Cypher here. Before we get started,
I want to point out that this is the third episode in a hot potato history series I've been doing with Step Back History.
We're covering the world revolutions. Last time, Tristan covered the Bourgeois Revolution,
which you can click here for that. But now, let's jump half a century ahead to
1848.
After the Napoleonic wars and the wave of revolutions around the Atlantic that began with the USA declaring independence,
the world had experienced a proper world revolution, but it had left the old empires torn to shreds. By the
1840s, new empires were on the rise and the old Spanish and Portuguese
ones were unrecoverably declining. As the world splintered around the rise and decline of European powers,
so did the sense of borders. Where once people thought of the kingdom in which they lived as
something that was defined by whomever
exercised their power over that, a new conception was on the rise due to this fractiousness. People began to
identify themselves as part of a larger culture that defined the borders of their country or language group.
This was fostered by the final breakup of major empires throughout Europe and the beginning of overseas empires.
Furthermore, historians and philosophers had started to argue that their particular region was unique culturally.
This was especially present with the new German conception of "Kultur". After so much of the New World had declared
independence, much of Europe wanted to do the same. This movement would begin the rise of nationalism.
The first revolution took place in Sicily in 1848, where the kingdom of the two Sicilies was considered to not
represent the island. They created a republican form of government
that was quickly suppressed by other monarchies coming to the aid of the original kingdom and defeating the
Constitutional government that had been created on the island. Next came France. Since Napoleon had been ultimately defeated in
1815, France had gone through two monarchies and a couple of coup attempts by Louis Napoleon, a
familial relation to Napoleon Bonaparte. In the beginning of 1848, political and economic tensions
led to the overthrow of the monarchy and the
establishment of the Second French Republic. People tried to steer the government away from a more
conservative approach with riots and barricades in Paris. The republic did make some attempts at
unifying the workers behind an early version of a national labor union, but this was ultimately a fight over defining
what being French meant. They chose to emphasize the revolution of
1789 by electing Louis Napoleon as head of the republic by the end of the year. Four years later, he refused to step down
and became the new French Emperor, calling himself
Napoleon the Third. After France started its revolution, numerous revolutions broke out across all of Europe.
People were trying to secede from empires or unify new ones. The new nationalism drove these revolutions.
People wanted to create a unified Germany,
Italy, Poland and various other states. Europe was in turmoil and there were too many
revolutions in 1848 to even count. For the most part, all of these were suppressed by bigger empires.
France was really the only successful revolution of 1848.
Russia even invaded a bunch of other empires to stop these revolutions: Milan,
Berlin, Venice, Budapest and all of Poland,
Bavaria and the Balkans saw revolutions that were promptly suppressed with brute force.
But the ideas were planted: people continued to campaign for unified nations. Before
1848, the idea of nationhood hadn't taken hold yet.
But afterward, it was perhaps the most powerful and dangerous drivingfForce in global politics.
Nationalism transported elsewhere. Suddenly, countries were fighting to define their national borders and what their ideology
represented. As early as 1848, the Chartists in England reignited democratic reforms, campaigning to redefine citizenship as a
national identity.
Ireland's independence movement
basically began in 1848. Canada created its own home democracy, called the
responsible government, which answered to the British parliament
rather than imperial government.
Brazil and what is now called Colombia had revolutions of their own. In the United States,
1848 saw the annexation of a whole lot of territory from Mexico and the British Empire. For the following decade, they grappled with whether
slavery could expand into the new territory, which ultimately
ended in the Civil War; the bloodiest war in their history. In many ways it was a
dispute over the definition of the USA as a nation. In fact, the word nation wasn't used to referred to the US until
President Lincoln did so in the 1860s.
I've done a couple of episodes on that subject if you're interested. Asian countries
experienced similar nation forming conflicts with the Indian Revolt in
1857, the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion in China and the Meiji restoration in Japan.
Nationalism spread like wildfire in 1848 and it's never gone away.
But it began in 1848. After campaigning for two decades,
Italians and Germans managed to finalize their own nation-states in 1871. Others were not so lucky.
Poland and the Balkans continued to be suppressed, eventually leading to World War One. Next week, Step Back History
will be tackling one of the results of that war, the Communist world revolution, so go check out his channel if you haven't yet,
and I'll link to that episode when it's up. But while you're here, don't forget to like and subscribe. I'll see you next time.
today