It would be brilliantly put into practice by the British Empire in India as by the French in Africa and Indochina to install colonial rule on all continents; gunboat and expeditionary corps diplomacy to impose territorial gains that the victim nations in a situation of technological inferiority could hardly afford to refuse.
To fuel its appetite for industrial consumption the British Empire would expropriate in its colonies the access to raw materials; salt, cotton and tea plantations; instill a culture of opium consumption amongst the suppressed masses of China and Asia, export the negroid population from its colonies to America in profitable slave trade along with the French; all the while building its cotton ginning industries and boat yards, its coal mines and steel factories at home, in its central and northern industrial red brick regions of plebeian concentration. While its upper classes played on the fields of Eton and ruled as administrators, like the Romans of old, as perpetrators of the eternal Victorian Raj. The legacy of the East India Company was such a boon, private armies and insider trading the rage of the Corsairs who built Rule Britannia.
In the meantime, all through the nineteenth century, the conventional imperial order of brinkmanship, would allow the Industrial Revolution to create material wealth of unknown dimensions, fueled on the new miracle of coal and steel, the railways and the kerosene lamp. People benefitted in all walks of life and the romantic novel was born to distract the nation with its emphasis on the individual's personal romance in society, a fact that appealed enormously to the newly formed bourgeoisie or middle class, direct social excroissance of the mass production methods of the industrial age and of increasing world commerce and galloping demographics.
During this age of material and scientific innovation will be born in the nascent middle class a desire for intellectual emancipation fed on the romanticism and novelista trend amongst literary luminaries who will influence the culture of that age; with their realistic and romantic description of the individual's condition when faced with collective trends of industrial mechanisation of society or of continental war. Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoi and Dostoievski along with Wagner and Nietzsche best incarnate this trend in literature and general culture. The debate will rage on in intellectual circles of that age, all caught up in organising nation-state between the conflicting values of ancient royalism and modern democracy. The Enlightenment will continue to inspire Man's desires.
Concomitant to this huge transformation of Western society on a scale never witnessed in History, will be born a realization that it gives inordinate wealth and power to a new breed of aristocracy : the Capitalist class, and that this has as inevitable consequence the pauperization of the rest of society; the proletariat working class. Such a brutal change of social structure will have huge consequences on the material standards of living. The notion of class struggle will be deeply ingrained in the European population. Its new and rabid proponent the German philosopher Karl Marx. His treatise 'Das Capital', as his previous vitriolic diatribe against the ruling class expressed in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, will mark the ages as the reference book of incessant class struggle.
When Napoleon III resurrected the Empire in France, it hurtled straight into conflict with Imperial Germany, now the powerhouse of industrial growth in Europe but with no colonial presence to feed its industries with cheap raw materials. The French debacle at Sedan faced with superior firepower thanks to the German Krupp canons, would truncate France of Alsace and Lorraine regions and lead to prolonged rancour between two neighbours; now at loggerheads as in Medieval times, fighting over Lotharingian legacy.
France's pivotal position in Europe as in Africa would lead to its eviction from Fachoda and Eastern Africa as a result of its rivalry on this continent with Kitchener's Sudan. The Nile valley would stay British axis and France's strategy to build a cross continent trunk line from Dakar to Djibouti would never materialise. Whereas Kitchener's vision to link Cape town to Cairo would nearly succeed to bulwark British Raj in Africa, of which the prize possessions are Kenya and Rhodesia.
Torn between its rivalry with Bismarck's Germany occupying its eastern flank and British intransigence in Africa, France would chose its alliance with Britain during the "entente cordiale". This would lead to bloody confrontation in the Balkans between the Franco-British-Serbian alliance opposed to Pan-German vision supporting the decaying mosaic of Austro-Hungarian Empire; where the tinder of conflict will be lit at Sarajevo in 1914.
A five year war fought over French soil will ruin all three main European economies, and its allies. France, Germany, Britain, Austria, Russia, and Ottoman Turkey will all be diminished, bled white by this brutal war which will kill twenty million inhabitants in all if we include the subsequent influenza epidemic ravaging an enfeebled populace. Its will install Germany into deep financial ruin, Turkey into imperial collapse and Russia into a social revolution which will plunge its proletarian peasantry into one party Bolshevik dictatorship; killing its ability to do anything except feed a huge war machine run on docile and under nourished peasant slave labour.
But the main victors of this collapse of European continent will be a young, burgeoning, industrialised United States of America. A nation the size of its empty continent blessed with nature's gifts in inordinate abundance on or under its soil. Now become a powerful modern state from coast to coast thanks in part to the Louisiana purchase from Napoleonic France and the subsequent conquest of the West by its pioneers. A nation whose identity had been forged in the context of a bloody Civil War opposing the agrarian and slave driven economy of South against the industrial, modernist, capitalist might of North. The North won and Lincoln's legacy would spread country wide as the American cavalry destroyed the indigenous culture of the Amerindian population, decimating them in concentration type reservation enclaves. A dark page of American history tainted its birth as Nation, a racialist trait that would persist as the black population continued to suffer from racial segregation in spite of the legacy of the Civil War. It reflected the European hypocrisy of the Colonial age, where the unscrupulous treatment of "under-developed" natives was idealised as colonial white man's burden during the Victorian age. A flagrant contradiction with the spirit of the Enlightenment, as embodied in the written articles of the Constitutions of the USA and of France, both built on the ideal of human rights; as iconised by the Statue of Liberty.
Its support of the Allies in 1917 will allow it rapidly to insert itself into world trade, benefitting greatly from the weakening of European monetary systems and European industrial production; whereas its recently created US dollar, destined to become world reserve currency, and its motor and cinema industries, will triumph all over the world. Its transport industry all based on cheap oil produced locally and the technological revolutions of country wide electrification based on coal, as the media miracle of radio and telephone networking, will push its unparalleled model into world wide pre-eminence. The American age will have arrived and a young country will celebrate its supremacy during the Jazz and Charleston Age of the roaring twenties.
Its first defeat will be that of irrational capitalistic exuberance sending its overpriced asset risk stocks plunging on Wall Street, pushing the world into deep depression and subsequently into World War a second time. With the advent of totalitarian regimes in a politically regressive and desperate Europe, decimated by its economic decline, the nations of Europe will have no other option but to go to war a second time destroying what little had been built by an exhausted and thinned out lost generation during the interim interwar years.
The age of modern art will be an expression of the individual's excessive, even narcissistic, desire to exist in the face of modern militarised massacre. The age of female emancipation and sexual affirmation will accompany Freud's astonishing discoveries in the domain of psychoanalysis.
But its most iconic expression will remain the flowering of Impressionist Art fifty years earlier. It will take nascent modern society by storm at the end of the dying century, as it symbolises the need for new horizons in a world dominated by the Taylorist mantra of --you can drive any color of car you like provided it is black-- of Henry Ford's motor car production line.
Individual subjectivity will be reborn in a society obsessed by collective industrially inspired norms.
The mechanical age will also father the extreme individualism of modern man. Existentialism will tinge his deception with the Ode to deterministic progress, now become outdated legacy of Enlightenment in the nascent twentieth century, in the face of Man's hubristic folly as manifested by his increasing impulsion to indulge in self destruction, all mobilised in robot formatted and totalitarian constructs to fight the enemy, mirror image of his own intolerant and dogmatic mindset.
This second Armageddon of a brutality never seen before will leave as indelible legacy the extermination camps of the Shoah and the nuclear annihilation of militarist Japan; ally to Fascist axis powers and destroyed by US firepower at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world will have entered into the nuclear age in the most sinister of fashions.
The age of Pax Americana will begin in this devastating situation after fifty million people, mostly civilians, will have lost their lives over six years; a truly Eurasian Armageddon, with world consequences. The age of global governance will emerge.
The European continent will have lost its strategic independence as a consequence of this thirty year nation-state conflict. A lesson to be meditated for the ages to come.
The myth of Sisyphus will resurface, as that of Pandora's box; respectively by the use of serf labour in the industrial world, all crammed into urban ghettos, and in the form of the nuclear conundrum.
Napoléon Ier - Wikipédia
Louisiana Purchase - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Congress of Vienna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victorian era - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Otto von Bismarck - Wikipédia
Causes of World War I - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Causes of World War II - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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