Chapter+24+(An+Age+of+Modernity,+Anxiety,+and+Imperialism,+1894-1914)

//PS: As always, this is taken STRAIGHT from the Chapter 24, blah blah blah...//

The period from 1894 to 1914 saw Europe expand its horizons, both in the rise of the daring, new intellectual and cultural developments at home and in the creation of new empires abroad. At home scientists worked on theories that in time relegated the old Newtonian world to the past and usher in a much more insecure and dangerous world. Sigmund Freud concluded that man operates at the direction of unconscious motivations. The teachings of Charles Darwin were applied to society and used to justify racism and imperialism by saying that in the struggle of races and nations the fittest survive and make the world a better place. Christianity did constant battle with forces that threatened it. Impressionism and Abstractism appeared in literature, the arts, and music. The old empires in America and India had long either been lost of integrated into the European system when the Western nations began a second round of modern empire building toward the end of the nineteenth century. In a quarter century almost all of Asian nations remained independent, China and Japan were also deeply affected and changed by Western imperialism. China was opened to trade and to Western concessions, leading to a violent native rebellion and to a revolution that toppled the Manchu Dynasty and established a Chinese republic. Japan opened up to the modern world to the extent that it adopted Western military, educational, governmental, and financial ways, even to the extent of taking colonies of its own in China and Korea. Amid this ferment and expansionism the clouds of war gathered. The great nations of Europe, competing with and fearing each other, formed defensive alliances with friends against foes and stockpiled weapons for a conflict that seemed to be more inevitable by the certainty of combatants that it could not be avoided.