The Twentieth Century:

1900-1929
Imperial rivalry
• Britain’s previously undisputed hegemony is
challenged in the last decades of the 19th
century. Anxieties are perceptible in the
culture.
• The British Empire is larger than ever, but
Britain is overtaken as an industrial power by
Germany and the USA by the end of the 19th
century.
• The rise of Germany after its unification in 1871
led by Bismarck alters European balance of
power, challenging British hegemony.
• European powers compete to secure colonies,
both for their own profit and to prevent their
rivals’ expansión.
The road to war
• European countries are entangled in a web of
alliances: the Triple Entente (Britain, France and
Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Italy).
• Rise of nationalism and militarism.
• Armament race, especially between Britain and
Germany.
• Socialist parties are unable to stop the war or
directly support European governments’
bellicism.
• The war is triggered by the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb in
Sarajevo in 1914.
The Great War
(1914-1918)
• The war brought the full power of
European industry to the battlefield:
machine guns, heavy artillery,
automobile, aviation, chemical weapons,
the tank. The result was a previously
unknown number of casualties. An
estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in
combat, plus another 23 million
wounded, while 5 million civilians died as
a result of military action, hunger, and
disease. Millions more died in genocides
within the Ottoman Empire and in the
1918 influenza pandemic.
• 750,000 British soldiers died in the war.
• It was a global war, fought in Europe,
Africa, the Middle East and even Asia.
The War to End All Wars
The horror of trench warfare.
After a quick initial German advance, the
Western frontline was stabilized in
northern France.
More tan one million soldiers were killed
or wounded in the Battle of the Somme
(1916). 20,000 British soldiers were
killed just on the first day. At the end of
the 5 month battle, British and French
forces had advanced 10 km into
German-occupied territory.

Botton right: Paths of Glory, by Stanley

Kubrick (1957)
End of the war
• The British navy managed to enforce a
blockade of Continental Europe. The
German navy was disabled in the Battle of
Jutland (1916). However, Germany’s
unrestrained submarine warfare threatened
British supplies.
• After the triumph of the Revolution, the
Bolsheviks take Russia out of the war. This
brings relief to Germany’s war effort.
• However, submarine attacks to American
merchant ships brought the United States
into the war in 1917, tilting the balance in
favour of the allies.
• Armistice is signed on 11 November 1918.
Today, 9/11 is celebrated in the UK as
Remembrance Day.
Aftermath of WWI
• Germany is punished by Britain and France at the
Versailles Conference (1919). War reparations
destroy Germany’s economy (e.g. 1923
hyperinflation) and lay the conditions for the rise
of revenge-seeking nationalism in the 1930s.
• The United States becomes the world’s
hegemonic power. President Woodrow Wilson
leads the creation of the League of Nations in
1920.
Aftermath of WWI #2
From the Empire to the Commonwealth:
The British dominions and colonies make a significant
contribution to the war effort. This inevitably entails
advance in the self-government of the dominions
(Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa). The
Balfour Declaration (1926 Imperial Conference)
declares the United Kingdom and the Dominions to be:
“autonomous Communities within the British Empire,
equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in
any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though
united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and
freely associated as members of the British
Commonwealth of Nations”
The conclusions of the 1926 Conference were
incorporated into the 1931 Statute of Westminster,
giving birth to the British Commonwealth of Nations
Aftermath of WWI #3
• Women had been repeatedly denied the right to
vote in the years previous to the war (Sufragette
campaigns). During the war, they took the place of
the men fighting the war, replacing them in the
workforce. Women over 30 obtained the right to
vote in 1918.
• During the war, promises were made as to the
improvement of working class life. They were not
fulfilled. There were wage cuts for miners and
industrial workers. This led to the 1926 General
Strike, which lasted nine days. The protest points
to the deterioration of Britain’s older mining and
industrial areas, which will only grow more acute.
The Roaring Twenties

• The 1920s are also the age of jazz, cinema,

flappers, hedonism and artistic
experimentation.

• During the decade, a giant bubble of

speculation drove the American and
British economies until the crash of
Autumn 1929. Prices in the London Stock
Exchange and Wall Street collapsed. Panic
ensued. It was the beginning of the Great
Depression. Millions of people lost their
jobs.
Post-war literature

The Advent of Modernism.

• Modernists reflect the lost of a common world, of common views of what
is significant in human life. ‘Reality’ is not something shared that can be
taken for granted. Experience can’t be fully shared either. Subjectivity is all
we have. Society seems a constellation of isolated consciousness.
• Influence of new developments in psychology (Freud and the notion of the
unconscious) and philosophy (new concepts of time by William James and
Henry Bergson).
• Formal experimentation. Oblique language and obscurity. New techniques:
non-chronological narrative, stream of consciousness.
 Modernist poetry: W.B. Yeats
and T.S. Eliot
• William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). Yeats started his long literary
career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist
poet. He regrets the post-war modern world which is now in
disorder and chaos and seeks refuge in the past. Yeats as a modern
poet is anti-rationalist in his attitude, which is expressed through
his passion for occultism and mysticism. Suggested poems: The
Second Coming, Sailing for Byzantium, The Tower, Easter 1916, A
Man Young and Old.
• T.S.Eliot (1888-1965). The central figure of Modernist poetry in
English. Suggested reading: The Wasteland (1922) This long poem
both diagnoses the chaos of modernity and provides an example of
how art can order this experience. It expresses a widespread
feeling of exhaustion and cultural crisis in the aftermath of the First
World War.
Modernist Fiction
• James Joyce (1882-1841). Suggested
reading: Dubliners (1914), Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses
(1922).
• Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Suggested
reading: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1831). Non
Fiction: A Room of her Own (1929).
• E.M. Forster (1879-1970): Howard’s End
(1910), A Passage to India (1924).
• D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Sons and
Lovers (1913), Lady Chatterley’s Lover
(1928).