-style Bolshevism to spread the individual, and
to Italy. Mussolini’s supporters called him Il Duce (ill DOO-chey), “the leader.” replacement of indepen-
It was true that lack of unity made the country vulnerable to both outside pow- dent social organization
ers and internal dissension. Social tension accompanied industrialization in the in civil society with
state organizations.
north, while the south was still mired in the poverty that drove many to emigrate to
the United States and Argentina. Having no deep roots, the existing liberal constitu-
tion seemed unable to reconcile regional and class divisions. The Catholic Church,
though dominating the lives of most Italians, was also powerless to bridge such
divides.
Mussolini stepped in, with supreme confidence and determination, to fill the
need that many Italians felt for order, discipline, and unity. The passion of his
speeches contrasted sharply with the bland style of most politicians. Some land-
owners and industrialists gave the fascists financial backing as his Blackshirts ha-
rassed union leaders, broke strikes, and kept disaffected farm laborers and tenants
in line. In 1922 he maneuvered his way into the prime minister’s position, and it
seemed for a time that the fascists would be willing to work within the framework of
Italy’s representative, democratic constitution. As the violence of fascist thugs con-
tinued, however, many members of the Italian middle class who had been attracted
by Mussolini’s youth and vigor began to turn against him. Mussolini responded by
taking active steps to consolidate his power, arresting opposition leaders and outlaw-
ing their political parties. Though the constitutional change was not immediate—
the old Chamber of Deputies was retained until 1939—after 1926 Mussolini ruled as
an authoritarian dictator.
The foundation of liberty in liberal societies was free associations: organizations
formed voluntarily by people with similar regional, class, or political interests. Mus-
solini had no sympathy with this idea. Instead, he installed a system of “corpora-
tions” by which all citizens involved in a common undertaking would be organized
by the state. His government replaced independent unions with state-sanctioned
ones and took over the nation’s youth organizations. In theory, the fascist govern-
ment was thereby able to monitor and control the activities of everyone in the
country, though the fascists never actually achieved that level of intrusion in the
lives of individuals. (See the feature “Movement of Ideas: Fascism and Youth.”)
For the dull compromises of parliamentary democracy Mussolini substituted a
theatrical politics that involved singing, flag waving, marching, and stirring oratory.
He often referred to Rome’s imperial tradition and promised to make it once again
the center of a mighty empire. In 1935, in defiance of the League of Nations, he in-
vaded Ethiopia, successfully avenging his country’s humiliating defeat at the Battle
of Adowa by King Menelik’s army in 1896 (see Chapter 26). Fervent patriotism in
the cause of empire proved another effective way to bind the Italian people together.
Some Italians were active supporters of Mussolini’s regime, willing to trade lib-
erty for security and a renewed sense of national pride. Others paid for opposition
to Mussolini with their lives, usually Italian communists. Most Italians probably did
not care too much one way or the other. Rather than actively supporting the fascist
cause or risking a fight against it, they simply went on with their daily lives.
Hitler and National Germans also faced difficult conditions after World
Socialism in Germany War I. The country was both humiliated and finan-
cially devastated by the war and the punitive Versailles
treaty. Although the Weimar Republic had brought liberal democracy to Germany
in the 1920s, progress toward stability and prosperity ended with the onset of the
Great Depression. Germans were growing desperate for solutions to their seemingly
intractable problems. By the early 1930s the center was falling out of German
• Adolf Hitler (1889– politics, as communists on the far left and fascists on the extreme right gained in
1945) Leader of the popularity.
National Socialist Party
who became chancellor
Into this environment stepped Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and his followers
of Germany and dis- in the National Socialist Party. Hitler had a very different idea than did liberals or
mantled the Weimar socialists of what “the people” meant. Socialists believed that “the people” meant
constitution. His ultra- the masses of workers, and liberals believed that each individual was autonomous
nationalist policies led
to persecution of com-
and that “the people” was simply the sum of those individuals. For Hitler, however,
munists and Jews, and das Volk (dahs vohlk), “the people,” was a single organism bound by history, tradi-
his aggressive foreign tion, and racial composition. Just as no cell is independent from the others in a liv-
policies started World ing organism, so all Germans were connected by their racial destiny. Hitler defined
War II.
Germans as an “Aryan” race superior to all others.
According to Nazism, any German who did not

live up to the ideal of racial pride and racial purity was
like a cancerous growth that needed to be excised.
Nazi targets included communists, with their interna-
tionalist doctrine; homosexuals, with their supposed
rejection of traditional family values; and the handi-
capped, considered physically inferior. Proponents of
the racist pseudo-science of eugenics, also popular in
the United States in the 1930s, argued that selective
breeding could lead to superior human beings. If the
smartest “Aryan” men and women married and had
children, they could produce a “master race.” Eugenic
medical practices led to the sterilization of many girls
from poor families to stop their “genetic defects” from
being passed on to another generation.
But Hitler was even more concerned with the
mixing of races. Looking for a scapegoat on which
to blame the country’s problems, he tapped into the
centuries-old tradition of anti-Semitism. In spite of
the fact that most German Jews were thoroughly as-
similated into national life, he identified them as the
main threat: “The personification of the devil as the
symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”
For the Nazis, Jews were the people whose negative
characteristics helped to define, by contrast, the vir-
tues of the German Volk. Only by isolating the Jews
could the goal of racial purity be achieved.
In the late 1920s such ideas were on the far fringe.
But after the Great Depression revealed the weakness
of the Weimar political system, voters increasingly National Socialist Propaganda The Nazi
abandoned the parties of the center-right and the Party often used images of healthy blond children to
center-left for the communists and the fascists. Be- emphasize German vitality and racial superiority and
tween 1928 and 1932 the National Socialist share of organized young people into party-based boys’ and
the vote jumped from 2.6 to 37.3 percent of the na- girls’ clubs. This poster for the “League of German
tional total, and Hitler’s deputies controlled more Girls” solicits donations to a fund to “Build Youth
than a third of the seats in the Reichstag. His main Hostels and Homes.” In spite of her smile, and the
supporters came from lower-middle-class people who flowers on the swastika-labeled collection tin, all of the
did not have savings or job security and were vulner- money collected actually went into weapons production.
(Mary Evans Picture Library/The Image Works)
able during the depression, as well as from young
people caught up in Hitler’s emotional, patriotic ap-
peals. Almost half the party members were under 30.
The German Communist Party also gained strong support in the elections of
1932. Alarmed by the threat of revolution, German business leaders increased
their support for the ardently anticommunist National Socialists. Though many
saw Hitler as wild and unrefined, they trusted him to rally the public against com-
munism. Although President Hindenburg was reluctant to give Hitler a major po-
litical role, he needed Hitler’s support to form a stable governing coalition. Hitler
said he would join the conservative coalition only if he were made chancellor. The
strategy worked: in 1933 President Hindenburg announced the formation of a
new government with Hitler at its head.
MOVEMENT OF IDEAS
Fascism and Youth

F ascists made a special appeal to youth, hoping to
tap into the idealism of young people and their de-
sire to be part of an exciting movement greater than
of “voortrekkers” (“pioneers”) over a Zulu army. That
miraculous victory, the nationalists claimed, had dem-
onstrated God’s covenant with the Afrikaner people
themselves. Because fascism appealed to the emotions to give them South Africa as their “promised land.”
more than to reason, there were few philosophical Torches were carried by modern-day “voortrekkers”
statements of fascist principles. Perhaps the most co- from across the country to the capital of Pretoria,
herent is the one extracted below, co-written by Benito where a bonfire was lit as part of the dedication of a
Mussolini and the fascist political philosopher Gio- nationalist museum, the Voortrekker Monument. In
vanni Gentile in 1932. the 1930s Afrikaner nationalists used such rituals to
The second document, published in a South Afri- unite their people against both South Africa’s black
can newspaper in 1938, shows how such fascist ideas majority and the English-speaking white immigrants
spread to other parts of the world. It was an entry in who dominated the economy.
a newspaper essay contest, written by a 16-year-old
girl named Elsa Joubert. That year Afrikaner national-
ists, descendants of the Boers who had claimed much Sources: Mussolini from http://www.worldfuturefund.org/
wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm, Fascism Doctrine and
of South Africa in the nineteenth century (see Chap- Institutions, 1935, pp. 7–42; Joubert quoted in T. Dunbar Moodie,
ter 26) staged an elaborate series of public ceremonies The Rise of Afrikanerdom: Power, Apartheid, and the Afrikaner Civil
to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the victory Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile:

“The Doctrine of Fascism”
Fascism sees in the world not only those super- tions are poised in a world sustained by moral
ficial, material aspects in which man appears as forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. The
an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, Fascist disdains an “easy” life. . . .
subject to natural law, which instinctively urges Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception
him toward a life of selfish and momentary of life stresses the importance of the State and
pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the accepts the individual only in so far as his interests
nation and the country; individuals and genera- coincide with those of the State. . . . Liberalism
tions bound together by a moral law, with com- denied the State in the name of the individual;
mon traditions and a mission which suppressing Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as express-
the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of ing the real essence of the individual. . . . Fascism
pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth
a life free from the limitations of time and space, having, the liberty of the State and of the indi-
in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the vidual within the State. The Fascist conception of
renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can the State is all embracing; outside of it no human
achieve that purely spiritual existence in which or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.
his value as a man consists. . . . Thus understood, Fascism, is totalitarian, and the
Therefore life, as conceived of by the Fascist, Fascist State . . . interprets [and] develops . . . the
is serious, austere, and religious; all its manifesta- whole life of a people.
822
823
Elsa Joubert: “Young South Africa”

The hearts of three thousand Voortrekkers, each darkness of the night. Numerous prayers of thanks
of whom in his own town had formed a link in for the torches rise up, many a quiet tear is wiped
the chain of the Torch Marathon, beat faster when away. The torches get their “Welcome home.”
they saw the light of the torch coming towards Behind them, like a blazing snake in the
them over the hills in the dusk. . . . night, the belt of fire coils down the hillside. On
The hill is on fire; on fire with Afrikaner fire; the festival grounds the two torches set alight a
on fire with the enthusiasm of Young South huge joyous fire. Around it march the three
Africa! You are nothing—your People is all. One thousand Voortrekkers and each throws his small
light in the dusk is puny and small. But three puny torch upon it—to form one great might
thousand flames. Three thousand! And more! Afrikaner fire.
There’s hope for your future, South Africa! The logs crackle as they burn. As they crackle
The mighty procession brings the torches to so they exult—“The torches set us alight. Now we
the festival ground where thousands await them. again set you alight, O youth of our South Africa!
A matchless, unprecedented enthusiasm in the Come along there’s work to do.”
QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

쑺 According to Mussolini and Gentile, how are fascist values different from liberal ones?
쑺 To what extent does the essay by a teenage South African girl reflect the fascist values promoted
in the first document?
A month after he took office, fire broke out in the Reichstag. The arson was the
work of a single individual, but Hitler accused the Communist Party of treason and
had all Communist members of the Reichstag arrested. The remaining representa-
tives then passed a law that suspended constitutional protections of civil liberties
for four years and allowed Hitler to rule as a dictator. The emergency powers granted
to Hitler became permanent.
Hitler dismantled the Weimar institutions and became the Führer (leader) of an
industrial state of huge potential power. Changes to German society were sudden and
extreme. The Nazis abolished all political parties other than the National Socialists
and replaced Germany’s federal structure with a centralized dictatorship emanating
from Berlin. As in Italy, they took over or replaced independent organizations in civil
society such as labor unions. Protestant churches came under tight state control, and
Hitler Youth replaced the Boy Scouts and church-sponsored youth groups as part of
a plan, reinforced by a new school curriculum, to teach fascism to the next genera-
tion. Hitler promised a Third Reich (“Third Empire”) that would last a thousand years.
Having sent the communists off to prison camps, the Führer (FY-ruh-r) turned
to the “Jewish problem.” In 1935 the Nazis imposed the Nuremburg Laws, which
deprived Jews of all civil rights and strictly forbade intermarriage between Jews and
other Germans. Some Jews began to flee the country, but others stayed, thinking
Primary Source: that “good Germans” would prevent Hitler from turning his anti-Semitic rhetoric
The Centerpiece of Nazi into action. Most German Jews were deeply assimilated into the country’s cultural
Racial Legislation: The and social life and did not want to move. But in 1938 the threat to their safety be-
Nuremberg Laws
came more extreme when the Nazis launched a series of coordinated attacks. After
These laws defined who was a
Jew, forbade marriage between this “Crystal Night,” named for the smashing of the windows of Jewish homes, syn-
Germans and Jews, and paved agogues, and stores, more Jews fled the country. Those who remained were forced
the way for the Holocaust. into segregated ghettos.
Hitler’s dictatorship, like Mussolini’s, relied on either active support or passive
consent from the majority of the population. Part of his appeal was negative: at a
time of fear and insecurity, Hitler identified enemies, such as Communists and Jews,
who could be blamed for the country’s problems. But other economic, social, and
psychological factors also help explain his popularity. While the Western democ-
racies struggled to find solutions to the problems of unemployment and govern-
ment finances, German unemployment dropped from over six million to under
200,000 between 1932 and 1938. Prices were fixed, and resources were allocated by
a centralized bureaucracy working in close coordination with Germany’s largest
corporations. Massive public works projects, such as the world’s first superhighways
and a large military buildup, put millions of Germans back to work.
With communists and Jews out of the way, Hitler promised, traditional values of
courage, order, and discipline would once again inspire and empower the German
people. Women’s highest calling was to stay in the home and nurture pure-bred
Primary Source: Aryan children. The psychological appeal of fascism was apparent in the Nazis’ mas-
Speech to the National sive rallies, with their precision marching, flag waving, and the spell-binding speeches
Socialist Women’s Asso- by the Führer himself. Like the Italian fascists, the Nazis turned politics into theater
ciation, September 1935 and gave people a sense of being part of something much larger than themselves.
Learn what the Nazis believed By creating public rituals that helped meet the deep human need for experiences
were the proper roles for
women in society—from the that transcend the individual, politics began to take on some of the functions of
woman appointed to dissemi- religion. Radio broadcasts and expertly made propaganda films spread the excite-
nate their beliefs. ment throughout the land.
Of course, not everyone was taken in. But open opposition to Hitler would
mean imprisonment or death. Many Germans were content to go about their daily
lives, perhaps regretting Hitler’s excesses but appreciating his apparent restoration
of relative order and prosperity.
Stalin: Collectivization For all the ambition of Mussolini and Hitler, neither
and the Great Purges could match the total control of society achieved by
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953). While Stalin’s totalitarian
control predated the global depression and was independent of it (see Chapter
27), the Soviet Union also saw an escalation of state power in the 1930s.
Starting in 1928, Stalin launched the U.S.S.R. on a path of rapid industrializa-
tion based on centralized Five-Year Plans. Since most of the country was still agricul-
tural, Stalin needed to find a way to apply his policy of “Socialism in One Country”
to rural areas as well. Lenin had promised the peasants land in return for political
support, and his New Economic Policy confirmed the move toward small-scale
private ownership in the countryside (see Chapter 27). But for many communists
this policy was an aberration, since private ownership would lead to agrarian capi-
talism. Stalin eliminated that option when he ordered the collectivization of the • collectivization
rural sector and suddenly moved millions of peasants into barracks on large, state- Stalin’s replacement of
peasant villages with
run collective farms. large, state-run collective
There was substantial resistance to collectivization, which Stalin explained as farms, following the idea
the activity of kulaks (koo-LAHKS), rich peasants who were out to exploit their fel- of “Socialism in One
low villagers. When he sent the Red Army into the countryside, he said it was to Country.” Millions died.
help the masses defeat these kulaks. In reality, the Soviet state was waging war on
its own people by using military power to enforce collectivization on a resistant
population. In 1932–1933, Stalin’s use of the army to impose collectivization cre-
ated a famine that killed millions. Ukrainians suffered the most. The brutality in
the Ukraine was Stalin’s punishment for their attempt to establish an independent
republic after the First World War.
But the industrial sector continued to expand rapidly. The Communist Party
bureaucracy treated the non-Russian parts of the Soviet Union, especially in Cen-
tral Asia, in colonial fashion, as sources of raw material for industrial growth in the
Russian heartland. In sharp contrast with the economies of other industrial soci-
eties, there was no unemployment in the Soviet Union. But Soviet workers received
almost no material benefit; wages were kept low to generate the capital that could
be invested in further industrial expansion. Rapid industrialization also poisoned
the air and water, leading to poor health for many. A network of gulags (GOO-
lahgs), prison camps even harsher than those of tsarist times, became the destina-
tion for anyone who ran afoul of communist authority for even the smallest
transgression.
In the later 1930s Stalin, always paranoid about plots against him, stepped up
his repression of the Old Bolsheviks (see the “Visual Evidence” feature in Chapter
27). During the Great Purges of the later 1930s, Stalin ordered his secret police • Great Purges
to arrest many former colleagues of Lenin—potential competitors for power—and The execution by Stalin
in the late 1930s of many
forced them to confess to supposed crimes. Movie cameras recorded their state- “Old Bolsheviks” he
ments before they were taken out and shot. In 1937 alone, half of the office corps regarded as competitors
of the army was imprisoned or executed. for power. Public trials
The decimation of his own military leadership was an irrational move given and forced confessions
marked the Great Purges.
that Hitler’s rise to power was a direct threat. Even as he killed and imprisoned his
generals, Stalin ordered a massive military buildup to protect the Soviet Union
from the likely scenario of yet another German invasion.
Authoritarian Regimes in Asia

T he challenge to liberalism was not limited to Europe and the Soviet Union. In
many other parts of the world where liberal traditions were absent or only weakly
developed, the uncertainty of the postwar period and the economic crisis of the
Great Depression strengthened authoritarianism. In Japan and Turkey, charismatic
rulers gained authority, the state intervened more in the economy and society,
and single-party states developed.
Ultranationalism Although the Versailles treaty had rewarded Japan with ter-
in Japan ritorial concessions at China’s expense (see Chapter 27), na-
tionalists were still dissatisfied:
We are like a great crowd of people packed into a small and narrow room, and
there are only three doors through which we might escape, namely, emigration,
advance into world markets, and expansion of territory. The first door has been
barred to us by the anti-Japanese immigration policies of other countries. The
second is being pushed shut by tariff barriers. . . . It is quite natural that Japan
should rush upon the last remaining door . . . of territorial expansion.2
The Great Depression strengthened the arguments of nationalists and militarists

for a more aggressive foreign and imperial policy.
In the 1920s there were some signs that the country was heading in a more
democratic direction. Japan was a constitutional monarchy, with an emperor whose
role was ceremonial rather than political. Though still quite limited, voting rights
were extended to more Japanese men, and the cabinet was no longer chosen by
imperial advisers but by the party that gained the most votes in elections.
But other factors limited liberal democracy in Japan. One was the power of the
civil service bureaucrats, who controlled policy behind closed doors in coordina-
tion with the zaibatsu, Japan’s large industrial conglomerates. In 1926, when the
new emperor Hirohito came to the throne, ultranationalists saw an opportunity to
move the nation further away from limited government and toward a more central-
ized state. A new requirement stipulated that the minister of defense be an active
military officer with significant power in the cabinet, often equal to that of the prime
minister. Even Fukuzawa Yûkichi, back at the turn of the century, had begun to
emphasize national glory over individual liberty (see Chapter 24). That attitude was
growing in the 1920s. After the market collapse of 1930 led to falling farm prices
and tough times for the farm families whose sons made up most of the soldiers in
the army, the military role in government became even greater.
• Invasion of Ultranationalists in Japan envisioned a new Asian economic system that would
Manchuria (1931) combine Japanese management and capital with the resources and cheap labor of
Invasion that occurred
when Japanese military
East and Southeast Asia. The turning point came in 1931 with the Invasion of
officers defied the Manchuria, the seizure of northeastern China in the name of the Japanese em-
civilian government peror. As part of the postwar settlement, the Japanese had been allowed to keep
and League of Nations soldiers in the Manchurian capital to safeguard their country’s interests, but Man-
by occupying this
northeastern Chinese
churia was still formally a province of China. Then Japanese military commanders
province, leading to in Manchuria, in defiance of civilian politicians in Tokyo, ordered their soldiers to
the further militariza- leave their barracks and occupy the main population centers and the transportation
tion of the Japanese infrastructure. Brought to trial, the disobedient soldiers denounced the govern-
government.
ment and used the courtroom to whip up public support for the army’s ambitions.
Authoritarian Regimes in Asia 827
As imperial fever grew, civilian politicians lost what little control they had over
the military.
As in Italy and Germany, the larger Japanese corporations were happy to play
by the rules of the new game because militarization brought them lucrative govern-
ment contracts. Japan was also like the fascist countries in the seeming success of
its economic policies. Military spending, even if it required government borrow-
ing, boosted the economy, as did the occupation of Manchuria. After 1932 expand-
ing employment opportunities benefited the Japanese working class and helped
solidify political support for the ultranationalists.
The Rise of The new nation of Turkey emerged from the violent collapse of
Modern Turkey the Ottoman Empire in an exceptionally hostile environment.
Without the skillful military and political leadership of Mustafa • Mustafa Kemal
Kemal (1881–1938), a former Ottoman officer, Turkey may well have been divided (1881–1938) Also
known as Atatürk, an
up by the victorious Allies. For his role in helping establish the new Turkish republic, Ottoman officer who led
Mustafa Kemal earned the name Atatürk, “Father Turk.” With the success of Kemal’s the nationalist army that
armies, by 1923 the great powers had agreed to recognize a sovereign Turkish repub- established the Republic
lic that retained the core territories and population of the old empire. of Turkey in 1923. A re-
former who established
Halide Edib played an important role. In 1919, as the Ottoman Empire crum- the secular traditions of
bled before British and Greek invaders, she stood before a crowd of thousands and the modern Turkish
rallied them to the cause of Turkish nationalism. Her heart, she later wrote, “was state, he served as its
leader until his death.
beating in response to all Turkish hearts, warning of approaching disaster. . . . I was
part of this sublime national madness. . . . Nothing else mattered for me in life at
all.” She and her husband then went to join Kemal’s forces in Ankara, where she
became one of the nationalist leader’s closest confidantes. After independence was
secured, however, they had a falling out. Whereas
Edib and her husband were leaders of a political party
that favored the expansion of liberal democracy, Ke-
mal was planning to be the unchallenged leader of
an absolutist state. “What I mean is this,” he told her.
“I want everyone to do as I wish. . . . I do not want
any criticism or advice. I will have only my own way.
All shall do as I command.” According to her mem-
oirs Edib responded, “I will obey you and do as you
wish as long as I believe you are serving the cause.”
But Kemal ignored her conditional response and said
only, “You shall obey me and do as I wish.” Edib re-
garded his statement as a threat, and indeed shortly
thereafter he banned her political party and she went
into exile.
Turkey’s New Alphabet The Turkish leader

Mustafa Kemal instituted a top-down program of
modernization and westernization in the new nation
of Turkey. In 1928, he declared that Turkish would no
longer be written in Arabic script and that Latin charac-
ters would henceforth be used for all purposes, public
and private. Here Kemal himself demonstrates the new
alphabet. (© Photo12/The Image Works)
Kemal’s authoritarian tendencies were not without precedent. Earlier Ottoman

reformers had also taken a paternalistic view, regarding their subjects like children
who needed guidance but also stern discipline. Such attitudes were also common
during this era of postwar uncertainty and global economic crisis. Having forged a
new country through war, Mustafa Kemal put his personal stamp on the ideas that
would guide Turkey for decades to come. His goal was to put Turkey on an equal
economic and military footing with the European powers, and he ordered rapid
modernization to achieve that end. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire
had vacillated about how much it should adopt Western models (see Chapter 23).
Kemal had no second thoughts in imposing a secular constitution with a strict line
between mosque and state.
Kemal’s drive to separate religion from politics included laws to improve the
status of women. Girls and young women were given increased access to education,
a move Edib strongly supported. Not surprisingly, after the emotional pain she suf-
fered when her first husband took a second wife, she also strongly favored the Turk-
ish law abolishing polygamy. Edib applauded when, in 1930, Turkey became the
first predominantly Muslim country in which women had the right to vote.
On the other hand, she critiqued the authoritarian means by which these re-
forms were attained. The issue of veiling was an important one. Edib argued that
“wherever religion is interfered with by governments, it becomes a barrier, and an
unremovable one, to peace and understanding.”3 But Kemal interfered with the
religious practices of Turkish women by banning them from wearing the veil in all
government buildings, schools, and public spaces. Liberal reformers like Edib ar-
gued that while the veil should never be imposed on women, neither should it be
banned by governments. Education and freedom to choose were the keys to reform.
Kemal had no patience for gradual reform; he simply imposed his own will on
the nation.
Following the general trend of the times, Mustafa Kemal’s modernization poli-
cies depended on the accumulation and application of centralized state power. After
export prices fell in 1930, his government taxed the countryside heavily to finance
a state-sponsored program of industrialization. This move was part of an import-
substitution policy designed to replace imported goods with domestic manufactures;
another part was protecting beginning industries with high tariffs on foreign prod-
ucts. By pursuing this policy, Turkey joined the many nations seeking a merely do-
mestic solution to a global problem. High tariffs inhibited international trade, and
as long as the global economy remained stagnant, the shadow of the Great Depres-
sion would remain. When Mustafa Kemal died in 1938 and Halide Edib returned
home the next year to become Professor of English at the University of Istanbul,
that problem still had not been solved.
Anticolonial Nationalism in Asia and Africa

C olonial governments are, by their nature, authoritarian. Such regimes were al-
ready well established in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia by the 1920s. The
economic crisis of the Great Depression, however, led powers such as the British and
the French to exploit their colonies even more as they increasingly relied on imperial
resources. Harsh policies, such as the use of forced labor, combined with the general
decline in the global economy to spread distress through African and Asian societies
Anticolonial Nationalism in Asia and Africa 829
in the 1930s. As a result, movements of anticolonial nationalism gathered in strength;

the forces that would bring to an end the age of European global domination were
gathering.
These forces were strongest in India, where Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) • Mohandas K.
and the Indian National Congress organized mass resistance to British rule. In Africa Gandhi (1869–1948)
Indian political leader
and most of Southeast Asia, mass nationalism was in an earlier stage of development. who organized mass
Nevertheless, by the 1930s a new generation of Western-educated leaders in both support for the Indian
Africa and Southeast Asia were working to forge the links between leaders and mass National Congress
supporters that had made Gandhi’s movement in India so effective. against British rule. His
political philosophy of
nonviolent resistance
had worldwide influence.
Gandhi and the Indian Halide Edib, in exile from Turkey, traveled to India in
National Congress 1935. Speaking before an audience at the National
Muslim University, her thoughts were more on some-
one in the audience than on her own speech. Looking out at the “fragile figure”
before her, she wrote in her book Inside India, “I was thinking about the quality of
Mahatma Gandhi’s greatness.” Gandhi had turned the Indian National Congress,
before 1914 a small elite movement, into the voice of India.
The Great War was a major turning point. Before 1914, the Congress Party had
been a reformist organization, seeking greater participation of Indians in their own
governance but accepting the basic outlines of British rule. Given the huge contribu-
tion the country had made to the British war effort, Indians expected to be rewarded
with substantial political reform. But the British developed only modest proposals
for a gradual increase in Indian participation.
Then in 1919 the Amritsar Massacre shocked the nation. Although the British
had banned public meetings, the peaceful, unarmed crowd that gathered for a reli-
gious ceremony was unaware of that order. In a horrible display of the violence on
which colonial authority was based, a British officer ordered his Indian troops to fire
directly into the crowd, which was trapped in a confined garden area. The soldiers
fired 1,650 rounds of ammunition, leaving 400 dead and 1,200 wounded. Coopera-
tion turned to confrontation, and in 1920 Gandhi and the Congress Party launched
their first campaign of mass public protest to gain Hind Swaraj, Indian self-rule.
By then Gandhi, a Western-educated lawyer, had discarded European dress for
the spare clothing of an ascetic Hindu holy man. His philosophy was in fact influ-
enced by both traditions. Western ideals of equality informed his insistence that
the so-called Untouchables, those considered outside and beneath the Hindu caste
hierarchy, be given full rights and recognition as human beings. (See the feature
“World History in Today’s World: Caste and Affirmative Action in India.”) But his
two main principles were from the South Asian tradition. Ahimsa (uh-HIM-sah), or
absolute nonviolence, was at the center of Gandhi’s moral philosophy. Satyagraha
(SUHT-yuh-gruh-huh), or “soul force,” was the application of that philosophy to
politics. Gandhi believed that it is self-defeating to use violence to counter violence,
no matter how just the cause. The moral force of his arguments earned him the
title Mahatma, “Great Soul.”
But in 1920, after the British threw Gandhi and other Congress leaders in jail,
depriving the movement of disciplined leadership, violence did accompany the first
mass campaigns of civil disobedience. Deciding that the Indian people were not
ready to achieve self-rule through satyagraha, Gandhi retreated to his ashram (AHSH-
ruhm), a communal rural home, and spun cotton on a simple spinning wheel for
hours at a time. The gentle clicking of the wheel stimulated meditation, and Gan-
dhi stressed that Indians should produce their own simple cloth at home rather than
WORLD HISTORY in TODAY’S WORLD
Caste and Affirmative Action in India

I s it appropriate to give social and political advan-
tages to members of a group that has faced long-
term historical discrimination? That is a question of
Muslim minority) still make up much of the country’s
poor today.
Of course, many caste Hindus resent government
great concern in India today. affirmative action policies that indirectly require them
Lying below and outside traditional Indian caste to have higher credentials to gain admission to elite
structures were the “Untouchables.” Generation after universities or to compete for coveted government
generation they did the lowest and most degrading jobs. Now the stakes are becoming even higher as the
jobs. Their mere presence could “pollute” a caste issue of affirmative action for dalits is entering the
individual. Mohandas K. Gandhi was outraged by domain of private-sector employment as well.
the system of untouchability and made its abolition Some employers have created special programs
a central goal of his nationalist movement. He to help dalits compete for good jobs. At an Infosys
called them Harijans, “children of God,” and declared, facility, for example, a special training course helps
“I would far rather that Hinduism died than untouch- dalit engineering graduates bring their skills up to
ability lived.” the level necessary for employment in the global soft-
In 1950 the independent government of India ware sector. Dalit political leaders see such programs
“reserved” 22.5 percent of all university places and as insufficient and are calling for legislation that
government jobs for what it called “scheduled castes.” would “reserve” jobs for dalits in the private sector.
Today dalit is more often used, a term that also in- Proponents of the legislation argue that positive
cludes “tribal” peoples who, like the Untouchables, action is still necessary to redress historical discrim-
have historically been regarded as “unclean” by caste ination, while opponents say the proposal will hurt
Hindus. Discrimination against dalits continues, and the Indian economy by preventing employers from
they (along with India’s large and poorly educated simply hiring the best and brightest applicants.
import the British textiles that had, since the nineteenth century, represented im-
perial economic exploitation (see Chapter 23).
In 1932 Gandhi re-emerged to lead another campaign of mass civil disobedience.
In his Salt March, he walked hundreds of miles to the sea to defy a British law that
forbade Indians from using ocean water to make their own salt. While the Salt March
galvanized his supporters and received international press coverage, the British re-
sponded with a combination of repression and concessions. After initially jailing
Congress leaders, they then compromised with the Government of India Act of 1935,
which called for elections of semirepresentative regional assemblies. The Congress
Party won huge victories in the following elections, but the law fell far short of their
goal of complete self-government.
While Gandhi remained the symbol of Indian nationalism, there were other
strong political actors both within and outside the Congress Party. In 1928 the young
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), a British-educated son of a wealthy Congress leader,
was elected president of the party. Although a faithful follower of Gandhi, he differed
in several ways. First, his politics were more pragmatic and realistic: he did not think
the moral transformation of Indian society was a necessary prerequisite for self-rule.
Second, he was a socialist who saw India’s future as an industrial one. Whereas Gan-
dhi idealized the simplicity of village life, Nehru saw the “backwardness” of village
life as an obstacle to progress.
830
Gandhi’s Salt March In 1930 Mohandas K. Gandhi received significant inter-

national press coverage when he and his followers marched 240 miles from his ashram
to the sea to make salt. It was a perfect example of nonviolent civil disobedience, since
the manufacture of salt was a legal monopoly of the British Indian government.
(© Dinodia Images/Alamy)
Though Gandhi used Hindu symbols to rally mass support, he and Nehru agreed
that the Indian National Congress should be open to members of all faiths. That did
not reassure leaders of the new Muslim League, who were concerned that if self-rule
were achieved they would be vulnerable to oppression by future Hindu-majority
governments.
Gandhi did his best to reassure the Muslim community, and Nehru’s vision was
of a secular state in which religion would play no part. Based on her visit to India,
Halide Edib was confident that nationalist unity could transcend religious differ-
ences. Nevertheless, distrust between the two communities was increasing. During
the 1930s, some members of the Muslim League developed the idea that a separate
state should be established in Muslim-majority areas. But in 1939 state power still
rested with the British. In spite of having played one group off the other as part of a
“divide and rule” strategy, the British argued that their presence as a neutral arbi-
ter between India’s diverse peoples would be necessary far into the future.
Colonialism in Africa Nationalist movements were also developing in Africa

and Southeast Asia and Southeast Asia during this period. As in India some-
what earlier, in the 1930s Western-educated leaders were
beginning to create political structures that could mobilize large numbers of peo-
ple to challenge European authority. However, since such movements were not
nearly as well developed as in India, European powers continued to rule Africa and
most of Southeast Asia with great confidence.
One feature of colonialism is that the ruling powers must find indigenous al-
lies to help them control and administer their territories. While the British, French,
Dutch, Belgians, and Portuguese each developed particular modes of colonial rule,
many of the same features were found throughout the colonial world. For example,
it was too expensive to staff colonial administrations solely with European person-
nel. While the top positions were always reserved for Europeans, it made sense to
educate some members of the colonized society to work as clerks, nurses, and pri-
mary school teachers. In so doing, however, Europeans were sowing the seeds of
their own defeat. As part of a curriculum that focused on European history (rather
than that of their own societies), young Africans and Southeast Asians learned about
the French Revolution or the traditional liberties of British subjects. They could not
help but compare their own situation with that of their colonial masters and aspire
for greater freedom for themselves and for their people.
The gap between aspirations and realities for Western-educated members of
colonized societies was particularly harsh in the French colonies. French colonial-
ism developed the principle that if a “native” studied French history, spoke the
French language perfectly, and was immersed in French culture, he would become
an évolué (“evolved one”). However, since French colonial society remained deeply
racist, the évolués (ay-vol-yoo-ay) were usually deeply frustrated because most French
people still looked at them as indigenes (ihn-deh-JEN), “natives” who were automati-
cally inferior.
The same dynamic was also found in the Dutch East Indies, where young
adults of mixed race were educated in Dutch schools but found that legal equality
was not matched by social equality in a racially informed colonial environment.
The British also relied on Western-educated youth in places like Nigeria and Burma
to carry out essential administrative tasks. In the British Empire, however, there was
no concept of assimilation, no idea that Nigerians or Burmese could ever “become
English.” Still, Africans and Asian educated in the English language often emu-
lated British cultural models, and they also might be shocked when racist coloniz-
ers rejected their attempts to be accepted as equals.
An additional resentment that often drove Western-educated Africans and
Asians into the nationalist movement was the European policy of relying on in-
digenous authorities for much of the day-to-day administrative work. In Southeast
Asia, for example, the Vietnamese emperors of the Nguyen dynasty continued in
office. In Africa, the British brought the king of Asante back from exile and used him,
and other “traditional” authorities, to maintain order and organize the collection
of taxes (see Chapter 26). The British called their administrative structure “indirect
rule,” priding themselves on the respect they showed to “traditional” ruling elites.
In reality, European colonists forged alliances with conservative ruling elites
to gain help in maintaining law and order and collecting taxes. Malaysian sultans,
to take another example, were given privileged positions in return for helping to
enforce existing laws. By the 1930s impatient nationalists increasingly saw such
figures as hindrances to self-rule. “Indirect rule” focused attention on local issues,
promoting local ethnic identities while forestalling the emergence of broader na-
tional ones.
The British in particular divided Africans into discrete “tribes” and played their
leaders against one another to secure continued control. One of the nationalists
who deplored this policy was the Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe (NAHM-dee ah-zee-
KEE-way) (1904–1996). From the largely Christian southeast, Azikiwe argued that
only if all Nigerians identified themselves with the nation as a whole, whatever
their ethnic and religious backgrounds, would they be able to struggle effectively
for self-rule. The young Azikiwe had a broader view of the African situation than
most, having stowed away on a ship to the United States in 1925 and then gradu-
ated from the University of Pennsylvania. He returned to West Africa in 1937 and
founded the Nigerian Youth Movement while editing the West African Pilot, a
newspaper dedicated to inspiring Africans to challenge British colonial policies.
During the 1930s sporadic popular uprisings in Africa and Southeast Asia arose
in response to colonial tax, trade, and land policies, but they had only limited and
local effect because they were not connected to larger political organizations. In the
Igbo Women’s War of 1929, for example, women in southeastern Nigeria rebelled • Igbo Women’s War
against what they felt to be an intrusion on their family privacy when the British (1929) Rebellion led
by women in colonial
insisted on counting every person in their households for tax purposes. These women Nigeria who used tradi-
targeted mainly the African chiefs who acted as tax collectors for the British. Using tional cultural practices
traditional Igbo (ee-BWOH) means of protesting male abuse of authority, the women to protest British taxa-
dressed up in special costumes, gathered in large numbers, and sang songs of deri- tion policies.
sion intended to shame the exploiter into better behavior. The British modified their
tax system slightly in response, but there were no wider reforms. The women lacked
a broader organization to connect their local efforts with a wider anticolonial
struggle.
Colonial tensions were strongest in those few areas where the Europeans came
not just as rulers but also as settlers, such as South Africa and Kenya. Here Africans
had lost not only their sovereignty but also much of their best farming and herd-
ing land. The British colony of Kenya in East Africa saw the rise of a mass protest
movement in the 1920s. Because the Kikuyu-speaking Kenyans were most affected
by the land alienation policies of Britain, it was among this group that anticolo-
nial feelings were strongest, and the first phase of resistance was organized ethnically
rather than nationally. As in the Nigerian Women’s War, however, merely local pro-
test was not enough to gain substantial reform. Meanwhile, a young leader named
Jomo Kenyatta (1895–1978) was earning a doctorate in anthropology from the
London School of Economics. Only later, after the Second World War, would he
return and provide the leadership necessary to create a nationalist and continental
movement that connected Western-educated Africans with peasants and workers.
Across Africa and Southeast Asia, the Great Depression had made the already
difficult conditions of colonialism even worse. In spite of a drop in world cotton
prices that made their crop virtually worthless, farmers in equatorial Africa were
forced to plant, weed, and harvest cotton because the French needed cheap sup-
plies from the colonies to keep French textile factories open. Likewise, in East Africa
a “grow more crops” campaign required African farmers to dedicate land and labor
to export crops that were basically worthless. Hunger resulted when farmers’ energy
was diverted away from subsistence crops.
Unemployment rose in Malaya, Vietnam, and the Dutch East Indies when the
drop in automobile manufacturing after 1929 depressed the world market for rubber,
a major plantation crop in these British, French, and Dutch colonies. Small-scale
farmers in Southeast Asia, as in Africa, sometimes stopped growing export crops and
focused on food crops for their own consumption to lessen their exposure to world
markets. However, colonial governments required cash payment of taxes and were
willing to use force to compel those payments. The French penalized Vietnamese
peasants who were not able to pay their taxes with forced labor on government
projects and French-owned plantations, sparking occasional uprisings. As in Africa,
however, the peoples of French Indochina still lacked the organizational and ideo-
logical means for effective resistance.
Africa and Southeast Asia have been called the “quiescent colonies” during
this period. But in larger historical perspective, the 1930s were merely a pause fol-
lowing the resistance to colonial occupation that took place in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Nationalist leaders during this time were laying the
foundations for the large-scale movements of mass nationalism that would emerge
at the end of the new worldwide military conflict about to erupt. Ho Chi Minh, who
had helped found the French Communist Party (see Chapter 27), spent the 1930s
in China, Russia, and Thailand. He would return to Vietnam in 1941 to play a lead-
ing role in the decolonization of Southeast Asia.
The Road to War

W orld War II did not sneak up on anyone. In the 1930s numerous events in
Asia, Africa, Asia, and Europe heralded the coming conflict. After the trauma
of 1914–1918, the world’s people barely had a chance to catch their breath before
the coming of another, even more global and more violent total war.
Japanese militarists were not content with the occupation of Manchuria in
1931, seeing it as just one step toward a greater Asian empire. Having already left the
League of Nations, the Japanese openly defied international law in 1937 when they
launched a savage attack on coastal China. Fighting between the Guomindang gov-
ernment of Chiang Kai-shek and Communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong
(see Chapter 27) left China particularly vulnerable to Japanese aggression. Attacked
by their former Guomindang allies in 1927, the Communists had retreated to the
interior. During the famous Long March of 1934–1936, they marched some 7,500
miles (12,000 km) to create a new base in the northeast. After the invasion of 1937,
Chiang and Mao agreed to cease their mutual hostilities and fight the common
Japanese enemy, but they never combined forces or coordinated their efforts (see
Map 28.1).
Convinced of their racial superiority, the Japanese invaders treated the Chinese,
• Rape of Nanjing soldiers and civilians alike, with callous brutality. During the Rape of Nanjing,
Slaughter in 1937 by the
Japanese army of hun- Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians, using tactics
dreds of thousands of such as gang rape and mutilation of children to spread terror among the popula-
Chinese civilians during tion. Total war, with its disregard of the distinction between soldiers and civilians,
their occupation of the
city. The soldiers used was being taken to a new level.
tactics such as gang rape The inability of international institutions to counter military aggression was also
and child mutilation to demonstrated by the Italian occupation of Ethiopia in 1935, an attack that featured
spread terror among the airplanes dropping poison gas on both civilians and soldiers. The Ethiopian emperor
Chinese population.
Hailie Selassie (1892–1975) went to the League of Nations for help:
110˚E 120˚E 130˚E 140˚E
Areas under Communist control
before Nov. 1934
Areas under Communist control, SOVI ET U N ION
1929–1938
Areas occupied by Japan by end
of 1938 Amur
50˚N R.
Route of the Long March,
Oct. 1934–Oct. 1935:
Main forces from Jiangxi Soviet MANCHURIA
Ussuri R.
Other forces
Qiqihar Jiamusi
100˚E
O U TE R M ON GO LI A Harbin
(Independent 1924)
N
0 200 400 Km.
0 200 400 Mi. Shenyang

40˚N Zhangjiakou Jinzhou (Mukden)
(Kalgan)
Baotou Sea of Japan
Beijing
Tianjin Lüshun
(Port Arthur)
Taiyuan KO R EA
(Japanese 1910–1945)
Yan’an SHANDONG
Lanzhou
R.
Jinan
e
H
g Qingdao
an JA PA N
Hu
SHAANXI Yellow Sea

Luoyang Zhengzhou
Xi’an Xuzhou
CHINA
Nanjing
30˚N Chengdu Ya n Shanghai

g zi
SICHUAN R. Wuhan Hangzhou
Chongqing
Jiangxi Soviet under
Nanchang Mao Zedong and
Changsha Chu Teh, 1929–1934
Zunyi HUNAN
Ji’an
Guiyang
Ruijin
Kunming
Xiamen
Canton uprising,
(Amoy) TAI WA N
Dec. 1927 Shantou (Japanese
1895–1945) PAC I F I C
Guangzhou
BURMA (Canton)
Hong Kong
Hailufeng Soviet, O C E A N
1927–1928
20˚N (Gr. Br.)
FRENCH
INDOCHINA
SIAM Hainan
MAP 28.1 Interactive Map

The Japanese Invasion of China Six years after the invasion of Manchuria (see
Chapter 27) Japanese forces began conquest of coastal China in 1937, quickly taking
Beijing, Shanghai, and other major cities. Chinese resistance was extensive, but limited
by divisions between the Guomindang government of Chiang Kai-shek and the Commu-
nists led by Mao Zedong. Expelled from coastal cities by the Guomindang after 1927,
the Communists relocated first to the southern interior and then, after their dramatic
Long March, established a new base in the northeastern Shaanxi Province.
835
The Rape of Nanjing One of the most brutal episodes during the Japanese
invasion of China was the Rape of Nanjing. Here Japanese soldiers are seen using live
captives for bayonet practice, with fellow soldiers and future victims looking on.
Though the Chinese have long remembered such atrocities, until recently Japanese
schoolchildren learned nothing about them. (Bettmann/Corbis)
I ask the fifty-two nations, who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to
help them in their resistance to the aggressor, what are they willing to do for
Ethiopia? And the great Powers who have promised the guarantee of collective
security to small States on whom weighs the threat that they may one day suf-
fer the fate of Ethiopia, I ask what measures do you intend to take? Representa-
tives of the world, I have come to Geneva to discharge in your midst the most
painful of the duties of the head of a State. What reply shall I have to take back
to my people?
The emperor warned the international community that if it did not take effec-
tive action, no small nation would ever be safe. The League of Nations placed eco-
nomic sanctions on Mussolini but took no further action. With access to colonial
The Road to War 837
resources, such as Libyan oil, and with aid from the German government, the sanc-
tions had little effect.
Meanwhile German and Italian fascists saw their movement gaining ground
in Spain. In 1936, a democratically elected Spanish government was attempting to
use socialist policies to deal with the crisis of the Great Depression. Spanish conser-
vatives, rather than contesting such policies through the electoral process, took up
arms under the leadership of General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) to overthrow the
Republicans and the liberal constitution. During the Spanish Civil War (1936– • Spanish Civil War
1939) the Soviet Union supported the Republicans, while the Nazis supported Franco (1936–1939) Conflict
between conservative
and his quasi-fascist movement. (See the feature “Visual Evidence: Guernica.”) The nationalist forces, led by
liberal democracies of France, Britain, and the United States remained neutral. Mired General Francisco Franco
in their own domestic concerns, they missed this chance to support democracy and backed by Germany,
against fascism. But some young people in the Western democracies were so con- and Republican forces,
backed by the Soviet
cerned that they formed volunteer brigades to fight with the Spanish Republicans. Union. The Spanish Civil
The Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the United States was one. Nevertheless, aided War was seen by many
by the German air force, by 1939 Franco was victorious. as a prelude to renewed
The Western democracies were also slow to respond to Hitler’s challenge to the world war.
balance of power. Hitler was quite forthright about his imperial ambitions. He de-
clared that the Germans needed lebensraum (LEY-buhns-rowm), “living space,” in
which to pursue their racial destiny. Jews had no role in this future, while the Slavic
peoples of eastern Europe and Russia were looked upon as inferior peoples who
would provide manual labor under German management. Hitler declared that the
ethnic Germans scattered across eastern Europe needed to be reunited with the
homeland. While Stalin took this threat seriously, most Western leaders thought
that Hitler could be contained. In fact, there was sympathy in some Western circles
for Hitler’s anti-Semitism and anticommunism.
In 1936 Hitler moved military forces into the Rhineland region on the border of
France, in direct violation of the Versailles treaty. In 1937 the British prime minister
Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) flew to Munich to deal directly with the German
dictator. Chamberlain’s policy of “active appeasement” was based on the premise
that Hitler would be content with minor concessions and that by working with him
Chamberlain could prevent a major European war. The British public, still scarred
by the trauma of the Great War, largely supported Chamberlain’s efforts to avoid
another one.
Hitler then demanded that he be allowed to occupy the Sudetenland, a region
of Czechoslovakia where, he claimed, ethnic Germans were being mistreated (see
Map 28.2). Stalin was now thoroughly alarmed but lacked confidence that his army
could withstand a German invasion, a problem partly of his own creation, since
many Russian military officers had been killed during the Great Purges. Much as they
hated and mistrusted each other, in the summer of 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed
a nonaggression pact that secretly divided Poland between them. Hitler was merely
delaying his planned attack on Russia, while Stalin was playing for time to ready
his country for war.
When Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France imme-
diately declared war on Germany but took no active military steps to confront the
German army. Meanwhile, in the United States public opinion was largely opposed
to another intervention in European politics. Soon, however, peoples across Europe,
Africa, Asia, and the Americas would be embroiled in a total war the likes of which
humanity had never seen.
GUERNICA
T he Spaniard Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was one
of the most influential visual artists of the twen-
tieth century, his work reflecting the unsettled cultural
a continuous struggle against reaction and the death
of art. . . . In the panel on which I am working, which
I shall call Guernica . . . I clearly express my abhorrence
climate of interwar Europe. Picasso’s “cubist” paint- of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an
ings fractured images in surprising ways, often using ocean of pain and death.”
African sculptures as models. Like other European Before April 1937 Guernica was held by the elected
artistic movements of the time—the strange, dream- Republican government, but it was under assault by
like images of surrealism; the emotional violence of insurgent Nationalist troops loyal to Francisco Franco.
abstract expressionism—Picasso’s cubist portraits Anxious to aid the cause of Spanish fascism (and also
characterized an “age of anxiety” during which mod- to try out his new Luftwaffe, or air force), Adolf Hitler
ern artists undermined earlier ideals such as rational- sent aerial squadrons to bombard Guernica. With no
ity, solidity, and conformity. anti-aircraft defenses, the city was devastated by Ger-
Though Picasso usually avoided political themes man bombs. Nearly two thousand civilians were killed
or direct reference to current events, he was so af- or wounded. Picasso was so disturbed by the slaugh-
fected by the German bombing of the town of Guer- ter that he quickly produced this painting and dis-
nica during the Spanish Civil War that he produced played it in the Spanish Pavilion at the World’s Fair in
this painting, writing: “The Spanish struggle is the Paris. Many visitors to the exhibition saw it as a warn-
fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. ing of terrible events about to unfold.
My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than
1 2
(Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain/Art Resource, NY. © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso.
© Artists Rights Society [ARS], NY)
Francisco Franco remained in power in Spain until 1975, two years after
Picasso’s death. The artist refused to allow the painting to travel to his
native country until democracy was restored. By 1981 that condition had
been met, and Guernica was moved to the Prado Museum in Madrid.
838
The horse may represent the Spanish Republic, and the bull Franco.
1 2
The horse is illuminated by a sun containing an

electric light (the only explicit symbol of modern
technology) and by a lantern held by the arm of a
woman entering the scene from above and
beyond.
3
The bull stands over a weeping woman with

a dead child in her arms; children were not
spared from the bombing of Guernica.
Below the horse is a fallen warrior with a broken

sword; just above the sword is a small flower,
perhaps symbolizing renewed life and hope.
Picasso read about Guernica in the newspaper: the horse’s body seems
to be textured to look like newsprint, a feeling reinforced by the black,
white, and grey color palette of the painting.
Question for Analysis

Over seven decades after it was painted, does the symbolism and
visual impact of Picasso’s work still have the power to communicate
the horrors of total war?
839
10˚E 20˚E
International boundaries, Tallinn
1936 N O RWAY
Germany in 1933 ESTON IA
0˚
Remilitarized in 1936 N
Annexed in 1938
Satellite states,
March 1939
SW ED EN L AT V IA
Riga
Conquered by Germany
in September 1939 Annexed by Germany,
D EN MA R K Baltic March 1939
Annexed by Soviet Union S e a Memel
in September 1939 L IT H UA N IA
SOV I ET
Vilnius
North UNION
Sea Danzig EAST Minsk
PRUSSIA
Hamburg WHITE RUSSIA
U N ITE D Elb
K I N G DO M Bremen e Vist
ula
R.
London R. Brest- Pinsk

N ETH ER L AN D S Litovsk
Berlin
Warsaw
RUHR P O L AN D
G ER MAN Y
Dunkirk Cologne
B ELG I U M Od
Rhin
er
R. 50˚N
eR
ETEN LAND
SU D
.
RHINELAND
Prague
Dn
LUXE M B OU RG BOHEMIA ies
SAAR CZEC ter
R.
Nuremberg HOS
. L O VA K I
be R MORAVIA A
Gained by Danu SLOVAKIA RUTHENIA
plebiscite, 1935
Munich To Hungary
Vienna 1938–1939
FRANCE
AU ST R IA
S WI T Z E R L A N D H U N GA RY
R O MAN I A
R.
Ad
Y U GO SL AV IA Da n
ub e
ITA LY
ria
0 100 200 Km.

tic
Se
0 100 200 Mi. B U LGA R I A

a
Interactive Map MAP 28.2

The Growth of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 The major turning point in the expan-
sion of Nazi Germany was the annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in
1938. Joseph Stalin interpreted British diplomatic efforts to avoid renewed world war
as a sign of weakness, and he agreed to a secret treaty to divide Poland between Hitler’s
Germany and his own Soviet Union. The German invasion of Poland from the west in
1939 therefore triggered the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union.
Chapter Review
Download the MP3 audio file of the Chapter Review and listen to it on the go. KEY TERMS
Halide Edib (812)
he decade of the 1930s was a harsh time, made harsher for Halide Edib by exile
T from Turkey, the country she loved and had helped to create. After her return in
1939, Edib continued to write novels, served one term as a member of parliament,
Great Depression
(815)
Franklin Delano
and taught English literature at Istanbul University. It was a relatively peaceful life Roosevelt (817)
after her wartime adventures and later travels. The world context remained tense,
Benito Mussolini
however, as she lived to witness both the violence of the Second World War and, (819)
following that conflict, the bitter international divisions of the Cold War. fascism (819)
Adolf Hitler (820)
How did governments in different parts of the world respond
collectivization (825)
to the crisis of the Great Depression?
Great Purges (825)
Governments responded in a number of ways to the collapse of global markets.
Invasion of
Liberal democracies like the United States, France, and Britain increased government
Manchuria (826)
involvement in the economy, trying to cushion their citizens from the effects of
Mustafa Kemal (827)
the depression while nudging their economies back to life. These attempts, which
Mohandas K. Gandhi
represented a compromise with the existing political, social, and economic order,
(829)
were less effective than the more aggressive policies pursued in places like Germany
Igbo Women’s War
and Japan, where more intensive state economic involvement and rapid military
(833)
growth created millions of jobs. The governments of some recently industrializing
Rape of Nanjing
economies, like Turkey and many Latin American nations, used import-substitution (834)
policies to stimulate modest increases in industrial activity. Meanwhile, the Soviet
Spanish Civil War
Union pursued a much more intensive policy of state industrial planning, result- (837)
ing in rapid economic growth but no benefit for Soviet workers, while Stalin’s pol-
icy of agricultural collectivization led to great hardship in the countryside.
Why did liberal democracy decline in influence as fascism,
communism, and other authoritarian regimes rose in power
and popularity?
In many countries, especially those that lacked strong liberal traditions, the eco-
nomic crisis of the Great Depression weakened the political center as more people
turned to ideologies of the extreme right and left in their search for solutions. Fas-
cism in Italy and Germany, ultranationalism in Japan, and the authoritarianism of
governments like that of Mustafa Kemal in Turkey are examples. China’s conserva-
tive Nationalist government was challenged by communist forces, but in the 1930s
the Soviet Union remained the world’s only communist regime.
841
How successful were anticolonial nationalists in Asia and

Africa during this period?
The authoritarian tradition of colonialism was reinforced when European powers
used harsh measures such as forced labor to spur production among their imperial
subjects in Africa and South and Southeast Asia, adding to the momentum of anti-
colonial nationalism. The most successful resistance was led by the Indian National
Congress, where Western-educated leaders like Gandhi and Nehru organized mil-
lions of Indians in their campaign for self-government. By 1935 they had extracted
an agreement that allowed provincial elections, but the British remained in secure
control at the top. In Africa and Southeast Asia, anticolonial protests were largely
confined to the local level. Here urban-based, Western-educated nationalists were
just beginning to build the political infrastructure that would later allow them to
more effectively connect local resistance to national movements.
What major events led to the outbreak of the Second

World War?
Throughout the 1930s militarism was on the rise. Japanese expansion, first into
Manchuria and then into coastal China, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and Hit-
ler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland all demonstrated that the League of Nations
was incapable of guaranteeing international security. The reluctance of the Western
democracies to face up to the possibility of another total war was demonstrated by
their neutrality in the Spanish Civil War and by Britain’s policy of appeasement
toward Hitler. The American novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell
Tolls based on his experiences fighting with the Republicans in Spain. The title comes
from a seventeenth-century poem by Englishman John Donne: “No man is an
island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. . . .
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore
never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. . . .” The tolling bells
of the 1930s, Hemingway warned, announced a looming catastrophe.
Chapter Review 843
For Further Reference

WEB RESOURCES
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of
World War II. New York: Penguin, 1998. Pronunciation Guide
Crozier, Andrew. The Causes of the Second World War. Malden, Interactive Maps
Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997.
MAP 28.1 The Japanese Invasion of China
Dalton, Dennis. Mahatma Gandhi: Non-Violent Power in Action.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. MAP 28.2 The Growth of Nazi Germany, 1933–1939
Edib, Halide. House with Wisteria: Memoirs of Halide Edib. Primary Sources
Charlottesville, Va.: Leopolis Press, 2003.
Chapter Objectives
Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in
the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York: Oxford ACE Multiple-Choice Quiz
University Press, 1996. Flashcards
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Malden, Mass.:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.
Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, Armenian Genocide
1914–1991. New York: Vintage, 1996. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6045182.stm).
Mango, Andrew. Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Debates over the 1915 Armenian genocide still generate
Modern Turkey. New York: Overlook, 2002. controversy today. The BBC provides an overview and
links to recent news stories on this topic.
Paxton, Robert. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage,
2005. Fascism
(http://departments.kings.edu/history/20c/fascism.
Rothermund, Dietmar. The Global Impact of the Great Depression, html). A brief overview and solid bibliography, with
1929–1939. New York: Routledge, 1996. links to specific figures and topics on the history of
fascism.
Websites
Gandhi
An Age of Anxiety (http://www.gandhiserve.org/information/links/
(http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook40. mk_gandhi/mk_gandhi.html). Provides extensive
html). The Internet Modern History Sourcebook provides links to information on Gandhi’s historical role and on
many primary source documents on the interwar years. contemporary Gandhian movements.

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CHAPTER

Basima Qattan Bezirgan, University of Texas Press, 1977, p. 166)

[India] seemed to me like Allah’s workshop: gods, men and nature

1920 1925 1930 1935 1940

Mussolini controls Italy Soviet collectivization and Great Purges

Halide Edib (hall-ee-DEH eh-DEEP) was the daughter of a progressive Ottoman

The Great Depression, 1929–1939

Fascism, Communism, and Authoritarianism

According to Nazism, any German who did not

Fascism and Youth

Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile:

Elsa Joubert: “Young South Africa”

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Authoritarian Regimes in Asia

The Great Depression strengthened the arguments of nationalists and militarists

Turkey’s New Alphabet The Turkish leader

Kemal’s authoritarian tendencies were not without precedent. Earlier Ottoman

Anticolonial Nationalism in Asia and Africa

in the 1930s. As a result, movements of anticolonial nationalism gathered in strength;

Caste and Affirmative Action in India

Gandhi’s Salt March In 1930 Mohandas K. Gandhi received significant inter-

Colonialism in Africa Nationalist movements were also developing in Africa

The Road to War

0 200 400 Km.

0 200 400 Mi. Shenyang

SHAANXI Yellow Sea

30˚N Chengdu Ya n Shanghai

MAP 28.1 Interactive Map

The horse is illuminated by a sun containing an

The bull stands over a weeping woman with

Below the horse is a fallen warrior with a broken

Question for Analysis

London R. Brest- Pinsk

0 100 200 Km.

0 100 200 Mi. B U LGA R I A

Interactive Map MAP 28.2

How successful were anticolonial nationalists in Asia and

What major events led to the outbreak of the Second

For Further Reference

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