For 500 years, Europe has profoundly influenced how the world trades, fights, thinks, and governs itself. Today Europe exerts a global influence primarily through the European Union, which is redefining both political and economic cooperation in this region and others. However, after years of increasing success and expansion, the European Union is now threatened by financial difficulties related to its currency, the euro.

The range of explanations for Europe’s powerful and sustained impact on the world vary widely. One argument, for which there is very little evidence, is that Europeans are somehow a superior breed of humans. Another is that Europe’s many bays, peninsulas, and navigable rivers have promoted commerce to a larger extent there than elsewhere. But, in fact, much of Europe’s success is based on technologies and ideas it borrowed from elsewhere. For example, the concept of the peace treaty, so vital to current European and global stability, was first documented not in Europe but in ancient Egypt. In order to try to understand how Europe gained the leading role around the globe that it continues to have to this day, it is helpful to look at the broad history of this area.

Starting about 10,000 years ago, the practice of agriculture and animal husbandry gradually spread into Europe from the uplands and plains associated with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Southwest Asia and from farther east in Central Asia and beyond. Mining, metalworking, and mathematics also came to Europe from these places and from various parts of Africa. All of these borrowed innovations increased the possibilities for trade and economic development in Europe.

The first European civilizations were ancient Greece (800 to 86 b.c.e.) and Rome (753 b.c.e. to 476 c.e.). Located in southern Europe, both Greece and Rome initially interacted more with the Mediterranean rim, Southwest Asia, and North Africa than with the rest of Europe, which then had only a small and relatively impoverished rural population. Later European traditions of science, art, and literature were heavily based on Greek ideas, which were themselves derived from yet earlier Egyptian and Southwest Asian (Arab and Persian) sources.

The Romans, after first borrowing from Greek culture, also left important legacies in Europe. Many Europeans today speak Romance languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Romanian, all of which are largely derived from Latin, the language of the Roman Empire. European laws that determine how individuals own, buy, and sell land originated in Rome. Europeans then spread these legal customs throughout the world.

The practices that Romans used when colonizing new lands also shaped much of Europe. After a military conquest, the Romans secured control in rural areas by establishing large, plantation-like farms. Politics and trade were centered on new Roman towns built on a grid pattern that facilitated both commercial activity and the military repression of rebellions, as can be seen in Figure 4.11A). These same systems for taking and holding territory were later used when Europeans colonized the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

The influence of Islamic civilization on Europe is often overlooked. After the fall of Rome, while Europe was in a time known as the early medieval period (roughly 450 to 1300 c.e.; sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages), Turkish, Persian, Egyptian, and Arab scholars preserved learning from Rome and Greece in large libraries, such as those in Alexandria, Egypt, and Constantinople (now Istanbul), Turkey. Muslim Arabs originally from North Africa ruled Spain from 711 to 1492 (see Figure 4.11B). From the 1400s through the early 1900s, the Ottoman Empire (based in what is now Turkey) dominated much of southern Central Europe and Greece. The Arabs, Persians, and Turks all brought new technologies, food crops, architectural principles, and textiles to Europe from Arabia, Persia, Anatolia, China, India, and Africa. Arabs also brought Europe its numbering system, mathematics, and significant advances in medicine and engineering, building on ideas they picked up in South Asia.

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Beginning 500 years ago, Europe also began to draw on a host of cultural features from the various colonies that were established in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. For example, many food crops now popular in Europe came mostly from the Americas (potatoes, corn, peppers, tomatoes, beans, and squash; see Table 3.1) and Southwest and Central Asia (wheat, leafy greens, garlic, onions, and apples).

As the Roman Empire declined, a social system known as feudalism evolved during the medieval period (450–1500 c.e.). This system originated from the need to defend rural areas against local bandits and raiders from Scandinavia and the Eurasian interior. The objective of feudalism was to have a sufficient number of heavily armed, professional fighting men, or knights, to defend a much larger group of serfs, who were legally bound to live on and cultivate plots of land for the knights. Over time, some of these knights became a wealthy class of warrior-aristocrats, called the nobility, who controlled certain territories. Some nobles gained power over other knights, amassing vast kingdoms.

The often-lavish lifestyles and elaborate castles of the wealthier nobility were supported by the labors of the serfs (Figure 4.9). Most serfs lived in poverty outside castle walls and, much like slaves, were legally barred from leaving the lands they cultivated for their protectors.

While rural life followed established feudal patterns, new political and economic institutions were developing in Europe’s towns and cities. Here, thick walls provided defense against raiders, and commerce and crafts supplied livelihoods, allowing the people more independence from feudal knights and kings. And Europeans, like people in other world regions, continued to develop distinctive cultures, including preferred working animals and pets (Figure 4.10).

Located along trade routes, people in Europe’s urban areas were exposed to new ideas, technologies, and institutions from Southwest Asia, India, and China. Some institutions, such as banks, insurance companies, and corporations, provided the foundations for Europe’s modern economy. Over time, citizens of Europe’s urban areas established a pace of social and technological change that left the feudal rural areas far behind.

Urban Europe flourished in part because of laws that granted basic rights to urban residents. With adequate knowledge of these laws set forth in legal documents called town charters, people with few resources could protect their rights even if challenged by those who were more wealthy and powerful. Town charters provided a basis for European notions of civil rights, which have proved hugely influential throughout the world. With strong protections for their civil rights, some of Europe’s townsfolk grew into a small middle class whose prosperity moderated the feudal system’s extreme divisions of status and wealth (Figure 4.11C). A related outgrowth of urban Europe was a philosophy known as humanism, which emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual, regardless of wealth or social status.

The liberating influences of European urban life transformed the practice of religion. Since late Roman times, the Catholic Church had dominated not just religion but also politics and daily life throughout much of Europe. In the 1500s, however, a movement known as the Protestant Reformation arose in the urban centers of the North European Plain. Reformers, among them Martin Luther, challenged Catholic practices—such as holding church services in Latin, which only a tiny educated minority understood—that stifled public participation in religious discussions. Protestants also promoted individual responsibility and more open public debate of social issues, altering the perception of the relationship between the individual and society. These ideas spread faster with the invention of the European version of the printing press, which enabled widespread literacy.

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A direct outgrowth of the greater openness and connectivity of urban Europe was the exploration and subsequent colonization of much of the world by Europeans. Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands conquered vast overseas territories and created global trade relationships that transformed Europe economically and culturally and laid the foundation for the modern global economy. The increased commerce and cultural exchange began a period of accelerated globalization that persists today (see the discussion in Chapter 1).

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Portugal took advantage of advances in navigation, shipbuilding, and commerce to set up a trading empire in Asia and a colony in Brazil (Figure 4.11D). Spain soon followed, founding a vast and profitable empire in the Americas and the Philippines. By the seventeenth century, however, England, the Netherlands, and France had seized the initiative from Spain and Portugal. All European powers implemented mercantilism, a strategy for increasing a country’s power and wealth by acquiring colonies and managing all aspects of their production, transport, and trade for the colonizer’s benefit (Figure 4.12).

Mercantilism supported the Industrial Revolution in Europe by supplying cheap resources from around the globe for Europe’s new factories. The colonies also became markets for European manufactured goods. 88. ART EXHIBIT ENCOMPASSES THE WORLD OF PORTUGUESE EXPLORATIONS

By the mid-1700s, wealthy merchants in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, and other western European cities were investing in new industries. Workers from rural areas poured into urban centers in England, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany to work in the manufacturing industries and mining. Wealth and raw materials flowed in from colonial ports in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Some cities, such as Paris and London, were elaborately rebuilt in the 1800s to reflect their roles as centers of global empires.

By 1800, London and Paris, each of which had a million inhabitants, were Europe’s largest cities, a status that eventually brought them to their present standing as world cities (cities of worldwide economic or cultural influence). London is a global center of finance, and Paris is a cultural center that has influence over global consumption patterns, from food to fashion to tourism.

By the nineteenth century, the English, French, and Dutch empires overshadowed those of Spain and Portugal. These empires extended European influence into Asia and Africa. By the twentieth century, European colonial systems had strongly influenced nearly every part of the world. Within Europe, the overseas empires of England, the Netherlands, and eventually France shifted wealth, investment, and general economic development toward western Europe and away from southern Europe and the Mediterranean.

The wealth derived from Europe’s colonialism helped fund two of the most dramatic transformations in a region already characterized by rebirth and innovation: the Industrial and democratic revolutions. Both first took place in urban Europe.

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The Industrial Revolution Europe’s Industrial Revolution—particularly Britain’s ascendancy as the leading industrial power of the nineteenth century—was intimately connected with colonial expansion and sugar production. In the seventeenth century, Britain developed a small but growing trading empire in the Caribbean, North America, and South Asia, which provided it with access to a wide range of raw materials and to markets for British goods.

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Sugar, produced by British colonies in the Caribbean, was an especially important trade crop (see Figure 4.12). Sugar production is a complex process that requires major investments in equipment, and for which a great deal of labor was once needed. Slaves were forcibly brought from Africa to help grow and process sugar. The skilled management and large-scale organization needed for sugar later provided a production model for the Industrial Revolution. The mass production of sugar also generated enormous wealth that helped fund industrialization.

By the late eighteenth century, Britain was introducing mechanization into its industries, first in textile weaving and then in the production of coal and steel. By the nineteenth century, Britain was the world’s greatest economic power, with a huge and growing empire, expanding industrial capabilities, and the world’s most powerful navy. Industrial technologies developed in Britain spread throughout continental Europe (see Figure 4.11F), North America, and elsewhere, thereby transforming millions of lives in the process.

Industrialization led to massive growth in urban areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Extremely low living standards in Europe’s cities created tremendous pressures for change in the political order, ultimately leading to democratization. Most early industrial jobs were dangerous and unhealthy, demanding long hours and offering little pay. Poor people were packed into tiny apartments that they shared with many others. Children were often weakened and ill because of poor nutrition, industrial pollution, inadequate sanitation and health care, and from being overworked as laborers. Water was often contaminated, and most sewage ended up in the streets. Opportunities for advancement through education were restricted to the tiny few who could afford it.

The ideas and information gained by the few poor people who did learn to read gave them the incentive to organize and protest for change. After lengthy and often violent struggles against the rich and politically powerful, Europe’s huge and growing working class won greater political freedoms, such as the right to vote in elections. Continuing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these struggles also gained urban industrial workers the right to form unions that could bargain with employers and the government for higher wages and better working conditions. Eventually, political power, wealth, and opportunity were distributed more evenly throughout society. However, it is important to note that the road to these sorts of changes in Europe was rocky and often violent, just as it is now in many other parts of the world.

In 1789, the French Revolution led to the first major inclusion of common people in the political process in Europe. Angered by the extreme disparities of wealth in French society, and inspired by news of the popular revolution in North America, the poor rebelled against the monarchy and the elite-dominated power structure that still controlled Europe (see Figure 4.11E). As a result, the general populace, especially in urban areas, became involved in governing through democratically elected representatives. The political freedoms created by the French Revolution ultimately proved short-lived, as governments dominated by the elite soon regained control in France. Nevertheless, the French Revolution provided crucial inspiration to later urban democratic political movements in France and many other parts of the world.

The Impact of Communism During the struggles of the nineteenth century, popular discontent took the form of new revolutionary political movements that proposed radical changes to the established economic and political order. The political philosopher and social revolutionary Karl Marx framed the mounting social unrest in Europe’s cities as a struggle between socioeconomic classes. His treatise The Communist Manifesto (1848) helped social reformers across Europe articulate ideas about how wealth could be more equitably distributed. East of Europe in Russia, Marx’s ideas inspired the creation of a revolutionary communist state in 1917, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, often referred to as the USSR or the Soviet Union. Eventually, the Soviet Union extended its ideology and state power throughout Central Europe.

In West, North, and South Europe, communism gained some popularity, but this tended to lead to the formation of Communist political parties that operated peacefully within the context of democratizing political systems. In countries like France, Italy, and Spain, Communist political parties are still influential and often form governing coalitions with other parties.

Popular Democracy and Nationalism During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the development of democracy was also linked to the idea of nationalism, or allegiance to the state. The notion spread that all the people who lived in a certain area formed a nation and that loyalty to that nation should supersede loyalties to family, clan, or individual monarchs. Eventually, the whole map of Europe was reconfigured, and the mosaic of kingdoms gave way to a collection of nation-states. All of these new nations were, at varying paces, transformed into democracies by the political movements arising in Europe’s industrial cities. Nationalism was a major component of both World War I and II, so in the period after the wars—called the post-war era—and as the European Union was constructed, nationalism was recognized as a problem and deemphasized.

Democracy and the Welfare State Channeled through the democratic process, public pressure for improved living standards moved most European governments toward becoming welfare states by the mid-twentieth century. Such governments accept responsibility for the well-being of their people, guaranteeing basic necessities such as education, employment, affordable food, and health care for all citizens. In time, government regulations on wages, hours, safety, and vacations established more harmonious relations between workers and employers. The gap between rich and poor declined, and overall civic peace increased. And although welfare states were funded primarily through taxes, industrial productivity and overall economic activity did not decline but rather increased, as did general prosperity.

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Modern Europe’s welfare states have yielded generally adequate to high levels of well-being for all citizens. However, just how much support the welfare state should provide is still a subject of intense debate—one that is currently being addressed in different ways across Europe.

Despite Europe’s many advances in industry and politics, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the region still lacked a system of collective security that could prevent war among its rival nations. Between 1914 and 1945, two extremely destructive world wars left Europe in ruins, no longer the dominant region of the world. At least 20 million people died in World War I (1914–1918) and 70 million in World War II (1939–1945). During World War II, Germany’s Nazi government killed 15 million civilians during its failed attempt to conquer the Soviet Union. Eleven million civilians died at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust, a massive execution of 6 million Jews and 5 million gentiles (non-Jews), including ethnic Poles and other Slavs, Roma (Gypsies), disabled and mentally ill people, gays, lesbians, transgendered people, and political dissidents. 89. THE WORLD REMEMBERS VICTIMS OF HOLOCAUST

The war divided Europe and much of the world into two battling camps. While a long list of countries participated, the main combatants were the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan; and the Allies—Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France (except during the German occupation of 1940–1944). After World War II ended in 1945 with an Allied victory, finding a lasting peace became a primary goal that eventually led to the formation of the European Union. But first, a number of enduring changes took place. Germany was divided into two parts. West Germany became an independent democracy allied with the rest of western Europe—especially Britain and France—and the United States. Russia controlled East Germany and the rest of Central Europe (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus). After the war, under Russia’s dominant leadership, these war-devastated countries solidified into an ideologically communist alliance known as the Soviet bloc. The line between East and West Germany was part of what was called the Iron Curtain, a long, fortified border zone that separated western Europe from Central Europe (then called Eastern Europe). Yugoslavia did not become part of the Soviet bloc but also kept itself insulated from the West, partly to protect its socialized economy.

The Cold War The division of Europe created a period of conflict, tension, and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to 1991. During this time, once-dominant Europe, and indeed the entire world, became a stage on which the United States and the Soviet Union competed for dominance. The central issue was the competition between capitalism—characterized by privately owned businesses and industrial firms that adjust prices and output to match the demands of the market—and communism (actually a version of socialism), in which the state owns all farms, industry, land, and buildings.

After 1945, in most of what we now call Central Europe, the Soviet Union forcibly implemented a communist-inspired economic model known as central planning, in which a central bureaucracy dictated prices and output, with the stated aim of allocating goods and services equitably across society according to need. This system was successful in alleviating long-standing poverty and illiteracy among the working classes and for women, but it was rife with waste, corruption, and bureaucratic bungling. It ultimately collapsed in the 1990s due to inefficiency, insolvency, high levels of environmental pollution, and public demands for more political freedoms.

The rest of post-war Europe, especially western Europe, developed capitalist economies with financial support from the United States under the Marshall Plan and from the governments of the involved countries. Basic facilities, such as roads, housing, and schools, were rebuilt. Economic reconstruction proceeded rapidly in the decades after World War II and included special attention to the social welfare needs of the general public.

91. MARSHALL PLAN’S 61ST ANNIVERSARY

Decolonization Europe’s decline during the two world wars also led to the loss of its colonial empires. Many European colonies had participated in the wars, with some (India, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and Algeria) suffering extensive casualties, and almost all emerging economically devastated. After World War II, Europe was less able to assert control over its colonies as their demands for independence grew. By the 1960s, most former European colonies had gained independence, often after bloody wars fought against European powers and their local allies.

At the end of World War II, European leaders concluded that the best way to prevent the kinds of hostilities that had led to two world wars would be to forge closer economic ties among the European nation-states. The first step toward developing an economic union in Europe began in 1951 with the creation of a common market for coal and steel (two resources essential for war industries) that, in the rebuilding of Europe, enabled the monitoring of Germany’s industrial rehabilitation. The next major step took place in 1958, when Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and West Germany formed the European Economic Community (EEC). The members of the EEC agreed to eliminate certain tariffs against one another and to promote mutual trade and cooperation. Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom joined in 1973; Greece, Spain, and Portugal in the 1980s; and Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995, bringing the total number of member countries to 15. In 1992, the EEC became the European Union, with the intent to work toward a higher level of economic, social, and political integration that would make possible the free flow of goods and people across national borders.

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