We've already talked about the rise of modern capitalism. Now let's talk about the rise of modern nation states. These states are just vastly more capable than states were in the traditional world. They have communications capabilities to be able to give orders and find out what's going on and respond to it. They have organizational capabilities that were undreamt of. People can even type out instructions on typewriters. Just think about the capabilities of states in crude ways, like armies and navies. Think just about the capabilities you see around you in government, in local government: garbage disposal, police, education. Education, really important. But not just capabilities, but think about the demands that people are making from states. Demands like, I want roads. I want a railroad to come to my town. I want that railroad to be well maintained. I want it to be safe. I want my mail delivered. I want it delivered on time. There's cities: food is being sold in grocery stores. I want my food to be safe. Workers are in factories. What happens to a worker who gets hurt? Demands on governments to provide much larger networks of insurance, social insurance. The Germans pioneer that. So, there're many more demands that are being placed on states. More capabilities that they have. So regardless of ideology, states are just getting bigger and more powerful, employing lots more people. They're becoming emblems of the entire society, what I call here: the state in uniform, especially in military power. Here's an illustration, it's a fairly revealing popular illustration. These are French soldiers showing off. Look at the reviewing stand there in the upper left hand corner. You see the politicians in their top hats. You see the gold braid of the general. But now let's look at the people. Their tunics are unbuttoned, what they're showing off is physical fitness. The manhood, the masculinity of all these young men who've been recruited together in uniform, becoming together more physically fit. And look at all the tricolors everywhere. Here, and the pennants, the French flag, all about. France, itself, is become physically vital. The whole nation is having a workout. But we're not just talking about, now, the state in uniform, the visible symbolism of military power. Also study the way the state becomes more important in almost every aspect of ordinary commercial life. For instance, imagine the world of trade. We've already talked about trade barriers. Here's a map of world trade during this period of the Great Acceleration. The purple arrows show manufacturing goods going out, the blue arrows show raw materials coming in. The arrows crisscross the world, but what I wanted to really focus in on is the way the state has to build the infrastructure for all of this. I mean, for instance, we have an infrastructure today of highways. You're glad to have them, highways and roads. If you want to use your car to go here and there, you need an infrastructure of gas stations every oh, 2, 3, 400 miles. If your country is running a network of steam ships, running all over the world, you need a network of places where they can refuel, too: coaling stations. So, for instance, these pink squares: a steam ship coming from Britain would stop at a coaling station here. Another one here at Alexandria. Then a key station here at Aden. And then it could go to Colombo at Ceylon before either going someplace in India or making its way through the Straits of Malacca. Or it could stop at Singapore. Or, if you are going around the Cape of Good Hope, you could stop here in West Africa or at Freetown in Sierra Leone. St. Helena. Capetown, a very frequent stop. Mauritius, the Seychelles, and so on, maybe to Singapore. Maintaining that network of coaling stations under British control, or under the control of some country that's willing to let you use this, whoever has that infrastructure and is willing to let you use it controls the ability to use the world's highways. The infrastructure around the world, ports, mines, steamships, railways, it's being built mainly by foreign investors, foreign investors buying, say, the bonds of a railway company in Argentina that allows a railroad to be built to Buenos Aires so that beef from the Argentine Pampas can be brought to Buenos Aires, where it will be shipped back to the hungry mouths of Britain or the rest of Europe. British are financing that. You see, for example in Latin America, the British are the dominant source of foreign investment, with the French and the United States close behind. In North America, the British were key players. In Europe, the French are the dominant foreign investors. In Asia, you see Britain again. In Africa, Britain, France, Germany. France is important in Asia, though, and Germany is a significant investor there too. But pause and think a moment about the role of the state in all of this. If you're a foreigner who's putting tens of millions of dollars behind building infrastructure and buying these bonds, you really care about whether those bonds are going to be repaid. You really care about the political relationship with the state, that in a way is standing behind those bonds. A lot of the crises of this period arise when states threaten to default on their loans. All these states want to become more developed; they want to have the railroads that can get their cattle to market, to make the money, to build up their own country. They borrow and borrow. And so a lot of the issues are about how states go about collecting from debtors who are having trouble paying their debts. The United States, in fact, is worried that European governments are threatening to invade places like Venezuela when Venezuela has trouble paying its debts. So, it asserts a version of the Monroe Doctrine to claim that Europeans aren't going to be allowed to invade anywhere around here to collect debts. Therefore, the Americans have to get involved in making sure those governments pay their debts on time. And you can see, then, how that gave the Americans a reason to get involved in the domestic politics of those countries, in order to keep the Europeans from extending the imperialist frenzy into the Caribbean and South America. Another thing about this map is interesting is you see how telegraph lines are crisscrossing the world, giving information to investors, transferring funds. And another way in which the state is key is the state is creating the shipping routes, with a Suez Canal here, or a Panama Canal here at the beginning of the 1900s, the great engineering marvel of its age. So we've talked about the essential role that the state has in trade and foreign exchange, creating standardized money, creating the conditions surrounding the foreign investment that is so important. But the state is also the key partner in creating the legal system to sustain the invention of these new corporations and laws that will govern them. And the state also determines the terms in which unions can be created, to try to offset corporate power. But the state is also now involved in providing all of these national services: public education, police, social insurance. Think, too, then about the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, who are now working for the state and providing these services. So, if you've got this point that the state is now much, much more important, larger, more central in people's lives, the question comes up: okay, well, if the state is so important, if it's so much a part of my ordinary life, well what do I feel about that state? What or whom does that state really represent? For example, does the state represent my aspirations, my beliefs? Does it even speak my language? Let's take a look for instance at the Austro-Hungarian Empire, circa 1900. This is an ethnic map of Austria-Hungary. You can look and say, well, where do people speak German in Austria-Hungary? Well, they speak a lot of German around here, but also up around here. They speak Italian over here; they speak Hungarian here, but also Hungarian over here. This is all an area that speaks Romanian. These people speak Ruthenian; these speak Czech; these speak Polish and so on. If you ask, who does the Austria-Hungarian state represent? It's not really a single nation state. It's a monarchy reconciling the needs of a number of different national communities. This sort of story is found all over the world. The nation states don't perfectly align with ethnic and linguistic communities. If the state is so important, people also ask: Who does it stand for? What does it stand for? There are culture wars. I've talked about these before. Cultural wars between people who have a heroic image of the state, and what it stands for, a warrior ideal perhaps. And then contrast that with the materialism of the bourgeoisie, or what the American essayist H.L. Mencken referred to as the �booboisie,� which gave you some sense of what Mencken thought of them. Beliefs, ideals, remember in an earlier presentation when we talked about the state in the 1840s and 1850s representing youth, a sense of destiny; the nation represented some sort of mission as to where the nation was going to go. Well, what is that place? The nation's going to achieve what? The spread of civilization? What kind of civilization? If the state stands for sense of community, does that community speak your language? Does it teach your language in the schools, does it teach your religion? Does it teach any religion? What is it that makes up a common community? These are the kinds of arguments that people have about the state, as it becomes more and more central to their lives. In other words, politics matters. One of the difficult things here in the early 21st century, depending on where you live, is to really grasp just how intensely people felt about political issues. Ordinary people were gripped by events in the daily newspapers, attending political rallies in the thousands. Why? It wasn't just because of some abstract interest in political philosophy. It's because politics really mattered in their daily lives. It mattered in deciding can I join a union? Can I get paid a living wage? What language will my children be taught in the schools? Where can I live? Will I be secure in my home? The state itself mattered so much in these different ways. Some historians even use words like the rise of statishness: a habit of thought in which you think about what a state can do, remolding society, changing the way a city looks, marking out national parks. Another scholar, James Scott, has a wonderful book, called Seeing Like a State. This phrase, seeing like a state, is the title of a book by a Professor named James Scott, he teaches at Yale. Scott's not a political scientist. His original [LAUGH] specialty was forestry. And he noticed, as someone who was studying forests, that here these governments were going around and kind of mapping out forests, in ways that didn't seem to make much sense to someone who knew much about the land and agriculture, and he got more and more interested in the way states kind of saw these things as abstract objects. Here's a [LAUGH] good illustration of what I mean by that. Some of you may recognize this. This is from a computer game called SimCity. This is actually a version of SimCity from about 10 years ago. But this is the way a state planner might see a city. You see, it's all very distant, all very abstract, you've got kind of everything laid out. You're balancing different resources. You've got your stadium over here. Another wonderful thing I like about this game, you see over here on the left, these are all the inputs that the planner would put in: let me add more money here or more of this or more of that to kind of redesign my city. That's seeing like a state. Now that is the modern state. No one would have thought of a state this way. No one would have thought of planning in this way, before say, 1860, 1870. So politics matters because the state matters a lot. The state is shifting things around. The state is managing society. Therefore, the character of the state matters a lot. Pro-business? Pro-worker? Is it giving you the services you want? Is it providing education? But now just to make this more interesting, notice too, that you're really interested in which state we're talking about. Are we talking here about my local state, which I like very much but is being interfered with by the national state that's overriding my local culture? So national versus local tensions become more and more important, because the local state is often now at odds with the national state. Or, it can be the tension between a home government and an imperial government, that's managing you from far away. Another thing that makes politics so important is that these modern nation states are inherently revolutionary; all of them, even the ones that are opposed to revolution. I'll explain why next time.
