Striving forIndependence:Africa, India, and LatinAmerica, 1900–1949

CHAPTER OUTLINESub-Saharan Africa, 1900–1945

The Indian Independence Movement, 1905–1947

The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940

Argentina and Brazil, 1900–1949

DIVERSITY AND DOMINANCE: A Vietnamese Nationalist Denounces French Colonialism

ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGY: Gandhi and Technology

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Emiliano Zapata˚, leader of a peasant rebellion inthe Mexican Revolution, liked to be photographed

on horseback, carrying a sword and a rifle and drapedwith bandoliers of bullets. Mahatma Gandhi˚, wholed the independence movement in India, preferredto be seen sitting at a spinning wheel, dressed in adhoti˚, the simple loincloth worn by Indian farmers.The images they liked to project and the methodsthey used could not have been more opposed. Yettheir goals were similar: each wanted social justiceand a better life for the poor in a country free of for-eign domination.

The previous two chapters focused on a worldconvulsed by war and revolution. The world wars in-volved Europe, East Asia, the Middle East, and theUnited States, and they sparked violent revolutions inRussia and China. They accelerated the developmentof aviation, electronics, nuclear power, and other tech-nologies. Although these momentous events dominatethe history of the first half of the twentieth century,parts of the world that were little touched by war alsounderwent profound changes in this period, partlyfor internal reasons and partly because of the warfareand revolution in other parts of the world.

In this chapter we examine the changes that tookplace in sub-Saharan Africa, in India, and in three ma-jor countries of Latin America—Mexico, Brazil, andArgentina. These three regions represent three verydistinct cultures, yet they had much in common.Africa and India were colonies of Europe, both politi-cally and economically. Though politically indepen-dent the Latin American republics were dependent onEurope and the United States for the sale of raw ma-terials and commodities and for imports of manu-factured goods, technology, and capital. In all threeregions independence movements tried to wrest con-trol from distant foreigners and improve the livelihoodof their peoples. Their success was partial at best.

As you read this chapter, ask yourself the follow-ing questions:

● How did wars and revolutions in Europe and EastAsia affect the countries of the Southern Hemi-sphere?

● Why did educated Indians and Africans want inde-pendence?

● What could Latin Americans do to achieve socialjustice and economic development? Were these twogoals compatible?

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA,1900–1945

Of all the continents, Africa was the last to come un-der European rule (see Chapter 27). The first half of

the twentieth century, the time when nationalist move-ments threatened European rule in Asia (see Diversityand Dominance: A Vietnamese Nationalist DenouncesFrench Colonialism), was Africa’s period of classic colo-nialism. After World War I Britain, France, Belgium, andSouth Africa divided Germany’s African colonies amongthemselves. In the 1930s Italy invaded Ethiopia. Thecolonial empires reached their peak shortly before WorldWar II.

Outside of Algeria, Kenya, andSouth Africa, few Europeanslived in Africa. In 1930 Nigeria,with a population of 20 mil-lion, was ruled by 386 British

officials and by 8,000 policemen and military, of whom150 were European. Yet even such a small presence stim-ulated deep social and economic changes.

Since the turn of the century the colonial powershad built railroads from coastal cities to mines and plan-tations in the interior, in order to provide raw materialsto the industrial world. The economic boom of the inter-war years benefited few Africans. Colonial governmentstook lands that Africans owned communally and sold orleased them to European companies or, in eastern andsouthern Africa, to white settlers. Large European com-panies dominated wholesale commerce, while immi-grants from various countries—Indians in East Africa,Greeks and Syrians in West Africa—handled much of theretail trade. Airplanes and automobiles were even morealien to the experience of Africans than railroads hadbeen to an earlier generation.

Colonial Africa:Economic andSocial Changes

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Where land was divided into small farms, someAfricans benefited from the boom. Farmers in the GoldCoast (now Ghana˚) profited from the high price of co-coa, as did palm-oil producers in Nigeria and coffeegrowers in East Africa. In most of Africa women played amajor role in the retail trades, selling pots and pans,cloth, food, and other items in the markets. Many main-tained their economic independence and kept theirhousehold finances separate from those of their hus-bands, following a custom that predated the colonialperiod.

For many Africans economic development meantworking in European-owned mines and plantations, of-ten under compulsion. Colonial governments were ea-ger to develop the resources of the territories under theircontrol but could not afford to pay high enough wages toattract workers. Instead, they used their police powers to

force Africans to work under harsh conditions for little orno pay. In the 1920s, when the government of FrenchEquatorial Africa decided to build a railroad from Braz-zaville to the Atlantic coast, a distance of 312 miles (502kilometers), it drafted 127,000 men to carve a roadbedacross mountains and through rain forests. For lack offood, clothing, and medical care, 20,000 of them died, anaverage of 64 deaths per mile of track.

Europeans prided themselves on bringing modernhealth care to Africa; yet before the 1930s there was too lit-tle of it to help the majority of Africans, and other aspectsof colonialism actually worsened public health. Migrantsto cities, mines, and plantations and soldiers moving frompost to post spread syphilis, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, andmalaria. Sleeping sickness and smallpox epidemics ragedthroughout Central Africa. In recruiting men to work,colonial governments depleted rural areas of farmersneeded to plant and harvest crops. Forced requisitions offood to feed the workers left the remaining populations

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C H R O N O L O G YAfrica India Latin America

1900s Railroads connect ports tothe interior

1909 African National Congressfounded

1920s J. E. Casely Hayfordorganizes political movement inBritish West Africa

1939–1945 A million Africansserve in World War II

1905 Viceroy Curzon splitsBengal; mass demonstrations

1906 Muslims found All-IndiaMuslim League

1911 British transfer capital fromCalcutta to Delhi

1919 Amritsar Massacre

1929 Gandhi leads March to theSea

1930s Gandhi calls forindependence; he is repeatedlyarrested

1939 British bring India intoWorld War II

1940 Muhammad Ali Jinnahdemands a separate nation forMuslims

1947 Partition and independenceof India and Pakistan

1876–1910 Porfirio Díaz,dictator of Mexico

1911–1919 Mexican Revolution;Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villaagainst the Constitutionalists

1917 New constitutionproclaimed in Mexico

1928 Plutarco Elías Calles founds Mexico’s NationalRevolutionary Party

1930–1945 Getulio Vargas,dictator of Brazil

1934–1940 Lázaro Cárdenas,president of Mexico

1938 Cárdenas nationalizesMexican oil industry; Vargasproclaims Estado Novo in Brazil

1943 Juan Perón leads militarycoup in Argentina

1946 Perón elected president ofArgentina

1900

1920

1940

Ghana (GAH-nuh)

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T he regions described in this chapter were not the onlyones whose inhabitants chafed at the dominance of the

great powers and sought more control over their own na-tional destinies. Movements for independence were a world-wide phenomenon. The tactics that different peoples used toachieve their goals differed widely. Among countries thatwere formal colonies, the case of India is unique in that itsnationalist movement was led by Mahatma Gandhi, a manwho subordinated the goal of national independence to hiscommitment to nonviolent passive resistance. In Mexico, asin China, Russia, and other parts of the world, revolutionarymovements were often associated with violent uprisings.French Indochina is a case in point.

Indochina, comprising the countries we now call Vietnam,Kampuchea, and Laos, was conquered piecemeal by theFrench from 1862 to 1895, but only after overcoming fierceresistance. Thereafter, France modernized the cities and irri-gation systems and transformed the country into a leadingproducer of tea, rice, and natural rubber. This meant trans-ferring large numbers of landless peasants to new planta-tions and destroying the traditional social structure. Togovern Indochina, the French brought in more soldiers andcivil administrators than the British had in all of India, a farlarger colony. Even though they succeeded in crushing theresistance of the peasants and the old Confucian elites, theFrench were educating a new elite in the French language.These newly educated youths, inspired by French ideas ofliberty and nationhood and by the examples of the Guomin-dang and the Communist Party in neighboring China, formedthe core of two new revolutionary movements.

One movement was the Vietnamese Revolutionary YouthLeague founded by Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969) in 1925, whichlater became the Indochinese Communist Party. The otherwas the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang, or Vietnamese National-ist Party, modeled after Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang, foundedin 1927 by a schoolteacher named Nguyen Thai Hoc (1904–1930). This party attracted low-level government employ-ees, soldiers, and small businessmen. At first Nguyen ThaiHoc lobbied the colonial government for reforms, but invain. Two years later he turned to revolutionary action. In

February 1930 he led an uprising at Yen Bay that the Frenchquickly crushed. He and many of his followers were executedfour months later, leaving Ho Chi Minh’s Communists as thestandard-bearers of nationalist revolution in Vietnam.

While awaiting his execution, Nguyen Thai Hoc wrote thefollowing letter to the French Chamber of Deputies to justifyhis actions.

Gentlemen:I, the undersigned, Nguyen Thai Hoc, a Vietnamese cit-

izen, twenty-six years old, chairman and founder of theVietnamese Nationalist Party, at present arrested and im-prisoned at the jail of Yen Bay, Tongking, Indochina, havethe great honor to inform you of the following facts:

According to the tenets of justice, everyone has theright to defend his own country when it is invaded by for-eigners, and according to the principles of humanity,everyone has the duty to save his compatriots when theyare in difficulty or in danger. As for myself, I have assessedthe fact that my country has been annexed by you Frenchfor more than sixty years. I realize that under your dicta-torial yoke, my compatriots have experienced a very hardlife, and my people will without doubt be completely an-nihilated, by the naked principle of natural selection.Therefore, my right and my duty have compelled me toseek every way to defend my country which has been in-vaded and occupied, and to save my people who are ingreat danger.

At the beginning, I had thought to cooperate with theFrench in Indochina in order to serve my compatriots, mycountry and my people, particularly in the areas of cul-tural and economic development. As regards economicdevelopment, in 1925 I sent a memorandum to GovernorGeneral Varenne, describing to him all our aspirationsconcerning the protection of local industry and com-merce in Indochina. I urged strongly in the same letter thecreation of a Superior School of Industrial Developmentin Tongking. In 1926 I again addressed another letter tothe then Governor General of Indochina in which I in-cluded some explicit suggestions to relieve the hardships

D I V E R S I T Y A N D D O M I N A N C E

A VIETNAMESE NATIONALIST DENOUNCES FRENCH COLONIALISM

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of our poor people. In 1927, for a third time, I sent a let-ter to the Résident Supérieur [provincial administrator] inTongking, requesting permission to publish a weekly mag-azine with the aim of safeguarding and encouraging localindustry and commerce. With regard to the cultural do-main, I sent a letter to the Governor General in 1927, re-questing (1) the privilege of opening tuition-free schoolsfor the children of the lower classes, particularly childrenof workers and peasants; (2) freedom to open popularpublishing houses and libraries in industrial centers.

It is absolutely ridiculous that every suggestion hasbeen rejected. My letters were without answer; my planshave not been considered; my requests have been ig-nored; even the articles that I sent to newspapers havebeen censored and rejected. From the experience of theserejections, I have come to the conclusion that the Frenchhave no sincere intention of helping my country or mypeople. I also concluded that we have to expel France. Forthis reason, in 1927, I began to organize a revolutionaryparty, which I named the Vietnamese Nationalist Party,with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial and oppres-sive administration of our country. We aspire to create aRepublic of Vietnam, composed of persons sincerely con-cerned with the happiness of the people. My party is aclandestine organization, and in February 1929, it wasuncovered by the security police. Among the members ofmy party, a great number have been arrested. Fifty-twopersons have been condemned to forced labor rangingfrom two to twenty years. Although many have been de-tained and many others unjustly condemned, my partyhas not ceased its activity. Under my guidance, the Partycontinues to operate and progress towards its aim.

During the Yen Bay uprising someone succeeded inkilling some French officers. The authorities accused myparty of having organized and perpetrated this revolt.They have accused me of having given the orders for themassacre. In truth, I have never given such orders, and Ihave presented before the Penal Court of Yen Bay all theevidence showing the inanity of this accusation. Even so,some of the members of my party completely ignorant ofthat event have been accused of participating in it. TheFrench Indochinese government burned and destroyedtheir houses. They sent French troops to occupy their vil-lages and stole their rice to divide it among the soldiers.Not just members of my party have been suffering fromthis injustice—we should rather call this cruelty ratherthan injustice—but also many simple peasants, interestedonly in their daily work in the rice fields, living miserablelives like buffaloes and horses, have been compromised inthis reprisal. At the present time, in various areas there aretens of thousands of men, women, and children, personsof all ages, who have been massacred. They died either of

hunger or exposure because the French Indochinese gov-ernment burned their homes. I therefore beseech you intears to redress this injustice which otherwise will annihi-late my people, which will stain French honor, and whichwill belittle all human values.

I have the honor to inform you that I am responsiblefor all events happening in my country under the leader-ship of my party from 1927 until the present. You onlyneed to execute me. I beg your indulgence for all the oth-ers who at the present time are imprisoned in various jails.I am the only culprit, all the others are innocent. They areinnocent because most of them are indeed members ofmy party, and have joined it only because I have suc-ceeded in convincing them of their duties as citizens ofthis country, and of the humiliations of a slave with a lostcountry. Some of them are not even party members. Theyhave been wrongly accused by their enemy or by the se-curity police; or they simply are wrongly accused by theirfriends who have not been able to bear the tortures in-flicted by the security police. I have the honor to repeatonce again that you need execute only me. If you are notsatisfied with killing one man, I advise you to kill also themembers of my family, but I strongly beg your indulgencetowards those who are innocent.

Finally, I would like to declare in conclusion: if Francewants to stay in peace in Indochina, if France does notwant to have increasing troubles with revolutionarymovements, she should immediately modify the cruel andinhuman policy now practiced in Indochina. The Frenchshould behave like friends to the Vietnamese, instead ofbeing cruel and oppressive masters. They should be atten-tive to the intellectual and material sufferings of theVietnamese people, instead of being harsh and tough.

Please, Gentlemen, receive my gratitude.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS1. When he first became involved in politics, what were

Nguyen Thai Hoc’s views of French colonialism? 2. What were his first initiatives, and what response did

he get from the French colonial administration?3. What motivated Nguyen Thai Hoc to organize an upris-

ing, and what was the response of the French?4. Compare Nguyen Thai Hoc’s views and methods and the

French response with the situation in India.

Source: Harry Benda and John Larkin, The World of Southeast Asia (New York: Harper &Row, 1967), 182–185. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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undernourished and vulnerable to diseases. Not until the1930s did colonial governments realize the negative con-sequences of their labor policies and begin to invest inagricultural development and health care for Africans.

In 1900 Ibadan˚ in Nigeria was the only city in sub-Saharan Africa with more than 100,000 inhabitants; fiftyyears later, dozens of cities had reached that size, includ-ing Nairobi˚ in Kenya, Johannesburg in South Africa, La-gos in Nigeria, Accra in Gold Coast, and Dakar in Senegal.Africans migrated to cities because they offered hope ofjobs and excitement and, for a few, the chance to be-come wealthy.

However, migrations damaged the family life of thoseinvolved, for almost all the migrants were men leavingwomen in the countryside to farm and raise children.Cities built during the colonial period reflected the colo-nialists’ attitudes with racially segregated housing, clubs,restaurants, hospitals, and other institutions. Patterns ofracial discrimination were most rigid in the white-settlercolonies of eastern and southern Africa.

Traditional religious beliefcould not explain the disloca-tions that foreign rule, migra-tions, and sudden economicchanges brought to the lives of

Religious andPolitical Changes

Africans. Many therefore turned to one of the two uni-versal religions, Christianity and Islam, for guidance.

Christianity was introduced into Africa by Westernmissionaries, except in Ethiopia, where it was indige-nous. It was most successful in the coastal regions ofWest and South Africa, where the European influencewas strongest. A major attraction of the Christian de-nominations was their mission schools, which taughtboth craft skills and basic literacy, providing access toemployment as minor functionaries, teachers, and shop-keepers. These schools educated a new elite, many ofwhom learned not only skills and literacy but Westernpolitical ideas as well. Many Africans accepted Chris-tianity enthusiastically, reading the suffering of theirown peoples into the biblical stories of Moses and theparables of Jesus. The churches trained some of thebrighter pupils to become catechists, teachers, and cler-gymen. A few rose to high positions, such as James John-son, a Yoruba who became the Anglican bishop of theNiger Delta Pastorate. Independent Christian churches—known as “Ethiopian” churches—associated Christianbeliefs with radical ideas of racial equality and participa-tion in politics.

Islam spread inland from the East African coast andsouthward from the Sahel˚ toward the West Africancoast, through the influence and example of Arab andAfrican merchants. Islam also emphasized literacy—in

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Arabic through Quaranic schools rather than in a Euro-pean language—and was less disruptive of traditionalAfrican customs such as polygamy.

In a few places, such as Dakar in Senegal and CapeTown in South Africa, small numbers of Africans couldobtain secondary education. Even smaller numberswent on to college in Europe or America. Though few innumber, they became the leaders of political move-ments. The contrast between the liberal ideas impartedby Western education and the realities of racial discrimi-nation under colonial rule contributed to the rise ofnationalism among educated Africans. In Senegal BlaiseDiagne˚ agitated for African participation in politics andfair treatment in the French army. In the 1920s J. E.

Casely Hayford began organizing a movement forgreater autonomy in British West Africa. In South AfricaWestern-educated lawyers and journalists founded theAfrican National Congress in 1909 to defend the inter-ests of Africans. These nationalist movements were in-spired by the ideas of Pan-Africanists from America suchas W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, who advocatedthe unity of African peoples around the world, as well asby European ideas of liberty and nationhood. BeforeWorld War II, however, they were small and had littleinfluence.

The Second World War (1939–1945) had a profoundeffect on the peoples of Africa, even those far removedfrom the theaters of war. The war brought hardships,such as increased forced labor, inflation, and requisi-tions of raw materials. Yet it also brought hope. During

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the campaign to oust the Italians from Ethiopia, Em-peror Haile Selassie˚ (r. 1930–1974) led his own troopsinto Addis Ababa, his capital, and reclaimed his title.A million Africans served as soldiers and carriers inBurma, North Africa, and Europe, where many becameaware of Africa’s role in helping the Allied war effort.They listened to Allied propaganda in favor of Europeanliberation movements and against Nazi racism, and theyreturned to their countries with new and radical ideas.

The early twentieth century was a relatively peacefulperiod for sub-Saharan Africa. But this peace—enforcedby the European occupiers—masked profound changesthat were to transform African life after the Second WorldWar. The building of cities, railroads, and other enter-prises brought Africa into the global economy, often atgreat human cost. Colonialism also brought changes toAfrican culture and religion, hastening the spread ofChristianity and Islam. And the foreign occupation awak-ened political ideas that inspired the next generation ofAfricans to demand independence (see Chapter 31).

THE INDIAN INDEPENDENCE

MOVEMENT, 1905–1947

India was a colony of Great Britain from the late eigh-teenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Under British

rule the subcontinent acquired many of the trappings ofWestern-style economic development, such as railroads,harbors, modern cities, and cotton and steel mills, aswell as an active and worldly middle class. The economictransformation of the region awakened in this educatedmiddle class a sense of national dignity that demandedpolitical fulfillment. In response, the British graduallygranted India a limited amount of political autonomywhile maintaining overall control. Religious and com-munal tensions among the Indian peoples were carefullypapered over under British rule. Violent conflicts tore In-dia apart after the withdrawal of the British in 1947 (seeMap 30.1).

Much of India is fertile land,but it is vulnerable to thevagaries of nature, especiallydroughts caused by the peri-

odic failure of the monsoons. When the rains failed from1896 to 1900, 2 million people died of starvation.

The Land and the People

Despite periodic famines the Indian population grewfrom 250 million in 1900 to 319 million in 1921 and 389million in 1941. This growth created pressures in manyareas. Landless young men converged on the cities, ex-ceeding the number of jobs available in the slowly ex-panding industries. To produce timber for constructionand railroad ties, and to clear land for tea and rubberplantations, government foresters cut down most of thetropical hardwood forests that had covered the subcon-tinent in the nineteenth century. In spite of deforestationand extensive irrigation, the amount of land availableto peasant families shrank with each successive genera-tion. Economic development—what the British calledthe “moral and material progress of India”—hardly ben-efited the average Indian.

Indians were divided into many classes. Peasants,always the great majority, paid rents to the landowner,interest to the village moneylender, and taxes to thegovernment and had little left to improve their land orraise their standard of living. The government pro-tected property owners, from village moneylenders allthe way up to the maharajahs,˚ or ruling princes, whoowned huge tracts of land. The cities were crowdedwith craftsmen, traders, and workers of all sorts, mostvery poor. Although the British had banned the burn-ing of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, inother respects women’s lives changed little underBritish rule.

The peoples of India spoke many different lan-guages: Hindi in the north, Tamil in the south, Bengali inthe east, Gujerati around Bombay, Urdu in the north-west, and dozens of others. As a result of British rule andincreasing trade and travel, English became, like Latin inmedieval Europe, the common medium of communi-cation of the Western-educated middle class. This newclass of English-speaking government bureaucrats, pro-fessionals, and merchants was to play a leading role inthe independence movement.

The majority of Indians practiced Hinduism andwere subdivided into hundreds of castes, each affiliatedwith a particular occupation. Hinduism discouraged in-termarriage and other social interactions among thecastes and with people who were not Hindus. Muslimsconstituted one-quarter of the people of India butformed a majority in the northwest and in eastern Ben-gal. Muslim rulers had dominated northern and centralIndia until they were displaced by the British in the eigh-teenth century. More reluctant than Hindus to learn Eng-lish, Muslims felt discriminated against by both Britishand Hindus.

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Colonial India was ruled by aviceroy appointed by the Britishgovernment and administeredby a few thousand members ofthe Indian Civil Service. These

men, imbued with a sense of duty toward their subjects,formed one of the more honest (if not efficient) bureauc-

British Rule and IndianNationalism

racies of all time. Drawn mostly from the English gentry,they liked to think of India as a land of lords and peas-ants. They believed it was their duty to protect the Indianpeople from the dangers of industrialization, while de-fending their own positions from Indian nationalists.

As Europeans they admired modern technologybut tried to control its introduction into India so as

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to maximize the benefits to Britain and to themselves.For example, they encouraged railroads, harbors,telegraphs, and other communications technologies,as well as irrigation and plantations, because they in-creased India’s foreign trade and strengthened Britishcontrol. At the same time, they discouraged the cottonand steel industries and limited the training of Indianengineers, ostensibly to spare India the social up-heavals that had accompanied the Industrial Revolu-tion in Europe, while protecting British industry fromIndian competition.

At the turn of the century the majority of Indians—especially the peasants, landowners, and princes—ac-cepted British rule. But the Europeans’ racist attitudetoward dark-skinned people increasingly offended Indi-ans who had learned English and absorbed English ideas

of freedom and representative government, only to dis-cover that thinly disguised racial quotas excluded themfrom the Indian Civil Service, the officer corps, and pres-tigious country clubs.

In 1885 a small group of English-speaking Hinduprofessionals founded a political organization called theIndian National Congress. For twenty years its membersrespectfully petitioned the government for access to thehigher administrative positions and for a voice in officialdecisions, but they had little influence outside intellec-tual circles. Then, in 1905, Viceroy Lord Curzon dividedthe province of Bengal in two to improve the efficiencyof its administration. This decision, made without con-sulting anyone, angered not only educated Indians, whosaw it as a way to lessen their influence, but also millionsof uneducated Hindu Bengalis, who suddenly found

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themselves outnumbered by Muslims in East Bengal.Soon Bengal was the scene of demonstrations, boycottsof British goods, and even incidents of violence againstthe British.

In 1906, while the Hindus of Bengal were protestingthe partition of their province, Muslims, fearful of Hindudominance elsewhere in India, founded the All-IndiaMuslim League. Caught in an awkward situation, thegovernment responded by granting Indians a limitedfranchise based on wealth. Muslims, however, were onaverage poorer than Hindus, for many poor and low-caste Hindus had converted to Islam to escape castediscrimination. Taking advantage of these religious divi-sions, the British instituted separate representation anddifferent voting qualifications for Hindus and Muslims.Then, in 1911, the British transferred the capital of Indiafrom Calcutta to Delhi˚, the former capital of the Mughal˚emperors. These changes disturbed Indians of all classesand religions and raised their political consciousness.Politics, once primarily the concern of westernized intel-lectuals, turned into two mass movements: one by Hin-dus and one by Muslims.

To maintain their commercial position and preventsocial upheavals, the British resisted the idea that Indiacould, or should, industrialize. Their geologists looked forminerals, such as coal or manganese, that British indus-try required. However, when the only Indian member ofthe Indian Geological Service, Pramatha Nath Bose,wanted to prospect for iron ore, he had to resign becausethe government wanted no part of an Indian steel indus-try that could compete with that of Britain. Bose joinedforces with Jamsetji Tata, a Bombay textile magnate whodecided to produce steel in spite of British opposition.With the help of German and American engineers andequipment, Tata’s son Dorabji opened the first steel millin India in 1911, in a town called Jamshedpur in honor ofhis father. Although it produced only a fraction of thesteel that India required, Jamshedpur became a powerfulsymbol of Indian national pride. It prompted Indian na-tionalists to ask why a country that could produce its ownsteel needed foreigners to run its government.

During World War I Indians supported Britain en-thusiastically; 1.2 million men volunteered for the army,and millions more voluntarily contributed money to thegovernment. Many expected the British to reward theirloyalty with political concessions. Others organized todemand concessions and a voice in the government. In1917, in response to the agitation, the British govern-ment announced “the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive

realization of responsible government in India as an in-tegral part of the British Empire.” This sounded like apromise of self-government, but the timetable was sovague that nationalists denounced it as a devious ma-neuver to postpone India’s independence.

In late 1918 and early 1919 a violent influenza epi-demic broke out among soldiers in the war zone ofnorthern France. Within a few months it spread to everycountry on earth and killed over 20 million people. Indiawas especially hard hit; of the millions who died, two outof three was Indian. This dreadful toll increased themounting political tensions. Leaders of the Indian Na-tional Congress declared that the British reform propos-als were too little, too late.

On April 13, 1919, in the city of Amritsar in Punjab,General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire into apeaceful crowd of some 10,000 demonstrators, killing atleast 379 and wounding 1,200. Waves of angry demon-strations swept over India, but the government waitedsix months to appoint a committee to investigate themassacre. After General Dyer retired, the British Houseof Lords voted to approve his actions, and a fund wasraised in appreciation of his services. Indians interpretedthese gestures as showing British contempt for theircolonial subjects. In the charged atmosphere of the time,the period of gradual accommodation between the Brit-ish and the Indians came to a close.

For the next twenty years Indiateetered on the edge of violentuprisings and harsh repres-sion, possibly even war. That itdid not succumb was due to

Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948), a man known to hisfollowers as “Mahatma,” the “great soul.”

Gandhi began life with every advantage. His familywas wealthy enough to send him to England for his edu-cation. After his studies he lived in South Africa andpracticed law for the small Indian community there.During World War I he returned to India and was one ofmany Western-educated Hindu intellectuals who joinedthe Indian National Congress.

Gandhi had some unusual political ideas. Unlikemany radical political thinkers of his time, he de-nounced the popular ideals of power, struggle, andcombat. Instead, inspired by both Hindu and Christianconcepts, he preached the saintly virtues of ahimsa˚(nonviolence) and satyagraha˚ (the search for truth). Herefused to countenance violence among his followers,

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and he called off several demonstrations when theyturned violent.

Gandhi had an affinity for the poor that was unusualeven among socialist politicians. In 1921 he gave up theWestern-style suits worn by lawyers and the fine raimentof wealthy Indians and henceforth wore simple peasantgarb: a length of homespun cloth below his waist and ashawl to cover his torso (see Environment and Technol-ogy: Gandhi and Technology). He spoke for the farmersand the outcasts, whom he called harijan˚, “children ofGod.” He attracted ever-larger numbers of followersamong the poor and the illiterate, who soon began to re-vere him; and he transformed the cause of Indian inde-pendence from an elite movement of the educated into amass movement with a quasi-religious aura.

Gandhi was a brilliant political tactician and a mas-ter of public relations gestures. In 1929, for instance, heled a few followers on an 80-mile (129-kilometer) walk,camped on a beach, and gathered salt from the sea in ablatant and well-publicized act of civil disregard for thegovernment’s monopoly on salt. But he discovered thatunleashing the power of popular participation was onething and controlling its direction was quite another.Within days of his “Walk to the Sea,” demonstrations ofsupport broke out all over India, in which the policekilled a hundred demonstrators and arrested over sixtythousand.

Many times during the 1930s Gandhi threatened tofast “unto death,” and several times he did come close todeath, to protest the violence of both the police and hisfollowers and to demand independence. He was repeat-edly arrested and spent a total of six years in jail. Butevery arrest made him more popular. He became a cultfigure not only in his own country but also in the West-ern media. He never won a battle or an election; instead,in the words of historian Percival Spear, he made theBritish “uncomfortable in their cherished field of moralrectitude,” and he gave Indians the feeling that theirswas the ethically superior cause.

In the 1920s, slowly and reluc-tantly, the British began to givein to the pressure of the In-dian National Congress and theMuslim League. They handed

over control of “national” areas such as education, theeconomy, and public works. They also gradually admit-ted more Indians into the Civil Service and the officercorps.

India MovesTowardIndependence

India took its first tentative steps toward industrial-ization in the years before the First and then the SecondWorld Wars. Indian politicians obtained the right to erecthigh tariff barriers against imports in order to protectIndia’s infant industries from foreign, even British, com-petition. Behind these barriers, Indian entrepreneursbuilt plants to manufacture iron and steel, cement, pa-per, cotton and jute textiles, sugar, and other products.This early industrialization provided jobs, though notenough to improve the lives of the Indian peasants or ur-ban poor. These manufactures, however, helped create aclass of wealthy Indian businessmen. Far from being sat-isfied by the government’s policies, they supported theIndian National Congress and its demands for inde-pendence. Though paying homage to Gandhi, they pre-ferred his designated successor as leader of the IndianNational Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru˚ (1889–1964). Ahighly educated nationalist and subtle thinker, Nehru,unlike Gandhi, looked forward to creating a modern in-dustrial India.

Congress politicians won regional elections but con-tinued to be excluded from the viceroy’s cabinet, the truecenter of power. When World War II began in September1939 Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared war without con-sulting a single Indian. The Congress-dominated provin-cial governments resigned in protest and found thatboycotting government office increased their popularsupport. When the British offered to give India its inde-pendence once the war ended, Gandhi called the offer a“postdated cheque on a failing bank” and demanded fullindependence immediately. His “Quit India” campaignaroused popular demonstrations against the British andprovoked a wave of arrests, including his own. Nehru ex-plained: “I would fight Japan sword in hand, but I canonly do so as a free man.”

The Second World War divided the Indian people.Most Indian soldiers felt they were fighting to defendtheir country rather than to support the British Empire.As in World War I, Indians contributed heavily to theAllied war effort, supplying 2 million soldiers and enor-mous amounts of resources, especially the timber neededfor emergency construction. A small number of Indians,however, were so anti-British that they joined the Japa-nese side.

India’s subordination to British interests was vividlydemonstrated in the famine of 1943 in Bengal. Unlikeprevious famines, this one was caused not by droughtbut by the Japanese conquest of Burma, which cut offsupplies of Burmese rice that normally went to Bengal.Although food was available elsewhere in India, the

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Gandhi and Technology

In the twentieth century all political leaders but one em-braced modern industrial technology. That one exception is

Gandhi.After deciding to wear only handmade cloth, Gandhi

made a bonfire of imported factory-made cloth and beganspending half an hour every day spinning yarn on a simplespinning wheel, a task he called a “sacrament.” The spinningwheel became the symbol of his movement. Any Indian whowished to come before him had to dress in handwoven cloth.

Gandhi had several reasons for reviving this ancient craft.One was his revulsion against “the incessant search for ma-terial comforts,” an evil to which he thought Europeans were“becoming slaves.” Not only had materialism corrupted thepeople of the West, it had also caused massive unemploy-ment in India. In particular, he blamed the impoverishmentof the Indian people on the cotton industries of England andJapan, which had ruined the traditional cotton manufactur-ing by which India had once supplied all her own needs.

Gandhi looked back to a time before India became acolony of Britian, when “our women spun fine yarns in theirown cottages, and supplemented the earnings of their hus-bands.” The spinning wheel, he believed, was “presented tothe nation for giving occupation to the millions who had, at

least four months of the year, nothing to do.” Not only woulda return to the spinning wheel provide employment to mil-lions of Indians, it would also become a symbol of “nationalconsciousness and a contribution by every individual to adefinite constructive national work.”

Nevertheless, Gandhi was a shrewd politician who under-stood the usefulness of modern devices for mobilizing themasses and organizing his followers. He wore a watch andused the telephone and the printing press to keep in touchwith his followers. When he traveled by train, he rode thirdclass—but in a third-class railroad car of his own. His goalwas the independence of his country, and he pursued it withevery nonviolent means he could find.

Gandhi’s ideas challenge us to rethink the purpose oftechnology. Was he opposed on principle to all modern de-vices? Was he an opportunist who used those devices thatserved his political ends and rejected those that did not? Ordid he have a higher principle that accounts for his willing-ness to use the telephone and the railroad but not factory-made cloth?Source: Quotations from Louis Fischer, Gandhi: His Life and Message forthe World (New York: New American Library, 1954), 82–83.

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British army had requisitioned the railroads to transporttroops and equipment in preparation for a Japanese in-vasion. As a result, supplies ran short in Bengal and sur-rounding areas, while speculators hoarded whateverthey could find. Some 2 million people starved to deathbefore the army was ordered to supply food.

When the war ended, Britain’snew Labour Party governmentprepared for Indian indepen-dence, but deep suspicions be-

tween Hindus and Muslims complicated the process.The break between the two communities had started in1937, when the Indian National Congress won provincialelections and refused to share power with the MuslimLeague. In 1940 the leader of the League, MuhammadAli Jinnah˚ (1876–1948) demanded what many Muslimshad been dreaming of for years: a country of their own,to be called Pakistan (from “Punjab-Afghans-Kashmir-Sind” plus the Persian suffix -stan meaning “kingdom”).

Partition andIndependence

As independence approached, talks between Jinnahand Nehru broke down and battle lines were drawn. Vio-lent rioting between Hindus and Muslims broke out inBengal and Bihar. Gandhi’s appeals for tolerance and co-operation fell on deaf ears. In despair, he retreated to hishome near Ahmedabad. The British made frantic pro-posals to keep India united, but their authority was wan-ing fast.

By early 1947 the Indian National Congress had ac-cepted the idea of a partition of India into two states, onesecular but dominated by Hindus, the other Muslim. InJune Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, decided thatindependence must come immediately. On August 15British India gave way to a new India and Pakistan. TheIndian National Congress, led by Nehru, formed the firstgovernment of India; Jinnah and the Muslim League es-tablished a government for the provinces that made upPakistan.

The rejoicing over independence was marred by vio-lent outbreaks between Muslims and Hindus. In protestagainst the mounting chaos, Gandhi refused to attendthe independence day celebration. Throughout the land,Muslim and Hindu neighbors turned on one another,

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and armed members of one faith hunted down people ofthe other faith. For centuries Hindus and Muslims hadintermingled throughout most of India. Now, leavingmost of their possessions behind, Hindus fled from pre-dominantly Muslim areas, and Muslims fled from Hinduareas. Trainloads of desperate refugees of one faith wereattacked and massacred by members of the other orwere left stranded in the middle of deserts. Within a fewmonths some 12 million people had abandoned theirancestral homes and a half-million lay dead. In January1948 Gandhi died too, gunned down by an angry Hindurefugee.

After the sectarian massacres and flights of refugees,few Hindus remained in Pakistan, and Muslims were aminority in all but one state of India. That state wasKashmir, a strategically important region in the foothillsof the Himalayas. India annexed Kashmir because thelocal maharajah was Hindu and because the state heldthe headwaters of the rivers that irrigated millions ofacres of farmland in the northwestern part of the sub-continent. The majority of the inhabitants of Kashmirwere Muslims, however, and would probably have joinedPakistan if they had been allowed to vote on the matter.The consequence of the partition and of Kashmir in par-ticular was to turn India and Pakistan into bitter enemiesthat have fought several wars in the past half-century.

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION,1910–1940

In the nineteenth century Latin America achieved inde-pendence from Spain and Portugal but did not indus-

trialize. Throughout much of the century most LatinAmerican republics suffered from ideological divisions,unstable governments, and violent upheavals. By trad-ing their raw materials and agricultural products forforeign manufactured goods and capital investments,they became economically dependent on the wealthiercountries to the north, especially on the United Statesand Great Britain. Their societies, far from fulfilling thepromises of their independence, remained deeply splitbetween wealthy landowners and desperately poorpeasants.

Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina contained well overhalf of Latin America’s land, population, and wealth, andtheir relations with other countries and their econo-mies were quite similar. Mexico, however, underwent atraumatic social revolution, while Argentina and Brazilevolved more peaceably.

Few countries in Latin Americasuffered as many foreign inva-sions and interventions as Mex-

ico. A Mexican saying observed wryly: “Poor Mexico: sofar from God, so close to the United States.” In Mexicothe chasm between rich and poor was so deep that onlya revolution could move the country toward prosperityand democracy.

Mexico was the Latin American country most influ-enced by the Spanish during three centuries of colonialrule. After independence in 1821 it suffered from a half-century of political turmoil. At the beginning of thetwentieth century Mexican society was divided into richand poor and into persons of Spanish, Indian, and mixedancestry. A few very wealthy families of Spanish origin,less than 1 percent of the population, owned 85 percentof Mexico’s land, mostly in huge haciendas (estates).Closely tied to this elite were the handful of Americanand British companies that controlled most of Mexico’srailroads, silver mines, plantations, and other produc-tive enterprises. At the other end of the social scale wereIndians, many of whom did not speak Spanish. Mesti-zos˚, people of mixed Indian and European ancestry,were only slightly better off; most of them were peasantswho worked on the haciendas or farmed small commu-nal plots near their ancestral villages.

The urban middle class was small and had little po-litical influence. Few professional and government posi-tions were open to them, and foreigners owned mostbusinesses. Industrial workers also were few in number;the only significant groups were textile workers in theport of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico and railroad work-ers spread throughout the country.

During the colonial period, the Spanish govern-ment had made halfhearted efforts to defend Indiansand mestizos from the land-grabbing tactics of the ha-ciendas. After independence in 1821 wealthy Mexicanfamilies and American companies used bribery andforce to acquire millions of acres of good agriculturalland from villages in southern Mexico. Peasants lost notonly their fields but also their access to firewood andpasture for their animals. Sugar, cotton, and other com-mercial crops replaced corn and beans, and peasantshad little choice but to work on haciendas. To survive,they had to buy food and other necessities on creditfrom the landowner’s store; eventually, they fell perma-nently into debt. Sometimes whole communities wereforced to relocate.

In the 1880s American investors purchased fromthe Mexican government dubious claims to more than

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2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) traditionally heldby the Yaqui people of Sonora, in northern Mexico.When the Yaqui resisted the expropriation of theirlands, they were brutally repressed by the Mexicanarmy.

Northern Mexicans had no peasant tradition of com-munal ownership, for the northern half of the countrywas too dry for farming, unlike the tropical and denselypopulated south. The north was a region of silver minesand cattle ranches, some of them enormous. It wasthinly populated by cowboys and miners. The harshnessof their lives and vast inequities in the distribution of in-come made northern Mexicans as resentful as people inthe south.

Despite many upheavals in Mexico in the nine-teenth century, in 1910 the government seemed in con-trol. For thirty-four years General Porfirio Díaz˚ (1830–1915) had ruled Mexico under the motto “Liberty, Order,Progress.” To Díaz “liberty” meant freedom for rich ha-cienda owners and foreign investors to acquire moreland. The government imposed “order” through riggedelections and a policy of pan o palo (bread or the stick)—that is, bribes for Díaz’s supporters and summary justicefor those who opposed him. “Progress” meant mainlythe importing of foreign capital, machinery, and techni-cians to take advantage of Mexico’s labor, soil, and natu-ral resources.

During the Díaz years (1876–1910) Mexico City—with paved streets, streetcar lines, electric street lighting,and public parks—became a showplace, and new tele-graph and railroad lines connected cities and townsthroughout Mexico. But this material progress benefitedonly a handful of well-connected businessmen. Theboom in railroads, agriculture, and mining at the turn ofthe century actually caused a decline in the averageMexican’s standard of living.

Though a mestizo himself, Díaz discriminatedagainst the nonwhite majority of Mexicans. He and hissupporters tried to eradicate what they saw as Mexico’sembarrassingly rustic traditions. On many middle- andupper-class tables French cuisine replaced traditionalMexican dishes. The wealthy replaced sombreros andponchos with European garments. Though bullfightingand cockfighting remained popular, the well-to-do pre-ferred horse racing and soccer. To the educated middleclass—the only group with a strong sense of Mexican na-tionhood—this devaluation of Mexican culture becamea symbol of the Díaz regime’s failure to defend nationalinterests against foreign influences.

Many Mexicans feared or antic-ipated a popular uprising afterDíaz. Unlike the independencemovement in India, the Mex-ican Revolution was not the

work of one party with a well-defined ideology. Instead,it developed haphazardly, led by a series of ambitiousbut limited leaders, each representing a different seg-ment of Mexican society.

The first was Francisco I. Madero (1873–1913), theson of a wealthy landowning and mining family, edu-cated in the United States. When minor uprisings brokeout in 1911, the government collapsed and Díaz fledinto exile. The Madero presidency was welcomed bysome, but aroused opposition from peasant leaders likeEmiliano Zapata (1879–1919). In 1913, after two years aspresident, Madero was overthrown and murdered byone of his former supporters, General Victoriano Huerta.Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), president of the UnitedStates, showed his displeasure by sending the UnitedStates Marines to occupy Veracruz.

The inequities of Mexican society and foreign inter-vention in Mexico’s affairs angered Mexico’s middle classand industrial workers. They found leaders in VenustianoCarranza, a landowner, and in Alvaro Obregón˚, a school-teacher. Calling themselves Constitutionalists, Carranzaand Obregón organized private armies and succeeded inoverthrowing Huerta in 1914. By then, the revolutionhad spread to the countryside.

As early as 1911 Zapata, an Indian farmer, had led arevolt against the haciendas in the mountains of More-los, south of Mexico City (see Map 30.2). His soldierswere peasants, some of them women, mounted onhorseback and armed with pistols and rifles. For severalyears they periodically came down from the mountains,burned hacienda buildings, and returned land to the In-dian villages to which it had once belonged.

Another leader appeared in Chihuahua, a northernstate where seventeen individuals owned two-fifths ofthe land and 95 percent of the people had no land at all.Starting in 1913 Francisco “Pancho” Villa (1877–1923), aformer ranch hand, mule driver, and bandit, organizedan army of three thousand men, most of them cowboys.They too seized land from the large haciendas, not to re-build traditional communities as in southern Mexico butto create family ranches.

Zapata and Villa were part agrarian rebels, part so-cial revolutionaries. They enjoyed tremendous popularsupport but could never rise above their regional andpeasant origins and lead a national revolution. The Con-

Revolution and Civil War,1911–1920

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stitutionalists had fewer soldiers than Zapata and Villa;but they held the major cities, controlled the country’sexports of oil, and used the proceeds of oil sales to buymodern weapons. Fighting continued for years, andgradually the Constitutionalists took over most of Mex-ico. In 1919 they defeated and killed Zapata; Villa wasassassinated four years later. An estimated 2 millionpeople lost their lives in the civil war, and much of Mex-ico lay in ruins.

During their struggle to win support against Zapataand Villa, the Constitutionalists adopted many of theirrivals’ agrarian reforms, such as restoring communal

lands to the Indians of Morelos. The Constitutionalistsalso proposed social programs designed to appeal toworkers and the middle class. The Constitution of 1917promised universal suffrage and a one-term presidency;state-run education to free the poor from the hold ofthe Catholic Church; the end of debt peonage; restric-tions on foreign ownership of property; and laws speci-fying minimum wages and maximum hours to protectlaborers. Although these reforms were too costly to im-plement right away, they had important symbolic signif-icance, for they enshrined the dignity of Mexicans andthe equality of Indians, mestizos, and whites, as well asof peasants and city people.

In the early 1920s, after a dec-ade of violence that exhaustedall classes, the Mexican Revo-lution lost momentum. Only inMorelos did peasants receive

land, and President Obregón and his closest associatesmade all the important decisions. Nevertheless, the Rev-olution changed the social makeup of the governingclass. For the first time in Mexico’s history, representa-tives of rural communities, unionized workers, and pub-lic employees were admitted to the inner circle.

In the arts the Mexican Revolution sparked a surge ofcreativity. The political murals of José Clemente Orozcoand Diego Rivera and the paintings of Frida Kahlo fo-cused on social themes, showing peasants, workers, andsoldiers in scenes from the Revolution.

In 1928 Obregón was assassinated. His successor,Plutarco Elías Calles˚, founded the National Revolution-ary Party, or PNR (the abbreviation of its name in Span-ish). The PNR was a forum where all the pressure groupsand vested interests—labor, peasants, businessmen,landowners, the military, and others—worked out com-promises. The establishment of the PNR gave the Mexi-can Revolution a second wind.

Lázaro Cárdenas˚, chosen by Calles to be presidentin 1934, brought peasants’ and workers’ organizationsinto the party, renamed it the Mexican RevolutionaryParty (PRM), and removed the generals from govern-ment positions. Then he set to work implementing thereforms promised in the Constitution of 1917. Cárdenasredistributed 44 million acres (17.6 million hectares) topeasant communes. He closed church-run schools, re-placing them with government schools. He nationalizedthe railroads and numerous other businesses.

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Cárdenas’s most dramatic move was the expropria-tion of foreign-owned oil companies. In the early 1920sMexico was the world’s leading producer of oil, but ahandful of American and British companies exportedalmost all of it. In 1938 Cárdenas seized the foreign-owned oil industry, more as a matter of national pridethan of economics. The oil companies expected the gov-ernments of the United States and Great Britain to cometo their rescue, perhaps with military force. But Mexicoand the United States chose to resolve the issue throughnegotiation, and Mexico retained control of its oil in-dustry.

When Cárdenas’s term ended in 1940, Mexico, likeIndia, was still a land of poor farmers with a small indus-trial base. The Revolution had brought great changes,however. The political system was free of both chaos anddictatorships. A small group of wealthy people no longermonopolized land and other resources. The military was

tamed; the Catholic Church no longer controlled educa-tion; and the nationalization of oil had demonstratedMexico’s independence from foreign corporations andmilitary intervention.

What did the Mexican Revolution accomplish? It didnot fulfill the democratic promise of Madero’s campaign,for it brought to power a party that monopolized thegovernment for eighty years. However it allowed farmore sectors of the population to participate in politicsand made sure no president stayed in office more thansix years. The Revolution also promised far-reaching so-cial reforms, such as free education, higher wages andmore security for workers, and the redistribution of landto the peasants. These long-delayed reforms began to beimplemented during the Cárdenas administration. Theyfell short of the ideals expressed by the revolutionaries,but they laid the foundation for the later industrializa-tion of Mexico.

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ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL,1900–1949

On the surface, Argentina and Brazil seem very dif-ferent. Argentina is Spanish-speaking, temperate

in climate, and populated almost exclusively by peopleof European origin. Brazil is tropical and Portuguese-speaking, and its inhabitants are of mixed European andAfrican origin, with a substantial Indian minority. Yetin the twentieth century their economic, political, andtechnological experiences were remarkably similar.

Most of Argentina consists ofpampas˚, flat, fertile land thatis easy to till, much like theprairies of the midwesternUnited States and Canada.

Throughout the nineteenth century Argentina’s econ-omy was based on two exports: the hides of longhorncreole cattle and the wool of merino sheep, whichroamed the pampas in huge herds. Centuries earlier, Eu-

TheTransformationof Argentina

ropeans had haphazardly introduced the animals andthe grasses they ate. Natural selection had made the ani-mals tough and hardy.

At the end of the nineteenth century railroads andrefrigerator ships, which allowed the safe transportationof meat, changed not only the composition of Argen-tina’s exports but also the way they were produced—inother words, the land itself. European consumers pre-ferred the soft flesh of Lincoln sheep and Hereford cattleto the tough sinewy meat of creole cattle and merinosheep. The valuable Lincolns and Herefords could not beallowed to roam and graze on the pampas. They werecarefully bred and received a diet of alfalfa and oats. Tosafeguard them, the pampas had to be divided, plowed,cultivated, and fenced with barbed wire to keep out pred-ators and other unwelcome animals. Once fenced, theland could be used to produce wheat as well as beef andmutton. Within a few years grasslands that had stretchedto the horizon were transformed into farmland. Like theNorth American midwest, the pampas became one ofthe world’s great producers of wheat and meat.

Argentina’s government represented the interests ofthe oligarquía˚, a very small group of wealthy landowners.Members of this elite controlled enormous haciendas

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where they raised cattle and sheep and grew wheat for ex-port. They also owned fine homes in Buenos Aires˚, a citythat was built to look like Paris. They traveled frequentlyto Europe and spent so lavishly that the French coinedthe superlative “rich as an Argentine.” They showed littleinterest in any business other than farming, however,and were content to let foreign companies, mainlyBritish, build Argentina’s railroads, processing plants,and public utilities. In exchange for its agricultural ex-ports Argentina imported almost all its manufacturedgoods from Europe and the United States. So importantwere British interests in the Argentinean economy thatEnglish, not Spanish, was used on the railroads, and thebiggest department store in Buenos Aires was a branchof Harrods of London.

Before the First World WarBrazil produced most of theworld’s coffee and cacao, grownon vast estates, and natural rub-ber, gathered by Indians from

rubber trees growing wild in the Amazon rain forest.Brazil’s elite was made up of coffee and cacao plantersand rubber exporters. Like their Argentinean counter-parts, they spent their money lavishly, building palacesin Rio de Janeiro˚ and one of the world’s most beautifulopera house in Manaus˚, deep in the Amazon. They hadlittle interest in other forms of development; let Britishcompanies build railroads, harbors, and other infra-structure; and imported most manufactured goods. Atthe time this seemed to allow each country to do what itdid best. If the British did not grow coffee, why shouldBrazil build locomotives?

Both Argentina and Brazil had small but outspokenmiddle classes that demanded a share in governmentand looked to Europe as a model. Beneath each middleclass were the poor. In Argentina these were mainlySpanish and Italian immigrants who had ended up aslandless farm laborers or workers in urban packingplants. In Brazil there was a large class of sharecroppersand plantation workers, many of them descendants ofslaves.

Rubber exports collapsed after 1912, replaced bycheaper plantation rubber from Southeast Asia. The out-break of war in 1914 put an end to imports from Europeas Britain and France focused all their industries on warproduction and Germany was cut off entirely. The dis-ruption of the old trade patterns weakened the landown-

Brazil andArgentina, to 1929

ing class. In Argentina the urban middle class obtainedthe secret ballot and universal male suffrage in 1916 andelected a liberal politician, Hipólito Irigoyen˚, as presi-dent. To a certain extent, the United States replaced theEuropean countries as suppliers of machinery and con-sumers of coffee. European immigrants built factories tomanufacture textiles and household goods. Desperatefor money to pay for the war, Great Britain sold many ofits railroad, streetcar, and other companies to the gov-ernments of Argentina and Brazil.

In contrast to Mexico, the postwar years were a pe-riod of prosperity in South America. Trade with Europeresumed; prices for agricultural exports remained high;and both Argentina and Brazil used profits accumulatedduring the war to industrialize and improve their trans-portation systems and public utilities. Yet it was also atime of social turmoil, as workers and middle-class pro-fessionals demanded social reforms and a larger voice inpolitics. In Argentina students’ and workers’ demonstra-tions were brutally crushed. In Brazil junior officers roseup several times against the government, calling for uni-versal suffrage, social reforms, and freedom for laborunions. Though they accomplished little, they laid thegroundwork for later reformist movements. In neithercountry did the urban middle class take power awayfrom the wealthy landowners. Instead, the two classesshared power at the expense of both the landless peas-ants and the urban workers.

Yet as Argentina and Brazil were moving forward,new technologies again left them dependent on the ad-vanced industrial countries. Brazilians are justly proudthat the first person to fly an airplane outside the UnitedStates was Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian. He didso in 1906 in France, where he lived most of his life andhad access to engine manufacturers and technical assis-tance. Aviation reached Latin America after World War I,when European and American companies such as Aéro-postale and Pan American Airways introduced airmailservice between cities and linked Latin America with theUnited States and Europe.

Before and during World War I radio, then called“wireless telegraphy,” was used not for broadcasting butfor point-to-point communications. Transmitters pow-erful enough to send messages across oceans or conti-nents were extraordinarily complex and expensive: theirantennas covered many acres; they used as much elec-tricity as a small town; and they cost tens of thousands ofpounds sterling (millions of dollars in today’s money).

Right after the war, the major powers scrambled tobuild powerful transmitters on every continent to com-

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pete with the telegraph cable companies and to take ad-vantage of the boom in international business and newsreporting. At the time, no Latin American country pos-sessed the knowledge or funds to build its own transmit-ters. In 1919, therefore, President Irigoyen of Argentinagranted a radio concession to a German firm. France andBritain protested this decision, and eventually four pow-erful radio companies—one British, one French, oneGerman, and one American—formed a cartel to controlall radio communications in Latin America. This cartelset up a national radio company in each Latin Americanrepublic, installing a prominent local politician as itspresident, but the cartel held all the stock and thereforereceived all the profits. Thus, even as Brazil and Ar-gentina were taking over their railroads and older in-dustries, the major industrial countries controlled thediffusion of the newer aviation and radio technologies.

The Depression hit Latin Amer-ica as hard as it hit Europe andthe United States; in manyways, it marks a more impor-tant turning point for the re-

gion than either of the world wars. As long-termcustomers cut back their orders, the value of agriculturaland mineral exports fell by two-thirds between 1929 and1932. Argentina and Brazil could no longer afford toimport manufactured goods. An imploding economyalso undermined their shaky political systems. Like Eu-ropean countries, Argentina and Brazil veered towardauthoritarian regimes that promised to solve their eco-nomic problems.

In 1930 Getulio Vargas˚ (1883–1953), a state gover-nor, staged a coup and proclaimed himself president ofBrazil. He proved to be a masterful politician. He wrote anew constitution that broadened the franchise and lim-ited the president to one term. He raised import dutiesand promoted national firms and state-owned enter-prises, culminating in the construction of the VoltaRedonda steel mill in the 1930s. By 1936 industrial pro-duction had doubled, especially in textiles and smallmanufactures. Under his guidance, Brazil was on its wayto becoming an industrial country. Vargas’s policy, calledimport-substitution industrialization, became a modelfor other Latin American countries as they attempted tobreak away from neocolonial dependency.

The industrialization of Brazil brought all the fa-miliar environmental consequences. Powerful new ma-chines allowed the reopening of old mines and the

The Depressionand the VargasRegime in Brazil

digging of new ones. Cities grew as poor peasants look-ing for work arrived from the countryside. Around theolder neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo˚,the poor turned steep hillsides and vacant lands into im-mense favelas˚ (slums) of makeshift shacks.

The countryside also was transformed. Scrubland wasturned into pasture, and new acreage was planted inwheat, corn, and sugar cane. Even the Amazon rain for-est—half of the land area of Brazil—was affected. In 1930American industrialist Henry Ford invested $8 million toclear land along the Tapajós River and prepare it to be-come the site of the world’s largest rubber plantation. Fordencountered opposition from Brazilian workers and politi-cians; the rubber trees proved vulnerable to diseases; andhe had to abandon the project—but not before leaving 3million acres (1.2 million hectares) denuded of trees. Theecological changes of the Vargas era, however, were but atiny forerunner of the degradation of the Brazilian envi-ronment that was to take place later in the century.

Vargas instituted many reforms favorable to urbanworkers, such as labor unions, pension plans, and dis-ability insurance, but he refused to take any measuresthat might help the millions of landless peasants orharm the interests of the great landowners. Although theBrazilian economy recovered from the Depression, thebenefits of recovery were so unequally distributed thatcommunist and fascist movements demanded even moreradical changes.

In 1938, prohibited by his own constitution from be-ing reelected, Vargas staged another coup, abolished theconstitution, and instituted the Estado Novo˚, or “NewState,” with himself as supreme leader. He abolishedpolitical parties, jailed opposition leaders, and turnedBrazil into a fascist state. When the Second World Warbroke out, however, Vargas aligned Brazil with theUnited States and contributed troops and ships to theAllied war effort.

Despite his economic achievements, Vargas harmedBrazil. By running roughshod over laws, constitutions,and rights, he infected not only Brazil but all of SouthAmerica with the temptations of political violence. It isironic, but not surprising, that Vargas was overthrown in1945 by a military coup.

Economically, the Depressionhurt Argentina almost as badlyas it hurt Brazil. Politically, how-ever, the consequences were

Argentina After 1930

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delayed for many years. In 1930 General José Uriburu˚overthrew the popularly elected President Irigoyen. TheUriburu government represented the large landownersand big business interests. For thirteen years the gener-als and the oligarquía ruled, doing nothing to lessen thepoverty of the workers or the frustrations of the mid-dle class. When World War II broke out, Argentina sym-pathized with the Axis but remained officially neutral.

In 1943 another military revolt flared, this one amongjunior officers angry at conservative politicians. It wasled by Colonel Juan Perón˚ (1895–1974). The intentionsof the rebels were clear:

Civilians will never understand the greatness of ourideal; we shall therefore have to eliminate them fromthe government and give them the only mission whichcorresponds to them: work and obedience.1

Once in power the officers took over the highest po-sitions in government and business and began to lavishmoney on military equipment and their own salaries.Their goal, inspired by Nazi victories, was nothing lessthan the conquest of South America.

As the war turned against the Nazis, the officerssaw their popularity collapse. Perón, however, had otherplans. Inspired by his charismatic wife Eva DuartePerón˚ (1919–1952), he appealed to the urban workers.Eva Perón became the champion of the descamisados˚,or “shirtless ones,” and campaigned tirelessly for socialbenefits and for the cause of women and children. Withhis wife’s help, Perón won the presidency in 1946 andcreated a populist dictatorship in imitation of the Vargasregime in Brazil.

Like Brazil, Argentina industrialized rapidly understate sponsorship. Perón spent lavishly on social welfareprojects as well as on the military, depleting the capi-tal that Argentina had earned during the war. Thougha skillful demagogue who played off the army againstthe navy and both against the labor unions, Perón couldnot create a stable government out of the chaos of coupsand conspiracies. He had to back down from a plan tomake Eva his vice president. When she died in 1952, helost his political skills (or perhaps they were hers), andsoon thereafter he was overthrown in yet another mili-tary coup.

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José Uriburu (hoe-SAY oo-ree-BOO-roo) Juan Perón (hoo-AHNpair-OWN)

Eva Duarte Perón (AY-vuy doo-AR-tay pair-OWN) descamisados(des-cah-mee-SAH-dohs)

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Until 1910 Mexico, Argentina,and Brazil shared a commonhistory and similar cultures. Inthe first half of the twentiethcentury their economies fol-lowed parallel trajectories,

based on unequal relations with the industrialized coun-tries of Europe and North America. All three countries—indeed, all of Latin America—struggled with the failureof neocolonial economics to improve the lives of themiddle class, let alone the peasants. And when the De-pression hit, all three turned to state intervention andimport-substitution industrialization. Like all industri-alizing countries, they did so by mining, farming, ranch-ing, cutting down forests, and irrigating land, all at theexpense of the natural environment.

Yet their political histories diverged radically. Mex-ico underwent a traumatic and profound social revolu-tion. Argentina and Brazil, meanwhile, languished underconservative regimes devoted to the interests of wealthylandowners, sporadically interrupted by military coupsand populist demagogues. Mexicans, thanks to their ex-perience of revolution, developed an acute sense of theirnational identity and civic pride in their history—pridelargely missing in South America. Despite shortcomings,Mexico seriously committed itself to education, land re-form, social justice, and political stability as nationalgoals, not merely as the campaign platform of a populistdictator.

CONCLUSION

Sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Latin America lay out-side the theaters of war that engulfed most of the

Northern Hemisphere, but they were deeply affected byglobal events and by the demands of the industrial pow-ers. Sub-Saharan Africa and India were still under colo-nial rule, and their political life revolved around theyearnings of their elites for political independence andtheir masses for social justice. Mexico, Argentina, andBrazil were politically independent, but their economies,like those of Africa and India, were closely tied to theeconomies of the industrial nations with which theytraded. Their deeply polarized societies and the stressescaused by their dependence on the industrial countriesclashed with the expectations of ever larger numbers oftheir peoples.

In Mexico these stresses brought about a long andviolent revolution, out of which Mexicans forged a last-ing sense of national identity. Argentina and Brazil

Mexico,Argentina, and Brazil: A Comparison

moved toward greater economic independence, but theprice was social unrest, militarism, and dictatorship. InIndia the conflict between growing expectations and thereality of colonial rule produced both a movement forindependence and an ethnic split that tore the nationapart. In sub-Saharan Africa demands for national self-determination and economic development were onlybeginning to be voiced by 1949 and did not come tofruition until the second half of the century.

Nationalism and the yearning for social justice werethe two most powerful forces for change in the earlytwentieth century. These ideas originated in the indus-trialized countries but resonated in the independentcountries of Latin America as well as in colonial regionssuch as the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa.However, they did not always unite people against theircolonial rulers or foreign oppressors; instead, they oftendivided them along social, ethnic, or religious lines.Western-educated elites looked to industrialization as ameans of modernizing their country and ensuring theirposition in it, while peasants and urban workers sup-ported nationalist and revolutionary movements in thehope of improving their lives. Often these goals were notcompatible.

■ Key TermsBlaise Diagne

African National Congress

Haile Selassie

Indian National Congress

Bengal

All-India Muslim League

Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi

Jawaharlal Nehru

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Emiliano Zapata

Francisco “Pancho” Villa

Lázaro Cárdenas

Hipólito Irigoyen

Getulio Vargas

import-substitution industrialization

Juan Perón

Eva Duarte Perón

■ Suggested ReadingOn Africa under colonial rule the classic overview is MelvilleHerskovits, The Human Factor in Changing Africa (1958). Twoexcellent general introductions are Roland Oliver and AnthonyAtmore, Africa Since 1800, 4th ed. (1994), and A. E. Afigbo et al.,

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The Making of Modern Africa, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century(1986). More detailed and challenging are UNESCO GeneralHistory of Africa, vols. 7 and 8; The Cambridge History of Africa,vols. 7 and 8; and Adu Boahen, African Perspectives on Colo-nialism (1987). Outstanding novels about Africa in the colo-nial era include Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (1964); BuchiEmecheta, The Joys of Motherhood (1980); and Peter Abraham,Mine Boy (1946).

For a general introduction to Indian history see Sumit Sarkar,Modern India, 1885–1947 (1983), and Percival Spear, India: AModern History, rev. ed. (1972). On the influenza epidemic of1918–1919 see Alfred W. Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic:The Influenza of 1918 (1989). The Indian independence move-ment has received a great deal of attention. Judith M. Brown’smost recent book on Gandhi is Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (1989).Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origin of Militant Nonviolence (1969) bynoted psychoanalyst Erik Erikson is also recommended. Twocollections of memoirs of the last decades of British rule areworth looking at: Charles Allen, ed., Plain Tales of the Raj: Imageof British India in the Twentieth Century (1975), and ZareerMasani, ed., Indian Tales of the Raj (1988). The transition fromcolonialism to partition and independence is the subject of thevery readable Freedom at Midnight (1975) by Larry Collins andDominique Lapierre. The environment is discussed in M. Gadgiland R. Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India(1993).

Thomas Skidmore and Peter Smith, Modern Latin America,3d ed. (1992), offers the best brief introduction. Two fine gen-

eral overviews of modern Mexican history are Enrique Krauze,Mexico: Biography of Power: A History of Modern Mexico, 1810–1996 (1997), and Colin MacLachlan and William Beezley, El GranPueblo: A History of Greater Mexico (1994). On the Mexican Rev-olution, two recent books are essential: Alan Knight, The Mexi-can Revolution, 2 vols. (1986), and John M. Hart, RevolutionaryMexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution(1987). But see also two classics by sympathetic Americans:Frank Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution: Mexico After 1910(1933), and Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution, 1914–1915 (1960). Mexico’s most celebrated revolutionary is the sub-ject of Manuel Machado, Centaur of the North: Francisco Villa,the Mexican Revolution, and Northern Mexico (1988). MarianoAzuela, The Underdogs (1988), is an interesting fictional ac-count of this period. The standard work on Brazil is E. BradfordBurns, A History of Brazil, 3d ed. (1993). On the environmentalhistory of Brazil, see Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle forRubber: A Study in Environmental History (1987). The history ofmodern Argentina is ably treated in David Rock, Argentina,1517–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (1987). MarkJefferson, Peopling the Argentine Pampas (1971), and JeremyAdelman, Frontier Development: Land, Labour and Capital onthe Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914 (1994),describe the transformation of the Argentinean environment.

■ Notes1. George Blanksten, Perón’s Argentina (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1953), 37.

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DOCUMENT 4Quotes from Mahatma Gandhi (Environment andTechnology, p. 805)

DOCUMENT 5The Partition of India (photo, p. 806)

What factors affect the reliability of Document 1?What additional types of documents would help youunderstand the role of nationalism in the strugglesfor independence in Vietnam and India from 1900to 1949?

Document-Based QuestionNationalism and the Strugglefor Independence, 1900–1949Using the following documents, assess the role ofnationalism in the struggles for independence inVietnam and India from 1900 to 1949

DOCUMENT 1A Vietnamese Nationalist Denounces French Colonialism(Diversity and Dominance, pp. 796–797)

DOCUMENT 2Map 30.1 The Partition of India, 1947 (p. 801)

DOCUMENT 3Quote from Jawarharlal Nehru (p. 804)

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