Current time:0:00Total duration:7:37
Empires before World War I
Video transcript
A lot of people,
including myself, have found the
study of World War I to be a little bit
confusing sometimes. And I think the
reason is is the world was very different leading up
to World War I than it is today. And to some degree, the
modern world we live in was shaped to a large
degree by Word War I and then later World War II. And just to get a sense of what
our modern world looks like, and especially what
modern Europe looks like, this is a map of modern Europe. But the interesting
thing about this map is instead of being the
traditional map that you normally see where you just
see the country boundaries, the state boundaries, this
has the state boundaries right here. And these little gray
lines, these show where France ends and, say,
Switzerland or Germany or Italy begins. But overlain on
top of that we see where the languages are spoken. So this is actually
much more focused on, where do people speak French. Where do people speak German? And the thing that you will
notice is, for the most part, throughout most of Europe,
today's boundaries, the modern boundaries
closely, closely match up to where
languages are spoken. There are a few
areas where there is more of a disconnect
with Catalan and Spanish. And actually, that is
leading to some issues. But for the most part,
in modern Europe, the country boundaries and
the linguistic boundaries or the national boundaries
kind of match up. If we rewind to the world of
entering into World War I, things were very different. Some of the boundaries
we recognize. We recognize the United Kingdom. Well, Ireland has
since been carved out. But we recognize it
as not being that different than it is today. Spain is not that different. France is not that different. Italy is not that different. Germany is a good bit different. In fact, if you take Germany,
the German Empire entering into World War I,
or the early 1900s, around 1914, between them
and the Russian Empire, they essentially were swallowing
up a bunch of linguistic groups right over here that now have
their own independent states. The other thing that
you might notice is this huge state called
Austria-Hungary, or often called the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. And people say, well, there's--
I'm familiar with some of these nations that have the word
Austria and Hungary in them, but I'm not-- what is this
Austro-Hungarian Empire? And what's interesting about
it is it really was an empire. It was really trying
to cobble together all of these folks that
spoke all different-- all the different types
of ethnicities. This is kind of a zoom-in of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire leading into World War I. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire
is probably the most important thing to understand
if we're trying to get a sense of how World War
I started, because leading up to World War I, in 1908,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire formally annexed
Bosnia and Herzegovina. And that's another confusing
thing for many of us, that that's actually
one country. It's called Bosnia
and Herzegovina, or I guess for the
Austro-Hungarians that was now one region that they annexed. And what's
interesting about that is if you look at
the linguistic map, you see that this whole
region right over here speaks a very similar--
essentially, they're dialects of Serbian,
Croatian, Bosnian. They're all very linguistically
and ethnically connected, so this whole region
right over here is linguistically and
ethnically connected. And what we'll see is,
is that this desire to connect people with similar
ethnic or linguistic roots-- linguistic backgrounds is what
led to a lot of what happened in World War-- or at
least was the spark that fueled, that people
sometimes say, the powder keg of World War I. The other thing that
was a very different or the other country
or nation or empire that we are not used to
today is the Ottoman Empire. So if we go today,
we see the country of Turkey, which is on
the Anatolian Peninsula. So this is Turkey
right over here. This is modern-day Turkey. But entering into
World War I in 1914, Turkey was essentially part
of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. So this right over here is what
the Ottoman Empire looked like. This right over here is
roughly modern-day Turkey. But the Ottoman Empire
consisted of modern-day Turkey and much of the
modern Middle East. So much of-- especially,
much of the Arab-- especially the Arab world around
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, much of what where
modern-day Israel is, some of Saudi Arabia. And this was really the dying
state of the Ottoman Empire. At its peak, it controlled
much of the Muslim world. It controlled Northern Africa
as well as all the stuff you see here and even
a little bit of Persia and actually a good bit of
the Balkans, southeast Europe, and even Greece at the
peak of its Ottoman Empire. And now I'm talking about going
hundreds and hundreds of years back into the past. So when we enter
into World War II, we don't have a world
where people are, where states are defined
by linguistic boundaries or by ethnic boundaries. To a large degree,
we had these empires that had existed as we
exited out of the 1800s. And these empires were
not just in Europe, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire
or not just in the Middle East, like the Ottoman Empire. Right over here is an empire map
at around that point in time. And you see, probably the
most dominant feature here is the British Empire. That's in this pink color. So British, that's
the United Kingdom. Great Britain would just
be this right over here. You throw in Ireland. You get the United Kingdom. Great Britain was in
control of the Indian, the entire Indian subcontinent. It was essentially although nominally Egypt
was somewhat independent, Great Britain had a huge
amount of influence here. Obviously places like Canada
and Australia and New Zealand were under control of or a
part of the British Empire. What a lot of
people don't realize is a significant amount
of Africa as well. A significant amount of Africa
was also under British control. And what we have running
up into World War I is kind of a race
for empire, an arms race between the major
powers of Europe. In particular, you have Great
Britain, or the United Kingdom, that obviously
had a vast empire. The sun never sets on
the British Empire. And it wasn't ever
setting on this empire that we just saw here. And the German Empire was also
starting to flex its muscle and starting to militarize. And the more that the German
saw that the British were militarizing, the more
that the British-- the more that the Germans would
want to militarize and vice versa, and you just
had this arms race. And they were all trying
to build their empires. So the Germans, they
were present in Africa. You have the French who were
present in much of Africa. And you have to remember
all of this in context. Some of this empire building
was, frankly, just about ego and just about spreading
someone's influence, spreading their power. A lot of it was based on ethnic
beliefs about civilization. I guess these were
rationalization to take control of other people's resources. And a lot of it was
we were in a world where access to resources--
in particular, access to raw materials and especially
oil-- could, to some degree, define whether a power
was a power at all. And so with that, I think
we have a pretty good basis for the state of affairs as
we enter into World War I.