Contextualizing 19th-Century Perspectives and Political Developments

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Describe the broader context shaping how nationalist and imperialist sentiments developed across Europe between 1815 and 1914 (Skill 4.B; LO A).
• Account for KC-3.4: how European states struggled to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and revolutions.
• Account for KC-3.5: how a variety of motives and methods drove the intensification of European global control and produced rising tensions among the great powers.
• Account for KC-3.6: how European ideas and culture expressed an ongoing tension between objectivity and scientific realism on one hand and subjectivity and individual expression on the other.
• Identify how Continuity and Change applies across the unit — the substantial transformation of the European political map and intellectual landscape alongside the persistence of dynastic monarchies and traditional cultural patterns.

Unit 7 covers the principal political and intellectual developments of nineteenth-century Europe between roughly 1815 and 1914. The unit's three principal threads are political (the rise of nationalism, the unification of Italy and Germany, the late-century alliance system), imperial (the new imperialism in Africa and Asia and its effects), and intellectual (the post-1848 turn to realism and materialism, the late-century turn to relativism and modernism). Topic 7.1 introduces the three thread structure that organizes the unit and connects each thread to its specific Unit 7 topics.

The political thread. The first cluster is KC-3.4: European states struggled to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and revolutions. Topics 7.2 and 7.3 cover this cluster in detail. KC-3.4.II: the breakdown of the Concert of Europe (covered in Topic 6.6) opened the way for movements of national unification in Italy and Germany and for liberal reforms elsewhere. The 1848 revolutions had ended the Concert system. The Crimean War (1853-1856) further weakened the Ottoman Empire and the conservative diplomatic order. Italian unification (1859-1870) under Cavour's Realpolitik diplomacy and Garibaldi's popular military campaigns produced a unified Italian state. KC-3.4.III.B: Bismarck used Realpolitik — diplomacy, industrialized warfare, modern weaponry, and the manipulation of democratic mechanisms — to unify Germany through the wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866), and France (1870-1871).

KC-3.4.III: the unification of Italy and Germany reshaped the European balance of power and produced efforts to construct a new diplomatic order. KC-3.4.III.C: after 1871, Bismarck attempted to maintain the European balance of power through a complex alliance system aimed at isolating France. The Three Emperors' League (1873, renewed 1881), the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary (1879), the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy (1882), and the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia (1887) together constituted the Bismarckian system. KC-3.4.III.D: Bismarck's dismissal in 1890 by the new Kaiser Wilhelm II eventually produced a system of mutually antagonistic alliances and rising international tensions: the Franco-Russian Alliance (1894), the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale (1904), and the Anglo-Russian Entente (1907) faced the Triple Alliance. KC-3.4.III.E: nationalist tensions in the Balkans — the Bosnian crisis of 1908, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and the July 1914 crisis triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand — drew the great powers into the First World War.

Topic 7.2 also covers the broader development of nationalism. KC-3.3.I.F: nationalists encouraged loyalty to the nation through romantic idealism (Mazzini's Young Italy, the Grimm Brothers' German fairy-tale collection), liberal reform (the British, French, and Belgian liberal-nationalist tradition), political unification (the Italian and German cases), and racialist appeals tied to anti-Semitism (the Dreyfus Affair in France 1894-1906; the Christian Social Party in Germany; Karl Lueger's mayoralty in Vienna). KC-3.3.I.G: although western European Jews became more socially and politically integrated across the nineteenth century, Zionism — a form of Jewish nationalism, founded by Theodor Herzl with Der Judenstaat in 1896 and the First Zionist Congress in 1897 — emerged late in the century in response to growing anti-Semitism across Europe. KC-3.4.II.B: a new generation of conservative leaders (Napoleon III in France; Cavour in Piedmont-Sardinia; Bismarck in Prussia) used popular nationalism to create or strengthen the state. KC-3.4.II.C: the creation of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867 (the Ausgleich), which recognized the political weight of the Hungarian Magyar nobility, attempted to stabilize the Habsburg state by reconfiguring the basis of national unity.

The imperial thread. The second cluster is KC-3.5: a variety of motives and methods drove the intensification of European global control and produced rising tensions among the great powers. Topics 7.6 and 7.7 cover this cluster in detail. KC-3.5.I: European nations pursued new imperial ventures in Asia and Africa from a mix of economic, political, and cultural motivations. KC-3.5.I.A: European national rivalries and strategic concerns fueled imperial expansion and competition for colonies. KC-3.5.I.B: the search for raw materials and markets for manufactured goods, alongside strategic and nationalistic considerations, drove European colonization of Africa and Asia. KC-3.5.I.C: European imperialists justified overseas expansion and rule by claiming cultural and racial superiority — the "white man's burden" (Rudyard Kipling, 1899), the French mission civilisatrice, and Social Darwinism.

The new imperialism was made possible by second-wave technology. KC-3.5.II: industrial and technological developments, including the second industrial revolution, enabled European control of global empires. KC-3.5.II.A: advanced weaponry (the breech-loading rifle, the Maxim machine gun from 1884) ensured the military advantage of Europeans over the regions they colonized. KC-3.5.II.B: communication and transportation technologies (steamships, the Suez Canal opened 1869, the telegraph, the European-controlled railway networks in colonized territories) supported the creation and expansion of European empires. KC-3.5.II.C: advances in medicine — Pasteur's germ theory, anesthesia, antiseptics, and quinine for malaria suppression — enabled European survival in tropical Africa and Asia. By 1900, European powers controlled most of Africa (the principal exception being Ethiopia, which defeated the Italian invasion at Adwa in 1896) and large parts of South and Southeast Asia.

KC-3.5.III: imperial endeavors substantially affected society, diplomacy, and culture in Europe and produced resistance to foreign control abroad. KC-3.5.III.A: imperialism produced diplomatic tensions among European states that strained the alliance systems — the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 (regulating European partition of Africa), the Fashoda Incident of 1898 (Anglo-French confrontation in the Sudan), and the Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911 (Franco-German confrontation). KC-3.5.III.B: imperial encounters shaped the styles and subjects of European artists and writers and provoked debate over the acquisition of colonies (J. A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study, 1902; Vladimir Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1917). KC-3.5.III.C: as non-Europeans became educated in Western values, they challenged European imperialism through nationalist movements (the Indian National Congress, founded 1885; the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901; the Egyptian nationalist movement) and through the modernization of local economies and societies (Meiji Japan from 1868 most notably).

The intellectual thread. The third cluster is KC-3.6: European ideas and culture expressed an ongoing tension between objectivity and scientific realism on one hand and subjectivity and individual expression on the other. Topics 7.4, 7.5, and 7.8 cover this cluster. KC-3.6.II: after the revolutions of 1848, Europe turned toward a realist and materialist worldview. KC-3.6.II.A: positivism (Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Emile Durkheim) emphasized rational and scientific analysis of nature and human affairs as the only reliable form of knowledge. KC-3.6.II.B: Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) produced a scientific and material account of biological change and human development that became, through the work of Herbert Spencer and others, the foundation of Social Darwinism — the racialist application of biological-evolutionary categories to human societies. KC-3.6.II.D: realist and materialist themes shaped art and literature, with painters and writers depicting the lives of ordinary people and drawing attention to social problems (Gustave Courbet, Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy).

Late in the century, a counter-movement developed. KC-3.6.III: a new relativism in values and a loss of confidence in the objectivity of knowledge produced modernism in intellectual and cultural life. KC-3.6.III.A: philosophy moved largely from rational interpretations of nature and human society toward an emphasis on irrationality and impulse (Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel). KC-3.6.III.B: Freudian psychology offered a new account of human nature emphasizing the irrational and the struggle between the conscious and subconscious mind (Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, 1900; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905). KC-3.6.III.C: developments in the natural sciences — Max Planck's quantum theory (1900) and Albert Einstein's special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1915) — undermined the primacy of Newtonian physics as an objective description of nature. KC-3.6.III.D: modern art (Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism) moved beyond representational forms toward the subjective, abstract, and expressive (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse).

Topic 7.1 thus introduces the framework Unit 7 will fill in. The Unit's central message is that the second half of the nineteenth century produced both substantial change (the unification of Italy and Germany; the new imperialism; the post-1848 turn to realism and modernism) and substantial continuity (the persistence of dynastic monarchies in most European states; the continued centrality of Christianity in popular religious life; the durable influence of Romanticism on national mythologies). Topic 7.9 closes the unit by asking students to construct the causation argument explicitly — how did nationalist and imperialist movements influence European and global stability across the long nineteenth century?

Three sources framing Unit 7's three threads: Bismarck on Realpolitik (the political thread), Kipling on the imperial mission (the imperial thread), and Darwin on natural selection (the intellectual thread).

1. (Continuity and Change, Skill 4.B) Account for the broader context shaping how nationalist and imperialist sentiments developed across Europe between 1815 and 1914. How did the conditions of Unit 6 (industrialization, the breakdown of the Concert of Europe, the new ideologies) translate into the specific Unit 7 transformations?
2. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-3.4: how did European states struggle to maintain international stability in an age of nationalism and revolutions? Identify three specific developments (Italian unification, German unification, the post-1871 alliance system).
3. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-3.5: how did the new imperialism intensify European global control between 1815 and 1914? Identify three specific motives and three specific technologies that enabled the imperial expansion.
4. (Continuity and Change) Account for KC-3.6: how did European intellectual and cultural life shift from realism and materialism (after 1848) to relativism and modernism (after 1880)? Cite specific representatives of each movement.
5. (Continuity and Change) Compare what changed and what continued by 1914. Identify two substantial changes (the Italian and German unifications; the new imperialism) and two substantial continuities (the persistence of dynastic monarchies; the continued centrality of Christianity in popular religious life).

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.