UNIT 23 POLITICAL REVOLUTION:

FRANCE
Structure
23.1 I~troduction
23.2 French Revolution and the Emergence of New Political Culture
23.2.1 The Ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity
23.2.2 The Concept of Republican State
23.2.3 Modern Views on Representation
23.2.4 The Theory of Revolutionary Conspiracy

23.3 Nationalism and Sovereignty

23.4 The Idea of Plebiscite and TotalitarianRegime
23.5 French Revolution and SocialistIdeology
2 3.6 The Cultural Legacy
23.7 Revolution and Gender
23.8 Summary
23.9 Key Words
23.10 Exercises

23.1 INTRODUCTION
At the undergraduate level you may have studied the course of events of the French
Revolution and what this Revolutiontried to achieve. In this Unit we shall examine
what the modem world owes to this great event by analyzing its direct and indirect
impact.
The French Revolution along withthe American War of Independence,is given credit
for movements such as liberalism, democracy and nationalism, although many of
these ideas became greatly transformed in the second half of the nineteenth and in
the early twentieth centuries. No other idea has had such a deep impact on the
emerging nations as the ideas of equality, liberty and fraternity. These concepts
found expressionin many different ways because although tliey had different meanings
for different sections of society, they nonetheless enjoyed a universal appeal. As
movements, they were directly linked with political expression and social protests
and the French Revolution became a source of inspiration for many of the subsequent
movements. Before going into a detailed discussion of those aspects of the revolution
that shaped the modern world, it would be useful to brieflv stuuy the direction the
revolution took.
Like in many other parts of Europe, a conflict was everging between the old regime
and the new social forces in France. The state . ~France
r was in a deep financial
crisis and the subject of taxation brought the issue ofprivilegeto the forefront. The
calling of the Estates General to tackle the taxation problem sparked off the crisis.
Clergy and nobility constituted a very small minority of populatio~~2;: -nioyed most
of the privileges and were represented in the first two estates while the rest of over
90 per cent of population remained burdened with taxation and many of them had to
 Revolutions pay many seigniorial dues but had amuch lesser representation. 1 5 spolitical system
was questioned by the newly emerging classes. They were deeply imbued with the
ideals ofpoliticalreform, flowing fiom the ideas of the Enlightenment. The elections
of the Estates General activated all sectionsof the society. While the mobility tried
to capture its losing power and safeguard its privileges, the representatives ofthe
middle class attempted to alter the power structure. In the words of Prof. Goodwin,
the revolution began as 'a merciless war between aristocracy and democracy. But
just a couple of years back, in 1787, aristocracy had made a strong onslaught on
despotism.' The events of 1789 rapidly outran all expectations. These were
simultaneous outbreaks of the urban poor, leading to the famous capture of Bastille
on July 14,1789.
The representatives of the third estate declared themselves as the National Assembly
and began creating a new France through debates and experiments. The rural
population on an unprecedented scale forced the National Assembly to end all
forms ofprivilegesincluding f m c i a l and legal. The new Constitution of 1791 and
the confiscation of Church property radically transformed the stated structure of
1
France and altered the basis of power and authority. The strong popular pressure
of the lower classes pushed the revolution towards radical republicanism. The
flood of revolutionary ideas and experimentscould not be confined to the borders
of France and the revolutionary government of France began exporting the new
principles by propaganda and war. Thus, the revolutionary events rapidly outran all
expectations.and the break with the past became irrevocable. As a result during the
nineteenth century, France became a laboratory of social and political theories. In
this Unit, we shall try to explain:
how the French Revolution was an attempt to break with the past;
how a modern political culture emerged, based on the principle of liberty,
equality and national sovereignty;
in what ways the revolution contributed to the modem ideas of democracy
based on the practice of representation, the ideas of plebiscite and the
importance of public opinion;
how the fear of revolution led to the theory of revolutionaryconspiracy for the
hture generations; and
how the ideas of modern nationalism and socialism had their roots in the
revolutionitself

23.2 FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE

EMERGENCE OF NEW POLITICAL
CULTURE
I

In recent years, scholars have broadened the period of the French Revolution to
almost the last three decades of the eighteenth century when revolutionarypolitics
had begun to take shape. The creation of new political rhetoric and the development
of new symbolic forms of political practice transformedcontemporarynotions about
politics, which became an instrument for reshaping society. People of France had a
strong belief that they could establish a new national community based on reason
and natural law according to the spirit of enlightenment, without reference to the
customs ofthe past. Such high ambitions demanded new political practices for their
realization. As Franqois Furet suggests, France through revolution invented
6 democratic culture and revealed to the world one of the basic forms of historical
consciousnessof action. If the Revolution inventednew structuresand upset the old Political Revolution:
ones, it also set in motion new forces to transform the traditional mechanisms of
politics. The Revolutiontook over an empty space and then proliferated within that.
For Furet, the French Revolution was essentially a political phenomenon. It led to a
profound transformation of political discourse involving new but powerlid forms of
political symbolism and experimented in radical forms of political action which was
unprecedented and unanticipated.
In the political dialoguebetween societies and their states, the Revolutiontipped
scales in favour of society against the state. The ancient regime was dominated by
the king; the Revolution turned it into people's achievement. From the 'kingdom
of subjects' France became a nation of citizens. The old society was based on
privilege; the Revolution established equality. The Revolution created an ideology
of a radical break with the-past.Everything -the economy, society and politics
yielded to the force of new ideology. The revolution, according to Keith Michael
Baker, marked the transformation of the discursive practice of the community, a
moment in which social relations were reconstituted and the relationship between
individual, communityand state radically transformed. As the Revolution progressed,
it coined new vocabulary of politics and culture. It accumulated its own symbols
and religious overtones and provided new definitions of patriotism and war. For
Robespierre, the famous Jacobin leader, the revolution became a war of liberty
against its ~nemies.'Its intensity, its reforming zeal and its war against privilege
made it' as Mcmmcrs l~tites,'a fort of forcing house where in the ideals of the
future, and their perversions, were Liol~ehtto early maturity'.
It should also be borne in mind that the Revolution in France was not pre-planned.
The overthrow of the government was followed by intense confusion and opened
the gates of political discourse and contestations. In this situation, certain kind of
actions and arguments took on meanings that often went far beyond what the actors
or leaders intended. The emergence of modem political culture destroyed the
absolutistmonarchy and brought about a political orderunder which the nationexisted
as a collective body. Various efforts were made to reconstitute the meanbg of ,
public right and redefine the nature of social order. According to K.M. Baker, the.
three strands of discourse in the late eighteenth century were -justice, will a~d
reason. The emergence, elaboration and interpretation of these three discourses
defined the political culture that emerged in France and provided the ideological
framework to the subsequent changes. These discourses provided grounds for the
abolition of feudal structure in France. Thus, the Revolution had begun a new era
but its ideologies and institutional himework gradually developedas a consequence
of debates and struggles within as well as outside France.
23.2.1 The Ideas of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity
No doubt, the ideas like liberty, equality, kternity and so on had existed sometimes
in a very confused or abstract form in many societies but in France, during the
revolutionary era, these became the guiding principlec for me law makers. The
American Revolution of 1776had also declared all mec Lorn 'free and equal'. The
Congress of the representatives of the thirteen coloni~shad asserted that all men are
born equal and have certain natural rights which a- inalienable and cannot be taken
away. But the American Constitution r e m a i r ~ silent on the significant question of
slavery and postponed the demand for extension of the franchise to them. The
slavery issued had divided the American nation during the Civil War (1861- 1865).
In France, these ideas became the defining conceptsthat had impact ILU; c d y upon
the western civilization but also worked their way into the history of 19" and 20"
century Europe, America and 4sia.
By liberty,the revolutionaries meant the right to act within the world with responsibility
to no one but oneself. It was an idea that remained dear to those who made the
French Revolution and one which pervaded the reforms. The Revolution founded
a potent new tradition of liberty. Protestants, Jews and Free Thinkers gained
toleration both in France and in the French dominated regions. The first official
document of the French Revolution -the Declaration of the Rights of Ma11- stated
the ideas of liberty and equality and efforts were made to embody them in the new
regime to form the chief theme of the French politics in the nineteenth century.
 Political Revolution:
A few lines from a contemporary poem bring out the spirit of the time- France

Oh you who are discouraging by nothing?

True lovers of Liberty
Establish e q d t y
On the debris of slavery
Republican Frenchmen, conquerors of your rights,
Strike down all these tyrants, profaners of the law.
* These revolutionary sloganshave become the torch-bearers for many of the countries
in the age of decolonization.
The continuing chain of revolutions which spread from Spain (1 820) to Naples and
Sicily (1 820), Piedmont (1821) and finally to France (1 830) clearly shows the
unending appeal of the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity.
23.2.2 The Concept of Republican State
The idea of a Republican state was not the product of the French Revolution as
there existed many republican states in the ancient world- in Greece, Rome and in
India. But the French Republic was based on a modem ideological platform. It
was created with the support of a liberal constitution and popular base. The world
'republic' has become insersdble fiom the Revolution with two high points:
The year 1789 when the sovereignty of the monarch was replaced by the
sovereigntyof the nation; and
The 1792 when the monarch was deposed and the liberal republic was
established.
Interestingly,in the French tradition, the word 'republic' has retained a powerful
emotional importance even though its institutional structures remained weak. The
principle of republic was subverted by persons of despotic traits on many occasions.
Modem politics can be said to have begun in the revolutionary decade, giving birth
to terms like 'right' and 'left'. The French Revolution had dividedthe people between
liberals and conservatives. The liberals generally moved towards republicanism
with wide suffrage, individual rights, fieedom of speech and expression, and election
of the head of the State. The conservatives resisted change and laid stress on
discipline,dutiesand social hierarchy. The unprecedentedchallenge of the Revolution
crystallized the political thinking ofthe conservatives. Many of them opposed reforms
based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. Both these ideologies played a determining
role in popular movements creating a sharp and antipathic division in nineteenth
century Europe. The French exported the idea of republicanism against the English
preference for monarchy and conservatism. The Republic in France is now firmly
established. The "Mareillaise'' is no more a battle song but her national anthem and
the Fourteenth of July is the national holiday, remembered as the Republic Day. So
'the currents ofturbulence and ideological dissidence which flowed most strongly
after 1789' according to C.A. Bayly, 'forced ruling groups to reconstitute the
ideologicalfoundations of the state and partially to modernize itY.They drew fiom a
variety of sources, especially the Enlightenment. It was this shift in the basis and
structure of traditional states that led to the popularity of new principles like
republicanism and liberalism.
Revolutions 23.2.3 Modern Views on Representation

Robespierre believed that the sovereign people, once their institutions were
established, would do for themselves all that they could do well and their delegates
would cany out what the people could not do. The supportersof Rousseau, however,
faced problems because the social contract stated that 'a people which gives itself
representatives is no longer h e ' . Citing the English practice, Rousseau argued that
the English people were free only at election time. In fact, the social contract of
Rousseau offered an abstract antithesis of the political and social order of the ancient
regime. The corporate society of orders and Estates was rejected in this work and
was to be replaced by a society based on equality of individuals bound by the
common status of citizenship. To achieve the freedom of the citizens, Rousseau ,
transfenied sovereignty from the monarch to the body of citizens as a whole. It is
not the individual's will but the general will ofthe whole body of citizens that prevails.
Rousseau's definition of social contract suggeststhat the sovereigntythus created
through a collective will could neither be alienated nor represented. Sovereign
authority of a monarch conferred by the people did not express the general will but
only that of a particular person. Once this general will is lost in this way, it dissolves
into a multiplicity of individuals who find themselves subjectto the will of another.
The social contract of Rousseau, therefore, offered a definite repudiation of
%
representation as incompatiblewith the spirit of the general will.

The supporters of the Revolution felt that for a large state like France, Rousseau's
principles had to be modified. Sieyes, one of the most important leaders of the
liberal revolution, concluded that the people can neither speak nor act, except through
their representatives. This view met objections fiom the Right, particularly fiom the
nobles who subscribed to the distinction of Orders. Later on, in the period of
Terror, Sieyes' view of representation met with opposition fiom the Left. The spread
of Rousseau's ideas, the popular participation, and deteriorating economic
circumstances created a demand for direct democracy, where deputies could be
recalled from the Sectional ~ s s e m bofl ~paris and new representativesnominated,
where people could intervene in state affairs by insurrections and the administration
of popular justice could be introduced.
Keith Michael Baker traces the roots ofthe social theory of representation to the
days of Louis XIV's reign when a group of reformers gathered around the Duc De
Bourgogne demanding the restoration of traditional provincial estates. But it was
the Physiocratic writings of Mirabeau and Quesney which transformed these ideas
into a modern theory of representation of society and social interests. Mirabeau in
his work L 'Amides hommes ' (The Friend of Men) established the righi; =.f 2 q x r t y
as the fundamental law of every society. He suggested the decentralization of
administrationthrough the creation of provincial assemblies composed of propzl-ty
owners. Till this stage,the proponents of the social theory of representation propose6
assembliesbut this was not meant to give voice to political will of the nation. It was
concerned with the rational representation of social interests.

The theory ofrepresentationwas given a modern content throughthe political debates

of 1788 and 1789. It was reworked and changed fiom some of its earlier meanings
when the deputies revolted against the old order based on the traditional force of
representation, andjustified their action by an appeal to the principle of general will.
Sieyes' Qu 'est-ceque be TierEtat? (What is the Third Estate?) provided solutions
to some ofthe thorny problems raised in political debates. He legitimized the
Revolution of the deputies in the name of national sovereignty and this led to the
 Political Revolution:
was the fusion of the idea of the general will with the concept of representation, Prance
achieved in the course of constitutional debates that took place over formation of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

The Erench Revolution brought about a fundamental transformation in the concept

of representation, thereby contributingto avibrant form of democracy. The traditional
perception of representationhad located unity and identityin the person of an absolute
monarch. Rousseau had suggested that it could be found only in the body of the
citizens taken as a whole. For Sieyes, a complex modern society could achieve
unity only in the national assembly. But it was far fiom a complete solution. Instead,
it introduced tensions into revolutionary discourse. Yet, it provided an ideological
foundation to the modern concept of representative government - an ideal that
influenced so many liberals of the nineteenth century.

Although, the French theorists had provided the idea of the 'sovereignty of the
people' they could not transform it into reality for anurnber of reasons. The effective
instrument needed to translate ideas into practice was a coherent party system.
During the revolutionary era, there was hardly any political party. One does talk of
the Girondins and the Montagnards as the parties of those days but in reality these
were more like shifting groups based on friendshipor personal loyalties without
party organization. They hardly represented public opinion or contested on distinct
ideology. Besides, the French democraticexperiments were carried out in the most
adverse conditions, when French had plunged into war in 1792. The Revolution
s another stage -the period of Terror and it is
drifted away from its original i d ~ dInto
commonlydescribed as the beginning of 'totalitarian democracy' under Robespierre.
Although he was l l l y aware that the revolutionary dictatorshipwould be a temporary
experiment and not the end of the democracy, his interpretation of Rousseau and
general will was conveniently used by dictators of the modern period to justifj their
actions.

23.2.4 The Theory of Revolutioaary Conspiracy

The polarization of Europe's politics into Left and Right also encouraged new ideas
of the revolution which led to radical upheavals and subversion of such basic social
institutions as family and property. By lgh century, the Revolution had become a
universal force-an ideological form of politics that first influenced Europe and then
the world. This resulted in the constructionof a conspiracy theory on the origins of
the Revolution. The Revolution began to be seen by many (like Edmund Burke) as
a conspiracy by an active minority who were fed by the teaching of philosophers
and had all veneration for ancient institutions and demanded anew deal. This minority
was poisoned by the new doctrines and in the name of democracy undermined
authority and damaged social stability. Many (likeAustrian Chancellor Metternich)
feared the outbreak of revolution in other parts of Europe and this gave birth to the
theory of conspiracy which haunted many gove&nents and conservativeleaders.

The general impressionpersisted throughout the nineteenth century that the French
Revolution was the outcome of conspiracy for which contemporary groups like
freemasonry and men of revolutionary ideology were held responsible for
overthrowing 'legitimate' authorities. The conspiracytheories promoted and sustained
the language of civil war in politics. Many political battles were fought against
imaginary foes. Abbe Barmel and the famous novelist Alexandre Dumas were
among those influential writers who created the popular impressionthat fieemasons
supported revolutions in order to hann monarchy throughout Europe. They were
also held responsible for undermining the power of the Catholic Church. Several
Revolutions versions of this myth persisted throughout the nineteeilth century. No doubt,
&masonry in France was popular with the left-wingpoliticians but they were seldom
centres of conspiracy. They only remained platforms for political discussion. Even
till the beginning of the twentieth century, they attracted radicals and some socialists.
Their critics saw them as the homes of threatening and subversive activities. This
theory of conspiracy was revived with its old myth when the civil war erupted in
Paris after the Franco-Prussianwar in 1870-71. This impression was created because
some Parisian freemasons had tried to mediate between the rebels and the
government. Interestingly, Nicholas Deschamps in his book Les Societe k et la
Societe (The Societies and the Society) saw freemasonry behind the German
unification. The conspiracy theory was also applied throughout the nineteenth
century to Protestants, Jesuits and Jews. The Jews were also accused of plotting
the rise of Prussia under Bismarck, in association with Protestants and
fieemasons. The publication of Edouard Dnunont's best seller La France Juive
(The French Jew Woman) in 1886 saw the beginning of anti-Jewish propaganda in
many parts of Europe. Anti-semitism became a major conservative theme in the
late nineteenth century. An anti-semitic paranoia got a major twist in France
through the Dre* affair (1894 - 99). Its aftermath could be seen even during the
Second World War. The formation of International Socialism in London in 1864,
consistingof labour representatives and socialist parties of some European nations,
was seen by many in context of the theory of conspiracy. There were many who
held it responsible for the Paris Commune of 1871. Interpreting political events
in terms of conspiracies is a tendency whose origins can be easily treated to the
days of French Revolution.

23.3 NATIONALISM AND SOVEREIGNTY

Among the forces that were to shape the developments in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, nationalism proved to be of tremendous importance. The French
Revolution provided anew definition of nation. France became anation when the
association of fiee citizens declared their rights to constitute the sole source of
sovereignty. Sieye's famous exposition Qu 'est-ce-que le Tiers Etat? (What is the
Third Estate?) provided a political definition of the nation 'as inalienable common
will'. This conception of nation had many implications. It lllcant that a nation was a
body of associateslivingunder a common law, enjoyingthe status of citizens, having
a relationship of equality by excluding all forms of privilege based on birth or social
rank. The second implication inherent in the definition of the nztion became
problematic as it was not universally accepted. Sieye's conception of nation,
possessing an inalienable and unitary common will, meant a rejecticrl of thc ancient
laws and ideasthat upheld claimsfor tmditional organizations and instiithorn, including
the theory of divine rights. He insisted on the link between a unitary represe~tztion
and a unitary national will that he considered crucial in transformingthe Es:zf,tes
General into aNationalAssembly. Thus, popular sovereignty lay at the heart of the
Revolution and was closely linked to nationalism.

In c o n a t to the revolutionary notion of nationalism, the eighteenthcentury concept

of nation was aptly defined by Diderot in his Eneycropedie. In this, he described it
as a 'corrective word used to denote a considerable quantity of people who inhabit
a certain extent of country defined with certain limits, and obeying the same
government'. Giving primacy to the diplomatic needs and securityconcerns, states
were handed over, without paying heed to popular will, to foreign rulers as
compensations, peace bribes or rewards of victory. The leaders of the Concert of
Europe adoptedthe same methods to safeguardthemselves against the futurethreats
 Political Revolution:
by redrawing the map of Europe. However, such arrangementscould not last long France
and a strong wave of nationalism swept across Europe, beginning with the Greek
and Belgium movements, reaching its heights in 1848.

The French nationalism was fostered and strengthened by various methods. The
Fete de Law Federation of 14 July 1790had proclaimed and enacted the unity of
the nation. By means of revolution and war, a large section of the population was
made aware of belonging to the nation. The involvement of the people in national life
from 1789 to 1815, in 1830, 1848 and 1870-71 made France a unique nation -
revolutionarymodel for others and a standard bearer of political progress. National
identity of France was redefined in 1889by the nationalists by providing legal and
cultural definitions. However, this debate remained inconclusive. All through these
years, the French governments had organized grand festivals to instill a sense of
national unity and promote a national memory. This included celebrating fetes like
14July with military bands, parades, fire works, ehbitions, playing national anthem
and creating national symbols, and by unveiling statues of republican heroes right
across the country. These festivities have now become a common practice in almost
all the nations to forge the spirit of national unity.

The role of the French Revolution in giving rise to nationalist feelings in other
countries of Europe, was usually not direct. The French notions of nationalism
often led to inspiration, administration and on a number of occasions, resulted in
fear and resistance. According to C.A. Bayly, the thing that did most to
radicalize the Revolution was the invasion of France by the great powers. The
presence of foreign armies on French soil released a wave of resistance in
France, then across the borders of France under Napoleon and in Europe itself. It
released extraordinary energy in the name of nationalism.Napolean's attempt to
create a German federation after the annexation of German lands on the left
I bank of Rhine from 1801to 18 14, revolutionized the German political structure
and swept away its medieval foundations. The French reorganized and
secularized the ecclesiastical statesand the German states, abolished fke cities and
I
the imperial nobility and attacked the feudal relics. The practical effect of all these
measures was the reduction in the Catholic and the Habsburg character of Germar~j.
The influence of the larger slates, particularly Prussia increased manifold and the
1 number of political units of Germany greatly reduced from about 300 states to only
i 3 8 by 18 15. Thus the process of German unification was set in notion. The French
had also annexed Belgium for opposing the French while the kingdom of Italy was
kept in economic tutelage for financial gains. Some of the Italian principalities were
given away to the French ruling houses as rewards. Napoleon's rule caused strong
popular resentment in these places. The critics of Napoleon rightly point out that his
regime was the 'negation of nationality'. There is no doubt that Napoleon's rule
I also led to the imposition of French model of administration with institutions like
secular education, civil code and prefect systems. Napoleon's defeat led to the
liberationof these lands but the imperial institutions ofNapoleoi1;-2z lasting impact.
Metternich tried to reverse all this through Vienna Congress, yet the old patterns
could never be restored completely. Here too, the principle of national unity began
to influencethe political movements.

The process of national unification in recent times has been achievedthrough various
means -railways, expandingbureaucracies, administrative centralization, expansion
of markets and economic regulations, education, mass media, prcri;zgzvda through
modem means of communication and by promoting cultural identity. Quite apart
from these, ideological factors too have promoted national feelings. The Franco-
Prussian War of 1871 was the direct outcome of the passionate nationalism and
Revolutions popular sentimentsthat not only changed the political boundaries of Europe but also
upset the traditional power equation.

Modem forms of nationalism manifested themselves in various ways between the

French Revolution and the world wars. They revealed idealist, selfishand aggressive
characteristics. Nationalism sometimes assumed sinister forms and has often been
used as a vehicle for invasion and domination. Under the Nazi rule, it became
insaneand demonic. Modern definitionsof nationalism lay stresson common descent,
language,territory, cultural and ethnicbonds. The experiencesof nineteenth century
have left a large space for illogical emotions and hatred that was fed by myths and
distortions of history to stir popular feelings.

Wars greatly shaped national identity and the model for this was provided by
France. The cult of Napoleon provided France with a great moment of
national triumph. The wars of Louis Napoleon in 1854,1859 and 1870 aroused
strong national feelings and were made to satisfy national aspirations. The
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries saw almost every Western state
glorifying military ceremonies, national symbols and mass conscriptions,
thereby making war an instrument of national consciousness. It was the force of
nationalism that propelled European states towards the First World War. Thg
rise of Japan in Asia was achieved through promoting nationalist spirit while its
absence in China delayed her emergenceas a nation-state. The French Revolution,
thus acted as a catalyst in the development and later the domination of modern
nationalism, first in Europe and subsequently in the rest of the world. French
nationalism became as much of a model as a threat for the outsiders. The resolute
nationalist spirit drew a great deal from the Enlightenmentphilosophies and had a
global appeal and global consequences.

23.4 THE IDEA OF PLEBISCITE AND

TOTALITARIAN REGIME
The use of plebiscite as a device to settle disputes or to provide legitimacy to a
debatable action had its origin in the French Revolution. In 1790the citizens of
Avignon declared their desire to be united with th'e rest of France. They were
French speaking and were bound with the French culture but Avignon was a papal
territory. This action of the people ofAvignon brought an issue to the forefront that
later became one of the most important sources of conflict and change during the
nineteenth century-that was the principle of self - determination or the right of the
people to choose their own allegiance. It ran contrary to the generally accepted
principle that suggested that a ruler's sovereignty was derived from divine sanction.
This right of self-determination, like the democraticprinciple, was closelyrelated to
the French Revolution and this passion for self-determination redrew the map of
Europe in the nineteenth century. Many of the Italian States under Austrian rule
succeeded in joining the union. The Latin American States of Spain and Portugal
achieved independencebetween 1808 and 1826. The French Revolution had left
its mark on these actions.

The establishment of the Jacobin Republic in 1793was another decisive event that
had along term impact. Robespiem's action of setting up a republican government
with a ~ w e r f uexecutive
l was basically a temporary experiment and was not meant
to be an end of democracy. His reinterpretation of Rousseau to legitimize his rule
gave many dictators a pretext to justifl their actions. Hence, the modern totalitarian
states, particularly of the twentieth century, are usually seen as the legacy of the
 Political Revolution:
French Revolution. Strongwar-time dictatorshipshad been established in the earlier France
period but the quasi-democraticdevice of plebiscite was the by product of the French
Revolution. A number of arbitrary measures were adopted during the Revolution
which were given legal sanction by way of plebiscite. Many fraudulent method
became a common practice undgthe Bonapartist regime. A new Constitutionwas
passed by an unusually large dajority and in 1802, Bonaparte became Consulate
for life withjust 8000 votes polled against him. With another plebiscite he became
the Emperor of France with over three and a half million votes in his favour against
mere 2579. Similarplebiscites were held by Louis Napoleon. Under the totalitarian
regimes of the twentieth century, the dictatorshipshave gained approval with foul
means and many scholars hold the French Revolution responsible for this misuse of
democracy.

23.5 FRENCH REVOLUTION AND SOCIALIST

IDEOLOGY
Although, the French Revolution was a liberal and not a socialistrevolution, some
currents of socialism could be found in various guises on the eve of the Revolution -
a few aspects of it provided later socialists with inspiration and heroes. It is true that
there was a gulf between the most radical social thinkers of the eighteenth century
and the mociem aoctrines of socialism but some of the writings and speeches of the
revolution era were the driving fcrm in the hrm of protest against poverty, exploitation
and inequality. Montesquieu, who himself came from an aristocraticfamily, said that
the state owed allits citizens an assured subsistenceand healthy life. Similar sentiments
were expressed by other thinkers and officials in France. Although there was no
real socialist doctrine in France in 1789but the passion for equality existed at every
stage, even though the opposition was more against social rather than economic
privilege.

The French Revolution protected property rights vehemently but it was not for
total concentration of property and wealth. The egalitarian thought is reflected
in Robespierre's speech of 5 February 1794 when he said that 'Comme1;e is
the source of public wealth and not just of the monstrous opulence of a feh
families'. When the Church lands were auctioned, one argument in the debate was
the need of making property more widespread, so that a larger number of people
would become the supporters of the new order. Toward'sthe end of 1789,a society
was formed called the Cerle Social (Social Circle), to educate the people. In this,
Abbe Fauchet highlighted the egalitarian implications of the social contract, and
asked for a gradual division of land. However, many of these proposals were
suppressed.

When the Revolution turned into war, the economic repercussions like food
shortages, steepinflation, black-marketing, etc. led to the reinforcement of egalitarian
ideas, with popular demand for equality and state rec*l-tion of economy. There
were several small groups who were demanding or plarmg action. Some of them
enjoy a special place in the ancestry of modern socia~sm.Apart h m Cercle Social,
Marx and Engels mention the names of Keclerc ar koux as precursors of socialism.
Together with some others like Varlet, they fofi-.-ed a group demandingradicalreforms
and came to be called ~ n k ~ e They
s . were individual enthusiastsand not bound by
single ideology except their fight for the poor against the rich. Jacques Roux, a priest
of the constitutionalchurch in Paris, claimed that the produce of the lani .klonged to
all men. His followers declared that physical need is the only basis of property.
society. Varlet too carried forward the egalitarian virtues and felt that so long as the
majority of population remained subject to the tyranny of the rich, Rousseau's
concept of direct democracy would remain an illusion. Leclerc, the revolutionary
journalist compared the mercantile and bourgeois class to aristocracy and raised a
slogan that 'all men have an equal right to eat.'

The Herbertists represented the voice of the urban poor. Herbert was a mythical
personality and reflected the aspirations and fears of the Sans Culottes, a lower
middle class category consisting of artisans and small shopkeepers who strongly
supportedthe success of the Revolution Herbert divided the Third Estate between
bourgeoisie and the people. They all preached a war gainst the rich. In 1795 - 96,
Noel Babenfled arising called the conspiracy of Equals, that was almost communist.
He reflected the collective spirit and his original solutionswere utopian in character
- an idea of total abolition of private property.

The French socialist ideology resurfaced during the period of Restoration (1815 -
1830) and in July Monarchy. Pierre Joseph Proudhon's views, according to Karl
Marx, marked an important stage in popular thought. He was one of those who
helped the working class to become conscious of itself. His writings against profit
making had idealized artisans,criticized industrializationand excessive division of
labour and called for absolute equality of incomes. The socialist impact led to the
coming of class war in 1848 and then in 187 1. During the Paris Commune, the
Paris workers made determined attempt to govern themselves. Words like class
war, proletariat and workers solidarity came fiom France in the socialist vocabulary.
All through the twentieth century, France remained an important centre of socialism
and socialist thought.

THE CULTURAL LEGACY

The French Revolution was like an explosion and a violent upheaval. Events like
this often destroy many aspects of the past culture. The destructive experience of
the revolution was not expected to give birth to durable creations but the Revolution
of 1789 signifiesan idea of fundamental change.

The French people had to confront the collapse of the whole social order. What is
termed as the ancien regime, and from its rubbles and chaos they had to assemble
a new order. This provided limitlesspossibilities of innovationto the revolutionaries.
Like the people of other regions, the Frenchmen did not have much of a politicai
vocabulary before 1789 as politics centred at Vessailles, the royal court. However.
the elections to the Estates General brought the common man of the street into the
national politics. The lower section of the populace began participating in street
marches and political insurrections. It affected not only the nature ofpolitics but
contributed to the sudden formation of a revolutionary language based on new
political vocabulary. New words or phrases were coined to express popular
demands. Words like citizen rights, sovereignty, representation and patriotism
received new meanings. Thousands of brochures, pamphlets, caricatures and
cartoons, plays, newspaper articles came out explaining the new ideology. Stage
plays were enacted on political and revolutionary themes, folk songs were sung
with changed meanings, popular fetes were organized and a revolutionary calendar
was introduced in France. All these developments were contributing to the creation
of new revolutionary culture. Traditional centres of public sphere were adapting
themselves accordingto the revolutionary atmosphere. New concepts of time and
space came into being based on the principles of rationalism and naturalism.
 Political Revolution:
France

(Left) A contemporary seal shows My, ianne, the image of the republic. (Right) A more aggressive
engraving showing "The French people overwhelming the Hydra of Federation." (August 1793).
The Image of tlie Repubkic

The revolutionaries had provided a new division of time by preparing a

1
I
revolutionary calendar in which a month was to consist ofthree weeks of ten days
each, and a year divided into twelve months. The remaining five days were
declared patriotic days to include civil qualities like virtue, genius, labour, reward
I
I
and opinion. Each day of the week was given a new name, which was dedicated to
some aspect ofrural life. The names of the rulers and queens were swiftly removed
from Paris streets and new names were given. Words like Le Roy or Le Roi (the
king) were replaced by la loi (the liberty). Eventhe pictures of king, queen and jack
were replaced with revolutionary symbols. The new expressions and political
vocabularyhad eroded the sacred positionofthe king. The ritual use ofthe language
like swearing and oaths provided to the revolutionaries a means of reconstituting
moral basis ofthe community. The formation of new political culture had its stamp
I
on the French culture. Theatre, art and music came under strong revolutionary
influence.
The coming of the Revolution influenced thejournalistic press. The newspapers like
Mercure, Brissot's Patriote Francaise (French Patriots) and Barere's Point du
Tour (The Turning Point) provided direct message to the people and popularized
the revolutionary ideology. Thesepapers demonstrated the role of politicaljournalism
to the future revolutionaries including intellectuals like Karl Marx. There was a
sudden growth of readership and a revolutionary change in the content of newspaper.
This contributed to the formation of public opinion.
In the sphere of drama, every crisis in the revolution had its commentary on civic
stage. Political themes were extensively borrowed. Stage plays became a
source of political propaganda. Chenier's Clzarles K i s said to have baptized the
stage in the name of nation, law and constitution. It was the most popular play
reflecting the spirit of revolution. Art, too, was used in public festjvals and in the
visual pageantry of the large-scale spectacles. The decade of the Revolution produced
I
Revolutions thousands of printed images through allegoricalcompositi~~ s , political caricatures,
portraits of leaders, letterheads, playing cards, children's games, civil manuals and
many other forms. These images are called ephemera and these proved to be more
effective means of drawingpeople into political debates. Art in this period acquired
a strategicand explicitlypolitical hction. The revolutionaries had great faith in the
power of images and art was used to perform the role of social and moral regenerator.
The imagery of the French Revolution was created through all these means.

Illustration 3: Assignant (Paper Money) of 1792

However, it is very difficult to say as to how much of these changes survived the
Revolution. Perhaps very little of it accept its imagery and memory. This was
because the Revolution had completely rejected the old culture of ancient regime,
while the new culture that was imposed fiom above was seen as a product of socio-
political interests and charged up emotionsof a few. Its survival became precarious.
The French society had reached a stage of disorder and sharp divide withthe collapse
of the old moral foundations. The new ruling class was unable to provide an
alternative. Yet those projects which were universal in scope, such as the metric
system, secularism, legal code and democratic principles-they survived to a large
extent. The other two expressions of the 18thcentury - Enlightenment and no-
classicism struggled with romanticism in the 19" century but moulded some of the
styles and ideas of modem day arts.
It can be said that the principal legacy of the French Revolution wzis the Revolution
itself. Even aftertwo hundred years, its memory persists. Many religions of humanity
duringthe nineteenth century -religions which made humanity their objects of cult -
were born out of this revolutionary faith. It marked the overthrow of the old
regime and the establishment of a k, hternal and egalitarian-society.11forced a
historical reconsideration of tradition. The revolutionary faith became a tradition
that relieved itself in the events of 1830,1848 and 1871 in France and inspired
many others in Greece, Belgium, Italy and Germany. However, some people questior,
the use ofterm 'revolutionary culture' for this memory, badition and rituat enactments.
Whichever way one looks at the Revolution, its most important legacy was dpmmtic
republicanism-an ideology embraced by a large section of the middle class all over
the world. The ideology experienced stiff resistance fiom the European officials
during the nineteenth century,as it was achieved either through war or terror. However,
the radical republicanism in France had to adjust with more moderate forms of
government,public education, secularism and the desire for individual liberty in order
to find a permanentplace in Europeand the outside world. The French Revolutionary
culture had a deep influence over the reformulated post-colonial world that emerged
after the Second World War.
One question which is often asked by the historians is whether the Revolution caused
the disempowennent of women from politics. There is no doubt that women from
JWerent sections of French society participated in the Revolution and contributed
in ditterent ways. From the hostesses of salons representing the aristocratic and
bourgeois background to women of modest means -washer women, fisher women,
flower sellers to the labouring women, all had something to offer. Most of them
demanded sufficient and regular supply of bread, some wanted better education
but the radicals like those who were members of the society of Revolutionary
Republic Women, asked for political representation, franchiserights and equality
with men. There are, however, two views on this subject. One view suggests that
the condition of French women worsened due to the Revolution and whatever was
granted to them through the Constitution was taken away after 1793. Women
ceased to be citizens and Napoleon's code adopted a cynical attitude towards
them. The Revolution reflected bourgeois masculine power in which women were
deprived of justice and the cause of women remained suspended for over one
century. However, there is another view that holds that the Revolution improved
the position of ' M y ' in which women given equal role. The new laws on inheritance
of property reflected a distinct elevation in the status of women. Similarly,when the
marriage was made a civil contract by the Constitution of 1791,divorce became a
matter of mutual consent in which women had equal say. So while the French
women were among the first in Europe to clamour for equal political rights and
citizenship,their agitations died down after the Revolution and remained suspended
till the second half of the centr.;~.

23.8 SUMMA%%!
After reading this Unit you must have realized that the French Revolution initiated
several important issues which remain relevant in today's world but the solutions
found to these questions varied with the passage of time. Prolonged debates followed
once the revolutionary problems were raised. It is not easy to make a precise
assessmeqt nf the Revolution's legacy. It definitely provided a sudden leap into a
utopian future. Most of the revolutionaries throughout the world saw the Revolution
as the torchbearer of modem politics and political experimentation but there are
many others who shunned it for its violence and disorder. These are two opposite
views on the Revolutionarypolitics. The 'Whig-Republican' interpretationsees the
Revolution as the inventor of modem democratic culture. According to this view,
the principles of liberty and equality reached a logical conclusion and a desired end
by the end of the nineteenth century. The opposite view is presented by the 'Tory-
Tocquevillian' analysis. It arguesthat the Revolution resulted in the strengtheningof
state power at the expense of autonomous institutions like the church, corporations
and associations by weakening the civil society and making it dependent on the
state. This view regards Bonapartism as the culmination of post-revolutionary
political culture by creating apowerfd state.

Revolution.
Concert of Europe (1815-23):Various Congresses held to settle the territorial
and financial problems caused by Napoleonic expansions in Europe, followed by
attempts to prevent further revolutionsand to maintain the status quo.
Revolutions July Monarchy: Afterthe revolution of 1830,Lousie P h iipp canle to power and
ruled till 1848.His rule is called the period of July Monarchy.
Freemasons: An international chain of political organizationsin Europe which
declared itself to be based on brotherly love, faith and charity. Freemasons were
against the ancient regime and also the Roman Catholic Church.
Dreyfus Affair(1894-99): Alfied DreyfUs, a Jewish officer in French army, was
accused and found guilty of selling military secretsto Germany. However, doubts
soon arose over the fairness of the charges against him. It soon developed into a
huge political controversy with many socialist and radical intellectuals supporting
DreyfUs and many others, mainly army leaders and the Church, holding him @ty.
Because Dreyfbs was a Jew, the controversy also provided an impetus to anti-
semitic feelings in France. It contributed to the politicization of the French rural
society.
Vienna Congress (1814-15): An international assembly of European super
powers, mainly Austria, Britain,Russia and Prussia, to settlethe territorialboundaries
within Europe, after the disruption ofthe old territorial boundaries caused by French
Revolution and Napoleonic wars.
Paris Commune (1871): A temporary revolutionary governmentin Paris, formed
after the overthrow of the second empire of Napolean 111,representing an alliance
between the middle and the working classes. The Commune lasted only for two
months from March to May 1871, and after a bitter fight, surrendered to the
Government.
Anti-Semitism: A feeling of hatred towards the Jews. A long history of racial
prejudice against the Jews had existed &I the Eurbpean society. It was somewhat
checked duringthe Enlightenment.In the 19"'century, however, a systematic attempt
was made to promote hatred against the Jews. This led to cultural isolation of the
orthodox Jews and, together with rising nationalism, pseudo scientifictheories of
Aryan racial superiority and spurious charges of Jewish domination encouraged
anti-sernitismin many of European states. Anti-semitism reached its climax inNazi
Germany in the 1930s and 1940s when around six million Jews were killed by
Hitla.
Whig-Republicans: A group that strongly supported the idea of representative
institutionsand popular participation in government.
Tory-Tocquevillians:ATory group that supportedthe cause of strong centralized
monarchy which derived its legitimacy not frompopular support but fiom its own
inherent power.

23.10 EXERCISES
1) Examinethe main featuresof modem political culture which emergedin Fmce
during the revolutionary phase.
2) How would you explain the unique appeal of nationalism in modern times?
How it is different fiom the view of the French revolutionaries?
3) Write a critical note on French cultural legacy.
4) Bring out the contribution ofthe French Revolutionin the evolution of modem
socialistthought.
5) What has caused the formulation of the conspiracy theory?
UNIT 24 POLITICAL REVOLUTION:
RUSSIA
Structure
24.1 Introduction

24.2 Prelude to Revolution: Russian Specificities

24.2.1 The Russian Working Class
24.2.2 The Tsarist Autocracy
24.2.3 The Decembrist Uprising
24.2.4 The Russian d t e l ~ i ~ e n t s i a
24.2.5 Populism
24.2.6 Growth of Social Democracy

24.3 The 1905Revolution: A Dress Rehearsal for 1917

24.4 Russia in the Sirst World War

24.5 The October Revolution

24.5.1 Who Were the Bolsheviks
24.5.2 Soviets
24.5.3 Lenin's April Thesis
24.5.4 Worsening Situation
24.5.5 The Kornilov Mutiny
24.5.6 The Bolsheviks Take Power
24.5.7 Early Legislation of the New Regime

24.6 The Legacy of the Russian Revolution

24.7 Summary

24.8 Exercises
--- - -

24.1 INTRODUCTION
The previous Unit looked at the French Revolution not just as French or a European
phenomenon,but as a global one. The focus of the Unit was not on the details of the
Revolution but on.how it influenced the politics and society in the post-revolution
period. This Unit on Russian Revolution will go into details ofthe Revol~itionartG dso
on the 19"' century social conditions of Russia that led to it. The Russ;m Revolution
was an unprecedented event in the sense that it was the first re ;elution that was
based on a concrete and explicit theory of revolution. The corn; ' ~ofg the revolution,
though not its details, had been both predicted and anticipa?pc.Anothercrucial aspect
of this Revolution was that it was not projected as a national or a Russian event.
Russian Revolution was visualized as an important step in the coming of the world
socialist revolution. It was for this reason that the Russian Revolution was called, nct
a national revolution but a world revolution, by many scholars. This Unit will examine
a range of factors that prepared the Russian cociety for the revolution. It would then
focus on the major events surrounding the Revolution. Finally it will briefly talk
about the legacy of the Revolution and what it meant to the rest of the world.
-

24.2 PRELUDE TO REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN

SPECIFICITIES
An important paradox of the Russian Revolution is its self-image as a global
phenomenon and the specificityof Russian conditions that brought it about in Russia.
According to the Marxian theory of revolution, it was to take place first in advance
industrial societies as a result of the maturing of the contradictions of capitalism. But
the Socialist Revolution occurred in a backward industrial country like Russia.
However, the coming of the revolution was nothing short of a storm that had a
dramatic impact on the society and people of Russia. The following quote is an
attempt to capture this impact:
All Russia was learning to read, and reading-politics, economics, history
-because the people wanted to know....In every city, in most towns, along
the front, each political faction had its newspaper - sometimes several.
Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of
organizations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the
streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst withthe Revolution
into a fienzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months,
went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturatingthe
land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable.
And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction
that corrupts -but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of
Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky.. . (From John Reed, Ten Days That Shook
the World, 1987 Edition, Moscow, p.37.)
That was Russia in 1917 as described by John Reed, an American journalist, who
had come to Russia to cover the event and who was, in the words of Lenin's wife,
Krupskaya, "not an indifferent observer, but a passionate revolutionary. ..." There
were many others like him, who flocked to the city of St. Petersburg, or Petrograd
as it was called fiom 1917 onwards, simply because that city symbolized all that
they dared to believe in and hold dear. If the French Revolution symbolized Liberty,
Equality and Fraternity, the Russian Revolution symbolized much more -organized
struggle, clarity of perspective and courage to go against the tide even if it meant
being isolated in the whole world wide.
How did all this happen? Why did Russia and not Germany stage the first socialist
revolution, contrary to the expectations of everyone? How could the working class
of this backward country, with its half-baked capitalism, have the courage to
overthrowthe Tsarist autocracy and move, with almost lightning speed from a semi-.
feudal political and social order, into a socialist system, bypassing the capitalist
phase almost completely?
The answers lie in the many peculiarities of Russia. It had a weak bourgeoisie
and the industrial development that had taken place in Russia fiom the 1880s was
entirely at the initiative of the Tsar and financed by foreign capital. While the
French companies invested in the mining and metallurgy sectors, oil was in the
hands of the British concerns and the chemical and electrical engineering
industries in the hands of the Germans. Within Russia, the capital for
industrialization was raised largely by taxing the peasantry even as the agrarian
sector continued to remain backward technologically,the best lands remaining with
Industrialization in Russia was limited to certain pockets in the country like Political Revolution:
St.Petersburgand Moscow districts, the Donetz and the Dneiper basins. They were,
in the words of Maurice Dobb, no more than industrial islands in a vast agricultural
sea. Yet, these industries gave rise to a powehl working class movement. This was
because the typical Russian factory was a huge industrial unit with a high level of
concentration. All stages of production were housed under one roof This meant that
workers of all kinds - fiom the unskilled to the highly skilled -were thrown together
and the msk ofmobilizing them was correspondinglyeasier.
24.2.1 The Russian Working Class
The Russian worker was part-peasant, part-worker, with strong roots in the villages.
Given a situation of peasant discontentment owing to the problems mentioned above,
this meant that the Russian working class reacted not only to the subhuman conditions
under which they worked in the factories, but also against the crushing burden of
land tax and redemption payments that weighed their families down in the villages.
Thus, the fact that Russian industrializationwas built, not upon a strong agricultural
base as in the case of England, but on a backward rural sector where many problems
had been left unresolved, contributed to the growth of an extremelyvolatile working
class movement in this country. Of course, the leadership that was available to this
working class also $-.)led a crucial role, but we shall come to that later.
The Russian working class was largey ~zcentratedin the textile industries, but
there were substantial numbers of workers in the metallurgical and railway sectors as
well. In 1900,there were three million industrial workers in Russia. Of these, 5,50,000
were working in textile factories, 500,000in metallurgical industries and 400,000 in
the railways. Wages were paid irregularlyand employers drove their men hard. Even
in 1913, the average working day ofthe Russian worker was 10 hours. Studies of
working class budgets indicated that a large proportionof the total expenditure went
on food. Few could afford proper clothing.And yet, interestingly, the literacy levels
amongthe working classwere at a higher level than general literacy in Russia According
to the 1897 census, 57.8% of the male workers and 28.4% of the female workers of
Russia were literate. By 1918,79.2% of the male workers and 44.2% of the female
workers were literate. Besides the schools run by the Zemstvos (locally elected
councilsto look after public health, educationand madmaintenance), schoolsfinanced
by the state, some educational institutionswere even maintained by the employers.
They offered evening courses and set up public libraries, which were well attended.
Thus the Russian working class, eTTen while chafing against its abysmal working and
living conditions and threatened with job insecurity, was able to absorb the flood of
pamphlets and books which were being smuggled into the country,defymg all attempts
at censorship by the Tsarist authorities.
Hence Russia had a peculiar combination of backwardness and modernization. This
was evident not just in the industrial sector.
24.2.2 The TsaristAutocracy
The Tsarist autocracy was unimaginativelybackward ev 211 while the intelligentsia
was the most vibrant intelligentsia in the whole of Ell1ape in the nineteenth century.
The autocracy, which originated in the medieval period, was said to have been
influenced by the Mongol tradition. For two hundred and fifty years, i.e., from 1240
to 1490, Russia had been under Mongol rule. According to 'l'ibor Syamuc!;; !lie
Mongol concept of society, based on the unqudified submission of all to the absoi~ate
power of the Great Khan, had its impact on the Russian political structure. Eve1.y
member of society was dotted his qpcciticposition, to which he was bound for life
Revolutions and which he could never desert, on pain of death. The Great Khan not only had
unquestioned authority over the lives of his subjects, he was also the sole owner of
all the land within his domains.
After the break-up of the Mongol empire, the power that emerged was that of
Muscovy, a principality centred around Moscow. This region had several natural
advantages, since it was situated at the heart of the principal waterways, with
comparatively easy access to all parts of the country. In Muscow, the position of
the Tsar was one of unique strength -all authority in the countryemanated fiom him.
He shared power with no one. There was no opportunity,either withinthe government
or outside it, for the development of rival centres of power capable of limiting,
balancing or checking the authority of the ruler. What was more, these doctrines of
authority enjoyed the f d l support of the Church.
The next great landmark in the history of the Tsarist autocracy was the reign of Peter
the Great (1682-1725).He was the great modernizer. Until his time, the h c t i o n of
government was primarily conceived as a negative one -to defend Muscovy against
external enemies and safeguard domestic law and order. This picture changed radically
when Peter gave a positive role to the government. He began with a rapid
modernization of the military and naval establishments. This entailedthesettingup of
fact&$, mines and collieries, leading to a modernization of the economy and fiscal
reforms. All this naturally enlarged the functionsofthe government and to take care
of this, ten 'colleges' or rudimentary ministries, were set up. The task of supervising
and co-coordinating the work of these 'colleges' was performed by Peter himself
and the officials of these colleges were encouraged to keep an eye on each other.
Thus emerged the tradition of mutual suspicion and vertical communicationwith the
Tsar, which remained a characteristicfeature of the Tsarist autocracy until the end.
Ministers reported directly to the Tsat and even tried to undercut each othpii. In the
late nineteenth century,the Minister of Finance and the Minister ofthe Interiorwere
constantly at loggerheads with each other. The former's efforts at modernization
would be stymied by the latter, fearful as he was of the political consequencesof any
attempts at bringing about change in the country.
Until the very end the Tsarist autocracy remained a top-heavy political structure, in
which the individual competence of the Tsar was of vital importance. Of course,
Tsars like Alexander 1 (1801-1825) drew upon the talent of officials like M.M.
Speranksy, who has been described as the most brilliant Russian statesman of the
nineteenth century.Yet Speransky himself suffered disgrace and exile when the Tsar,
puffed up with his victory over Napoleon and Russia's primacy in the Concert of
Europe, retracted on his reformist promises and became more and more reactionary.
The reforms of Tsar Alexander 11, remembered as the man who carried out the
Emancipation of the Serfs and instituted the Zemstvos, were carried out in an
authoritarianmanner. He brushed aside all suggestions for popular participation in
government even though he had encouraged such expectations.
24.2.3 The Decembrist Uprising
Gradually, a mood of discontent spread over all of educated Russia. The first
expression of this spirit of revolt was the Decembrist uprising of 1825,known by
this name hecause the revolt occurred in the month of December.The "Decembristsy',
as those who participated in the revolt came to be known, were patriotic, intelligent
young men ofthe aristocracy who had served as officers in the Tsar's army. They
had fought in the Napoleonic Wars and when they travelled abroadthey were greatly
influenced by the Western way of life and the ideas of the French Revolution.w ~ n
they returned to Russia in 1816,they formed a secret society for constitutional and
 -

judicial reform, for the abolition of serfdom that was still prevalent in Russia and for political Revolution:

the curbing of foreign influence on the Tsarist state. When Tsar Alexander I died
unexpectedly in 1825, there were some weeks of confusion before the next Tsar
ascended the throne. The Decembrists used this opportunity to make their point.
They tried to prevent several military regiments from taking the oath of allegiance to
the new Tsar unless he committed himself to a constitutional form of government.
However, they were unable to cany out their plan successfidly. Some of the regiments
deserted them and the new Tsar, Nicholas, had prior warning of the revolt. Hence
he was able to put down the revolt very f m l y by firing upon the insurgents.About a
dozen men were killed, 289 others either condemned to death or sentenced to hard
labour in Siberia.
Most of the Decembrists were serving officers under the age of thirty. There were
also some senior officers of distinguished lineage. John Keep and Lionel Kochan
have described the Decembrist uprising as "an attempted revolution on the people's
behalf by a section of the educated elite."
24.2.4 The Russian Intelligentsia
The Decembrist uprising may have been crushed brutally and news of it blacked out
completely in the press, but it remained in popular memory as a heroic struggle and
inspired several generations thereafter.As the nineteenth century advanced, the
numbers of educated Russians who turned against the Tsarist system grew by leaps
and bounds. There emerged a clearly recognizable class known as the intelligentsia.
In fact, the word "intelligentsia" had its origins in Russia and was first used in this
country in the mid-ninetee~thcentwy. The word then spread to other counties and
came to signify at- Ate of writers, academiciansand cultural figures, who were often
critical of the establishment. In Western societies, the intelligentsia was not sharply
differentialed from the professional and middle classes as a whole. But in a more
backward political order as prevailed in Russia, the intellectual elite did not grow
with the society as a whole and did not share a common ethos with the other middle-
class groups. The Russian intelligentsiarepresented a small crust ofwell- educated
people with a European outlook, who had few links with Russian society.
!t was the reforms of Tsar Alexander 11, which marked the turning point for the
intelligentsia. He was known as the reforming Tsar and when he announced his
intentions of carrying out reforms, there were great expectations amongst the
intelligentsia. There was hope that he would consult the progressive sections of his
people. But soon there was disappointment. Alexander I1 chose to carry out the
reforms by authoritarian methods and brushed aside all suggestions for popular
participation in government. When he constituted the Zemstvos, it was only the
propertied classes and the higher taxpayers who were given representation. All
suggestions for a nationally representative body or parliament were f m l y turned
down. So great was the anger of the intelligentsiaagainst the Tsar that he faced a
series of assassinationattempts. The last one, in 1881, took his life. His successor,
Alexander I11fiercely cracked down on the intelligentsiaand many intellectuals had
to flee the country. Many found refuge in Switzerland and Geneva became a centre
oftheir activities.
The mid-nineteenth Russian intelligentsia was of two kinds. There were the
Westernizers and the Slavophiles. While the former, i.e., the Westernizers, were
ashamed of Russia's past and believed that the future for Russia lay in imitating the
West, the Slavophilesmaintained that Russia's salvation lay in a return to the true
traditions ofRussia. It is important to note that the Slavophileswere also in favour of
change. But they felt that the Western values of rationalism and individualism were
Revolutions disintegrating forces. The strength of Russia lay in the f. 'th of her people and the
sense of community of which the mir (village commi ~qJty\was the essence. Russia,
in fact, should show the way to the West.
This controversy between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles was but the first of
a series of polarizations amongst Russian intellectuals.In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century Russian socialism split into the Populists and the Marxists and
still later, the Russian Marxists split into the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

In the post-Decembrist period the new intellectual tradition that unfolded was
characterized by an indifferenceto political reforms. There was a general belief that
it was more important to improve the material conditions of the people than to give
Russia constitutional liberties. Chemyshevski, a leader of the radicals in the 1860s,
for instance,distinguished clearlybetween liberalism and democracy.While liberalism,
representing freedom of speech and constitutional liberties, was essentially for the
educated class, democracy was concerned with the material welfare of the masses.
Chernshevskiwent to the extent of stating that if the welfare of the people could be
served by despotic methods, he would not hesitate to support these methods.

24.2.5 Populism
Lnthe 1860s,almost every section of the Russian intelligentsia shared an extravagant
idealization of 'the people'. There was an almost mystical belief in 'the people' as
the repository of some profound truth of life. 'The people' would even cleanse the
intelligentsia, who were corrupted by worldly education and material goods.
Alongside with this, however, there was also a deep-rooted conviction that 'the
people', left to themselves, were incapable of overthrowing oppression and achieving
the just society.

An interesting aspect of the Russian intelligentsia was that many of its members
were creative writers who produced excellent short stories, plays and even novels.
Their works were reflective of the politics of the times in a way which has seldom
been seen in other countries.Ivan Turgenev's Fathers andsons, for instance, while
being an important literary work, was the best account of two generationsof Russian
intellectuals-the men of the forties and the men of the sixties, as they were known.

The generation of the '40s had been brought up on German idealistic philosophy
and romanticism.According to Riasanovsky, they had ,:metaphysical, religious,
aesthetic and historical approach to reality. The '60s gener??lon,on the other hand,
believed in utilitarianism, positivism, materialism and especiallyrealism. They were
obviously more radical. Socially too, they belonged to a mixed backgromd below
the gentry being the sons of priests, petty officials and others who had made their
way up by education and effort.
Hugh Seton Watson makes the point that the children of the Russian nobiliiy were
quite as capable of extreme revolutionary thought as their social inferiors. Cr?tthere
is a certain venom and fanaticism in the language of non-noble radicals which is i i ~ t
found in their gentleman predecessors. This became and has remained an essential
part of the Russian revolutionary tradition.

By the 1870s, anessentiallyindividualistcreed of nihilism had combined withpopulism.

The spirit of the former, i.e., nihilism can be understood from Bakunin's famous
phrase: "The passion for destruction is also a constructivepassion." Between 1869
and 1872 there existed a group of young revolutionaries in St. Petersburg who
called themselvesthe "Chaikovsky Circle". Their first aim was to politically educate
the university students. They sold books which had been banned, distributed
_-
Political Revolution:

pamphlets, organized discussion groups among workers and intellectuals.

By 1873the students were ready for their first movement to the people. They went
to the countryside and preached socialism amongst the peasantry. They were in for
a rude shock, however. The peasants, far from welcoming them as their saviours,
assaulted them and handed them over to the Tsarist police! Obviously there was a
disconnectbetween their understanding of the people and the people's understanding
ofthem.
This bitter experience made the Populists change their perspective. The new
understandingwas that social and economicissues must come before politics. Hence
the second movement to the people in 1876 was on a different basis. Groups of
young revolutionaries went to live among the people. They practised a normal trade
or profession - some learnt manual trades, others went as medical orderlies or
midwives, working with the Zemstvos. Young women played a prominent part in this
movement. But even then the masses did not respond and by 1877 these groups had
been discovered. Mass arrests followed,thereby ending this ambitious enterprise.
If the peasants would not act, then there was another way -that of terrorism and
assassination.The "Land and Freedom" society, formed in 1876, launched an all-
out terrorist offensive against the government. They believed that because of the
highly centralized nature of the Russian State, a few assassinations could do
tremendous damage to the regime. They succeeded in killing TsarAlexander 11, but
did not manage to bring Tsarism to an end. What followed thereafter under Tsar
Alexander I11 was such se17ert:repression that for the next twenty five years, all
Russian revolutionaq activity had to be carried on outside the country. No free
political discussion^ ~ouldtake place within Russia.

24.2.6 Growth of Social Democracy

This period of emigrant revolutionary activitywas, however, a veryproductive one.
In the 1880s, even as industrialization was proceeding apace in Russia, the first
Marxist groups began to be formed among Russian intellectuals. The major voice
was that of Plekhanov who, in his pamphlets, 'Our Differences' and 'Socialism and
the Political Struggle' made the following points:

1) Socialism cannot be based on the peasantry. It has to be based on the industrial

working class.

2) Capitalism was going ahead in Russia and the growth of the working class was
inevitable.

3) The village commune was an anachronism-a mere survival of a pre-capitalist

order.
The fundamental break had been made. Populism continued to survive in Russia,
reincarnated as the Socialist Revolutionary Party, but it was now marginal to Russian
politics. It was now Marxism and Social Democracy which became the mainstream.

Meanwhile,within Russia, the first volume of Karl Marx's major critique of capitalism
Das KapitaI had been published in Russian in 1872.The Tsarist censorship regarded
it as too academic and irrelevant to Russian conditionsto be subversive.
Vladimir Ilyanovich Lenin, born in 1870,had been converted to Marxism in 1889.
In 1893 he moved to St. Petersburgto work with the Marxist underground groups.
Revolut~ons He also visited Plekhanov and other leaders ?Fthc Aussian Social Democratic Party
in Switzerland. In 1895 he, along with Martov, fol~nedthe St. Petersburg Union of
Strugglefor the Liberation of the Working Class to disseminateMarxist ideas among
the working classes and to prepare leaders for the future revolution. The Union also
had branches in the cities of Moscow and Ekaternioslav. However, Lenin was soon
arrested and he had to spend the next four and a half years in prison and in exile in
Siberia. It was while he was thus incarcerated that he published his important
work 'The Development of Capitalism in Russia', which proved conclusivelythat
capitalism in Russia was an accomplished fact and contained all the conditions of
economic viability. This work was published illegally inRussia in 1899.
Another group of legal Marxists had also come into being around this time.
They were basically a liberal group, consistinglargely of sociologists and economists.
They made apowerfd contributionto the debate against the Populists. Peter Struve,
for instance, brought out his "Cultural Remarks on the Question of Economic
Development in Russiayyin 1894 in which he argued that the advent of capitalism
in Russia should be welcomed since it would, along with its miseries, also bring
the material and spiritual culture of Western Europe to Russia. This included
political liberty. The Legal Marxists, however rejected the revolutionary aspects of
Marxism.
The League of Combat for Liberation of the Working Class of Lenin and Martov
took active part in the day-to-day struggles of workers. They supported the textile
strikes of 1896 and '97. Gradually, the Russian Marxists were reaching out to a
wider mass base. But involvement with industrial labour also meant that the movement
had to concentrate on the more practical objectives, such as the achievement of
better wages and working conditions. Some leadersbegan to argue that the movement
should concentrate on such economic objectives because, given the peculiar
conditions of Russia, any struggle for economic gains would naturally and inevitably
lead to the demand for political objectives. Revolutionary slogans directed towards
the overthrow of the autocracy would hghten and even repel the workers. However,
Lenin, who was still in exile and other emigrant leaders like Plekhanov, didnot agree
with this. They argued for the primacy ofpolitical objectives and felt that a campaign
which confined itself to practical objectives could not become a country-wide
proletarian movement. Lenin pointed out that various groups of workers, immediately
interested merely in securingtheir own, narrow. material gains may even tryto secure
these gains against the interests of other groups of workers. Or they may try to
secure immediate advantages at the expense of lo~l&-terrn interests. "Consciousness"
was more important than spontaneity.
As E.H. Carr has pointed out, by the turn of the century there was a general feeling
among the Marxist groups that the time was ripe for paysing-Ii-ommere lecturing on
Socialist principles to more systematic and political work among the masses. The
time for making the transition from propagandato agitation ha2 arrived. In 1898, it
was decided to hold a Congress of existingMarxist groups in oldel t3 form a Russian
Social Democratic Workers' Party. The groups met at Minsk ir, Bytlxussia ancl
prepared a Manifesto which contained the following memorable passage.
The further to the east one goes in Europe, the weaker, meaner and more
cowardly in the political sense becomes the bourgeoisie and the greater are
the cultural and political tasks which fall to the lot of the proletariat. On its
strong shouldersthe Russian working class must carry the work of liberty.
The Russian Social Democratic Party became a part of the Second International. It
may be recalled that the First International Working Men's Association had been
 Political Revolution:
founded by Marx in 1864 and had existed until 1871. It symbolized the coming Russia
together of working class parties across national boundaries in the belief that Marxian
socialismwas essentially internationalin character and that all members of the working
class shared certain common interests. The Second International, founded in 1889,
was dominated by the German Social Democratic Party and continued its existence
until the First World War. After the Revolution of 19 17,there would be a tussle over
who -.xrps to lead such an International - Russia as the first country to carry out a
working class revolution, or other forces in Europe.

24.3 THE 1905 REVOLUTION: A DRESS

REHEARSAL FOR 1917
Russia's humiliating defeat at the hands of Japan in the Russo Japanese War made
the Russian people seriously wonder about the strength of their mighty empire. The
workers were in any case agitated about their conditions of work and poor wages.
On 9 January 1905, a huge crowd of workers, led by a priest, Father Gapon,
marched towards the Winter Palace to subinit a petition to the Tsar, Nicholas 11.
This was intended to be a peaceful procession and the participants had full faith in
the Tsar. They beliekcC!tFathe was surrounded by bad advisers, who kept the truth
about the actual plight of the peupl~,:wav from him. Despite the church icons and
portraits of the Tsar that they carried. the Tsaris: Guards received the petitioners
with a hail of bullets. Over a hundred fell dead, many more were injured. This was
the last straw. It was also the signal for the revolution. Strikes spread throughout the
country. Revolutionaries assassinated the Grand Duke Sergei, one of the leaders of
the court coterie. Soon, peasant revolts broke out in various parts of the country.
Even the fringes of the Russian Empire were affected. There were risings in
Poland and in the Black Sea port of Odessa. the crew of the battleship Poteinkin
joined in the revolt.

All this shook the self-confidenceof the Tsar and he promised to convene a Duma,
or Representative Assembly, in which, however, the working class would not be
represented. All parties of the opposition, from the Liberals to the Bolsheviks,
protested against this edict. In October 1905 a general strike spread from Moscow
and St. Petersburg throughout the country. The strikers of St.Petersburg elected a
Council of Workers' Deputies, the St.Petersburg Soviet, which virtually became the
centre ofthe Revolution. The Soviet called on the country to stop paying taxes to
the Tsar. Its members, along with the chairman, Leon Trotsky, were arrested. New
strikes broke out and the pressure led the Tsar to issue his October Manifesto of 30
October, in which he promised to extend the franchise to those classes which had
until now been excluded. There was also an assurance that no law would take effect
without the approval ofthe Duma. The Manifesto split the ranks of tht -,.:lctionaries
into those who wanted to withdraw the movement and Work ~lleproposals and
others, like the Social Democrats, who wanted a Consti~~~tlLAssembly. This split
proved to be fatal for the Revolution and slowly the TsaLst forces recovered their
strength.By 1907the Tsar had regained his self-conf;,%nce and begun withdrawing
the semi-liberal concessions which he had been co1,qelled to make in October 1905.

Yet, 1905 was an important landmark in Russia's history and things wtl; .xver the
same thereafter. The revolutionariescould learn fiom their mistakes in this encounter
and, when the next opportunity came in the First World War, they were able to plan
their strategy with gre~termaturity. Tht Goviets,however brief their existence, were
a model for the future.
 RUSSIA IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
It has been said that the First World War was different from all previous wars in that
it was not just a test ofthe military capabilities of the warring countries. It was their
economies that were being put to the test and Russia was bound to perform badly.
In an epoch when "coal was king" Russia produced only 1116thof the amount of the
coal that the US produced, 1/9ththat of Great Britain and 1/6ththat of Germany.
Though Russia ranked sixth in the world production of iron, it manufactured only
6% of the steel produced in the world. As for railroad, when Germany had 11
kilometers per 100 square kilometers, France 8 or 9, Russia had only 400 meters
excluding Siberia. When the war began, Russia's trade with the outside world came
to a standstill and given its heavy reliance on foreign capital, this seriously dislocated
the economy.

Moreover, large sections of Russia were horrified and disillusioned at the way Tsar
Nicholas I1 conducted the war effort. There were some parties like the Cadets
(Constitutional Democrats), which felt that if the conduct of the war was given over
to them, they would do a better job of it. In fact, through the greater part of 1916,
the country was being governed not by the Tsar or by his bureaucracy or by the
court, but by private associationswhich had sprung up more or less sirnultaneously.
Red Cross Committeeswhich had started out modestly, little by little took over the
administration ofpublic health. The Zemstvos, locally elected councils which had
come into existence in the time of Tsar Alexander 11, i.e., the 1860s and 1870s,had,
after 1914 come together to form a Pan-Russian Union of Zemstvos to help the sick
and wounded soldiers who were pouring in from the war-front. There was a
Committee of War Industries which comprised of representatives of commerce and
industry. They became like a parallel government, trying to streamlinewar production.
This was because the Tsarist authorities were increasinglyproving themselves to be
incapable of even looking after defence production of the country.
There was also a huge consumers co-operative movement which was spreading
rapidly, trying to tackle the difficulties of everyday life such as price increases. A bag
of potatoes, which would cost one rouble before the war had gone up to 7 roubles
by 1917. Apood (equivalent to 36 pounds) of wheat flour, costing 6 roubles 50
kopecks before the war was now selling at 40 roubles. On most essential items
there had been a seven-to-eight-foldincrease, and, needless to say, wages had not
kept up with this rise in prices. It was not just the industrial workers who we1.e
affected. Civil servants and white-collar workers were also badly hit and this was
why, when the workers came out on the streets in demonstrations, they too joined
the protests - something which had not happened in the 1905 Revolution.

The administrationwatched helplessly as it was slowly divested of its powers. Every

working group was getting organized and without realizing it, the Russians were
beginning to govern themselves. The Durna or the Russian Parliament, which had
been constituted after the 1905Revolution, though largely comprised of supporters
of the Tsarist regime, and boycotted by the more radical groups, tried to open the
Tsar's eyes to the growing abyss between the court and public opinion but had no
effect. Such were the times that even this loyalist Durna became more and more
critical of the government and finally on 25 February 1917, matters came to a head
with the Tsar decidingto prorogue the Duma. He accused this body ofhavinginstigated
the strikes in major industrial units like the Putilov arms works, the street
demonstrations and the defiance by soldiers of their officers. But so complete was
Revolutions proletariat of some other major industrial country of Europe to create a socialist
revolution. Only then would it be possible for Russia to bypass its bourgeois-
democratic stage and create a socialist revolution.
Thus, in many ways, Lenin was able to anticipate the turn of events in Russia. Wliere
he, as well as many of his fellow revolutionary leaders, went wrong was in their
expectation that the first socialist revolution would occur in Germany or any other
highly industrialized country of Europe. That was not to happen and it fell to the lot
of Russia to carry out this task.
Leon Trotsky, a charismatic leader who was to play a dynamic role in the St
Petersburg Soviet, was a Menshevik for a long time even though his views were
quite close to those of Lenin. Where he differed with Lenin was on the question of
the peasantry's potential. He was skeptical of the peasants and firmly believed that

From February to October

After the February Revolution, the internal contradictionswithin Russia became
evident and were accentuated over time. The Provisional Government, headed by
Prince Lvov, and representing the moderate forces, was committed to carrying on
the war effort. The more radical forces were concentrated in the Petrograd Soviet.
They were in favour of introducingdemocratic reforms, confiscationof lahded estates
and promulgating an eight-hour day for workers. They also wanted to enter into
negotiations with the proletariat of other countries in order to bring an end to the
war.
Though the Provisional Governmentwas the official regime in the eyes of the world,
within Russia it was unable to take a single important decisionunless it was endorsed
by the deputies of the Soviet.
24.5.2 Soviets
What was the Soviet? First constituted in the course of the 1'905Revolution the
St.Petersburg Soviet was a Council of Workers' Deputies, which, in the words of
Isaac Deutscher, "soon became the most spectacular centre of the revolution." The
orders and instructions of this Soviet commanded universal obedience. It was the
people's parliament par excellence and in the absence of any parliamentary institutions,
it was the broadest and most representative body that Russia possessed. In 1917,
a few days after the Tsar's abdication the St. Petersburg Soviet was reconstituted.
Its members were elected from factories, workshops and later in the barracks of
regiments that were stationed in the capital. They were not elected for any fixed
term - the electorate had the right to replace them by other men at any time. It was
also the de facto executive power in Russia. The writ of the Soviet ran in factory,
railway depot, post office and regiment alike. In fact the Provisional Government
was virtually a prisoner in the hands of the Soviet.
In the months after the February Revolution, Sovietsmushroomed all over Russia -
in provincial towns and in villages. Because of the mode of their election,they did
not represent the nobility and the middle classes. By August 1917, there were 600
Soviets in Russia. They had assumed all the responsibilities of government.
24.5.3 Lenin's April Thesis
In April 1917 Lenin arrived in Russia from Finland and issued his 'April Theses' in
which he set forth the new slogan "All power to the Soviets". Capitalismhad to be
overthrown and the war brought to an end. The bourgeoisie and the Mensheviks
 Political Revolution:
were deceiving the proletariat. The Revolution had entered the socialistphase. Land
and banks should be nationalized, the police and the army abolished. Those who
heard Lenin's ideas were stunned and thought that he had taken leave of his senses.
It was like an avalanche and some of the proposals sounded completely like flights
of fancy. But slowly, in the following weeks, the ideas seeped in and Lenin was able
to win over many to his views.
24.5.4 Worsening Situation
Meanwhile the Provisional Government was alienating itself fiom the people
continuously. They wanted peace but the Government had already declared that all
the Tsarist Government's commitments to the war would be adhered to. In the face
of mounting opposition, the members of the first Provisional Government had to
resign and in May, a new government, still headed by Prince Lvov, but with six
socialistMinistersdrawn fiom the Soviets, was constituted. But this new government
was even less able to tackle the problems of the day. These were internal differences:
while the liberal group wanted to delay certainfundamental reforms until the convening
of a Constituent Assembly, the socialists were anxious to respond to the popular
demandsfor immediate reform.

The economic situation grew worse. When workers demanded more wages, the
industrialists,unwilling to grant them any increase, began to close down factories.
The Governmentprovided no protection to the workers. To add to the problems a
Russian military offensive in Galicia ended disastrously. The Provisional Government
was unable to handle thk wave of popular unrest which was triggered off by the
offensive and Prince Lvov had to resign.

Thus, by July 1917, in Litle more than four months, a third Provisional Government
had been constituted Clearly these Governmentswere incapable of providing stability
to Russia and tackling its pressing problems. Sensingtheir own incompetence,the
Government became more and more defensive. They began directing their anger
against the Bolsheviks,who were the only group among the socialistswhich had not
joined the Provisional Government.

Order5 were issued for the arrest of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders like Zinoviev
and Kamenev. Lenin and Zinoviev evaded arrest and escaped to Finland while
Kamenev got arrested. It was at this time that Trotsky and several other members
of the Menshevik party decided to join the Bolsheviks. They too were promptly
arrested.

Throughout this period, there was growing unrest in the countryside. Thoroughly
disillusioned with one Provisional Government after another, the peasants decided
to cany out a veritable agrarian revolution on their own. They seized the estates of
the landlords and began cultivating them with the help of local land committees.
Peasant anger also found reflection in the m y , as more and more soldiers began
desertingthe war fiont and returning to the villages.

24.5.5 The Kornilov Mutiny

Thereafter, events moved with lightening speed. In August 1917there was an attempt
at a military coup. General Kornilov, the head of the armed forces, had been invited
by Kerensky to the capital in order to help him crush the Bolshevik forces. But
Kornilov exceeded his brief. He thought he could seize this opportunityto wipe out
not just the Bolsheviks but also the Soviets, the moderate Socialists and Kerensky
himself!
 3 -
Revolutions The Kerensky government was panic-stricken. It realize? that it could not defeat
the forces of Kornilov without the help of theBolsheviks, niany of whom were
behind bars. They were released. Trotsky's services were sought for obtaining the
help of the Kronstadt sailors (Kronstadt was a naval base outside Petrograd), who
were extremely radical and powerfil. Trotsky used to addressthe Kronstadt sailors
frequently. They faithfdly followed him, even idolized him.

The Soviets formed a Committee for struggleagainst Counter-Revolution. Kornilov's

troops deserted him. The railway workers stopped his trains, the telegraph operators
refused to relay his messages.

This aborted military coup clearly showed where the actual power resided. The
Kerensky Governmenthad lost face and credibility. A fifth Provisional Governrnent
was formed on 2 1September. It had ten Socialist ministers and six others. The
Bolsheviks continued to steer clear of the government. However, they were steadily
gaining more and more seats in the Soviets.

In October 1917, following a series of defeats in the war, the Provisional Government
planned to shift the capital from Petrograd to Moscow. This was seen by the
people as the final act of betrayal and the Bolsheviks,along with the Soviets,called
far a defence of Petrograd as the capital of the revolution. They managed to get the
support of all the parties and the Provisional Government thereby stood exposed.

Lanin, though still in hiding, had moved closer to the scene of action by this time. In
a short article titled 'The Crisis is Ripe', he wrote: "we stand on the threshold of a
worldwide proletarian revolution". It was important to seize the moment - the
timing was crucial. Trotsky on the other hand was adamant that any armed insurrection
must coincide with the convening of the All Russian Congress of Soviets. Lenin
warned that if they were to "let slip the present moment, we shall ruin the revolution".

On 9 October Lenin came to Petrograd in disguise and on 10 October the Central

Committee of the Bolshevik Party met. By a majority vote of 10to 2, the Committee
voted in favour of armed insurrection. A 'political bureau' consisting of sevenmembers
was to be formed to carry out the task. In the meantime, the Petrograd Soviet had
also formed a Military Revolution Committee (MRC) to make the military
preparations for the coming resolution.

Thereafter the Bolsheviks and the Soviets began acting in unison ;n the countdown
for the revolution. In any case the Soviet had already assumed the responsibility for
the defence of the capital,thus lifting itself to a new prominence and authority which
would enable it to undo the Provisional Government.

24.5.6 The Bolsheviks Take Bower

25 October (7 November according to the English Calendar) was the date fixed ro~
the revolution. The All Russian Congress of Soviets was to meet in the evening a d
the insurrection was to be carried out before that. The final touches were given on
the eve of the revolution. The members of the Bolshevik Central Committee along
h t h those of the MRC took charge of the different arms of the government-posts
a d telegraphs, railway communications, food supplies and even the P r o v i s i d
Government itself!

, Bolshevik forces went into action. Tfre key

Barly on the morning of the 2 5 ~the
points in the city were occupied and members of the Provisional Governmentwere
 Political Revolution:
taken into custody. There was virtually no resistance to this takeover. The news Russia
agency, Renters, reported only two causalties whereas in February over 1000people
had been killed or wounded.
In the afternoon, Lenin announced to a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, the triumph
,f +heworkers' and the peasants' revolution. In the evening, the Second All Russian
Congress of Sovietsproclaimed the transfer of all power to the Sovietsthroughout
Russia. It may be mentioned here that when the first All Russian Congress of Soviets
had been convened in June 1917, the Bolsheviks had been treated with disdain.
One of the speakers had challenged the delegatesto say whether there was a single
party in Russia that was prepared to shoulder the responsibility for government.
Lenin had got up and said that his party was willing to do so. His words were
drowned in hilarious laughter.
Now Lenin had shown that he meant what he had said. In the confused, ever-
changing scenariothat had unfolded fiom February to October, it was the Bolsheviks
alone, under the leadership of Lenin that had understood the needs of the people
and assessed the true strengths and weaknesses of the various classes in the country.
It had figured out that the capitalist class was a weak one, whereas the peasantry
had revolutionary potential.
It was with this clarity of perspective that, on the day followingthe revolution, three
Decrees were promulgated: The Decree on Peace, the Decree on Bread and the
Decree on Land. These were the three issues that were uppermost in the minds of
the Russian people: they wanted Russia to pull out of the war immediately; they
wanted anameliorationof the con&tions of acute food scarcity; and the redistribution
of the large landed estates. l'hough the Land Decree proclaimed that henceforth
there would be no privat., property in land and all land was to pass into the hands of
the Soviets, it was realized that the small peasants would be unwilling to part with
their lands yet. Hence the Land Decree was only partially implemented.
24.5.7 Early Legislation of the New Regime
The new regime was keen to show that it represented a radically new and different
order. A ~insri~~tio~ls
I and customs associated with the autocracy were to be abolished.
All ranks, titles and decorations were to be done away with. Army commandersas
well as judges were to be elected. All agencies of local government were set aside
and replaced by a hierarchy of Soviets. Women were given equal rights with men.
All banks andjoint stocks companies were nationalized. Payment of interests and
dividends were prohibited. Safe deposit boxes were opened and all valuables
confiscated, since t h q were now considered national property. In January 1918, it
was announced that ill state foreign and domestic loans would be annulled. This
caused the new regime to become extremely unpopular, especially in the eyes of
those countrieswhich had loaned large sums for Russian's industrialization.
In the factories, an eight hour day was introduced. For the first time in the world,
workers' control of industrial enterprises became legal. Universal labour service
was introduced and only those with workers' books could receive rations. Lenin
explained that his immediate purpose in introducing compulsory labour service was
to fight the forces of counter-revolution.
Many of these policies were to be revised and even reversed later. But the
commitment to ending Russia's involvement in the war was steadfast and so was that
of redistributing the nobility's estates amongstthe peasants. These were the reasons
for the survival of the Bolsheviks and the spreading of their influence in the crucial
months after the October Revolution.
Revoluiions
24.6 THE LEGACY OF THE RU,C§IAN
REVOLUTION
The new regime set up by the Bolsheviks survived, no doubt with many changes and
even distortions, for some seventy-odd years, until the 1990s. Though regarded
with apprehension,suspicion and at times with awe, Soviet Russia influenced the
course of events in many parts of the world, sometimes in predictable but more
often in unpredictable ways. Some historians regard the Russian Revolution as the
most significant event ofthe twentieth century and see most ofthe major developments
in the world during this period and even thereafter, as being related to this event in
some way or the other. In the words of E.J.Hobsbawm in his Age of Extremes:
.. .with the significant exception of the years from 1933 to 1945, the
international politics of the entire Short Twentieth Century since the
October revolution can best be understood as a secular struggle by the
forces of the old order against social revolution, believed to be embodied
in, allied with, or dependent on the fortunes of the Soviet Union and
international communism.
The old order was that of capitalism and imperialism. It felt threatened by the onset
of socialism from the very outset. When Russia signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk
with Germany in March 1918 and pulled out of the First World War, the Allies felt
betrayed. They regarded this action as strengthening the hands of Germany, their
enemy, even though Soviet Russia had pulled out of the War as much because it
could no longer sustain the war effort as because of the ideological commitment of
the Bolsheviks to end all inlperialistwars. The subsequent surgeofconfidenceamongst
all left-minded groups in Europe and in other parts of the world caused great alarm
to entrenched political systems based on exploitation and maximization ofprofit. A
revolutionary wave swept Europe in 1918 and 1919, with German revolutionary
sailorscarrying the banner ofthe Sovietsthrough the country. Spanishrevolutionaries
experienced a new burst of energy, a short lived socialistrepublic was proclaimed in
Bavaria in 1918 and another one in Hungary in March 1919. Other parts of the
world were also in ferment. "Soviets" were formed by tobacco workers in Cuba,
revolutionary student movements erupted in Argentina and in China. In Mexico, the
revolutionary forces under Erniliano Zapata now drew inspirationfiom revolutionary
Russia and in India too, M.N.Roy and later many others were greatly influenced by
communism. Jawaharlal Nehru has explained, in his Aulobiography, what Russia
meant to people like him:
Russia, followingthe great Lenin, looked into the f i r 2 and thought only
of what was to be, while other countries lay numbed under the dead hand
of the past and spent their energy in preserving the ~iselessrelics of a
bygone age.
Yet, there were certain negative aspects too. There was a strong autholiman streak
in Boshevism which carried over into Communist Russia as well. The :picit of
democracy was often compromised with and individual Communist Parties which
were set up in different countries were too closely tied to the apron strings ofthz
Comintem (The Communist International, set up by Soviet Russia in 1919to promote
the world revolution) for them to grow in a healthy, organic fashion. Within Russia
too, especially in the Stalinist years, terror and dictatorial methods became the order
of the day and a bureaucratic machine replaced the Soviets which had caught the
i.magination of the world. Though Stalin's Russia heroically defended itself against
the onslaught of Hitler and was responsible for beating back the forces of Fascism
 Political Revolution:
to a significantextent, in the years that followed the regime turned inwards, drawing
an iron curtain across Europe and cutting itself off from the outside world. Anti-
cosmopolitanism and xenophobia came to replace the internationalism of the early
years and that was the great irony. It negated the very spirit of the Russian Revolution,
which had an ingrained internationalism, which had discarded old divisions of
nationality as obsolete and whose vanguard, the Bolshevik,had once proudly regarded
himself as a citizen of the world.

24.7 SUMMARY
This Unit was a discussion of the Russian Revolution, as an important political
phenomenon of the 20d'century, that had global implications. One major feature of
the Russian Revolution was that although the revolution occurred in Russia, it was
not conceived of as a national event but rather as a global event. It was hoped and
anticipated that a series of socialist revolutions in various parts of the world would
cumulatively create a world revolution. The leaders ofthe revolutionactually provided
a theory of the transformation of the world from a capitalist order into a socialist
one. The revolution inspired similar activities in other parts of the world and also
motivated a number of anti-imperialist liberation struggles taking place in Asia, A.fiica
and Latin America against colonial domination.
The main purpose of this Block is to familiarize you with the range of revolutionary
experiences that the modern world goes through:As case studies of political
revolutions, you read about the French and the R-ussianRevolutions. The next two
Units ofthisBlock willexaminetwo entirelydifferenttypes ofrevolutions-Knowledge
Revolution and Technological Revolution -that were not organized around political
events. Neither were they consciously brought about by political actors or leaders.
But these revolutions played an equally, if not more, important role iribringing about
a transformationin human life.

24.8 EXERCISES

1) Why did the Socialist Revolution take place in Russia?

2) In what ways were the ideas ofthe SocialistRevolution different h m the manner
in which the revolution actually came about?

3) Write a note on the legacy of the Russian Revolution.

 - -

UNIT 25 KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION:

PRINTING AND INFORMATICS
- -

Structure
25.1 Introduction
25.2 Education
25.2.1 Background: 17"- 18" Century Europe
25.2.2 Education in the 19" Century
25.2.3 Education in the 20h Century

25.3 Revolution and the Word: Printing, Publishing, Reading

25.4 Radio and Television Broadcasting
25 -5 The Internet
25.6 Summary
25.7 Exercises

25.1 INTRODUCTION
The modem word has experienced broadly speaking, two kinds of revolutions.
There are sudden convulsions that change the course of history irreversibly: political
revolutions like the French and the Russian are instances of this. There are also
slower, seismic shiftsthat underpin social change, which, when comprehended over
the course of a century or two, present an undeniable picture of revolutionary
transformation. The revolution in knowledge and social communication that this
Unit will consider contains, at differentjunctures and with different intensities, both
these forms of revolution.
We know much more about the world than our predecessors two or three centuries
ago. This is undeniable. The question is, how did this change in the extent of general
human knowledge come about? There are many possible answers to this. One
could cite the list of major technological changes and scientificdiscoveries in the last
few centuries. (The following Unit on technologicalrevolutions will discuss some of
these aspects). One could look at the growth of new fields of knowledge, the
'disciplines', as they're known, and notice nothing short of a revolution in fields like
medicine, the physical and social sciences, and technical and technological
knowledge. These would be relevant ways of approachingthe knowledge revolution.
This Unit, however, will approach the matter differently.
If we concedethat much greater numbers of people are much better informed about
the world around them than was the case a few centuries ago, then we are linking
two developments together. The first is relatively straightforward: people have
discovered new things about the world, and these discoveries have come faster and
with more intensity since, say, the sixteenthcentury,and especially since the Industrial
Revolution, than they did before. The second development is equallyprofound, but
subtler: the ways in which people have come to know the world have been
revolutionized.Today, how do we keep ourselves informed of what happens around
m?We read newspapers, we read books, we listen to the radio, we watch television,
we sufthe Internet. All of this cannot, of course, be done in the same proportions
 Knowledge Revolution:
by everyone. Depending on educational level and access to technology, some may Printing and Informatics
rely on newspapers solely, others inay be able to access the Internet, and still others
may have to hear of events by word of mouth. What all this should tell us is that it is
important to understand the ways in which we come to know things. Books have a
history; so does the Internet, and so -equally crucially - does education, the training
that shapesthe ways in which people see the world, and, through its inclusions and
exclusions, decides who gets to know the world in what degree.
All ofthis will be considered in this Unit, which could be read,with some simplification,
as a history of the media - in the broadest historical sense. The revolutions of
modernity have had a constant thread runningthrough them: the expanded awareness
of the world on the part of more and more numbers of people, across the world,
though usually - for complex historical reasons -earlier in the Western world than
elsewhere. This, considered in the long term, constitutes a slow revolution of its
own, thoughnot all that slow if we consider the extent of the expansion of human
knowledge. Within this extended long revolution, we can sense an underlying
continuity and steady growth of awareness, but we can also sense certain moments
when technological discoveriesand intellectual breakthroughs rocked society -the
invention of printing, for instance, or the rise of the Internet.
A handy term to describe the cluster of transformationsconsidered in this Unit is
'social communication': the ways in which social change and expanded
communicationbetween human beings are locked together. This Unit will examine
certain key processes that have revolutionized knowledge and expanded the
possibilities of social communication.
First, the protracted spread of systems of education and the achi~vementof
literacy in various parts of the world, which constitutes a neccssary basis for
the absorptionof knowledge.
I
I Second, the various ways in which the printed word has been revolutionized
since the fifteenth century: the growth of modem printing, the book publishing
I
industry, changes in ways people read, and the growth of newspapers producing
regular information about the world.
I Third, the growth of audiovisualbroadcasting in the twentieth century: radio
and television.

I
1
Fourth, and finally, the contemporary rise of the Internet, and its possibilities.
Neither this Unit nor the list are comprehensive:they do, however, indicate the
texture of the prolonged revolution in knowledge that has chixacterized modem
tima.

i 25.2 EDUCATION
One of the centad transformations of the modern era has collcemed the organization
of the ways in whch howledge is transmitted, and also the ways .inwhich people's
capacities to receive this knowledge have been shzrped. For this a study of
the development of mcrdan systems of educationis essential for an & m g of
the' revoMon'.
25.2.1 bekground: 17"b - l$Jth Century Europe
As Absotukism developed over the course of the 17hand 18&centuries,
I the state in mtrkslike Prussia, France, and Russia began to perceive the importance
Revolutions of intervening actively in educational matters, oRen in competitionwith the Church
and other religious bodies, which had hitherto dominated pedagogy. The spread of
elementary education across society, and especially into the burgeoning middle
classes, was often seen as an efficient way of breeding loyal and obedient citizen-
subjects.

Certain major changes began to take place in educational practice and ideology in
this period. First, Latin, which had been the medium for instruction, came to be
rivalled and slowly displaced by teaching in the mother languages of different states.
This heralded amove towards the identificationof the kind of educationone received
with the cultural and political identity one bore. Second, spurred by the ideas of
thinkers like Francis Bacon in England, there was a growing emphasis on training in
the exact sciences, which slowly began to rival the Renaissance-inheritedfocus on
logic and rhetoric as subjects fit for school curricula. This new emphasis can be seen
as a way of trying to keep education abreast of the accretions of scientificknowledge
that characterized European life from the 16&century onward.

The dghteenth-centuryEnlightenmentproduced different schools of thought around

the questionofeducation.The empiricistphilosopher John 1,ocke argued that human
minds were formed by lived experienceand not abstract reason: thus, children should
be given thoroughgoing instruction in proper modes of conduct prior to 'studies'.
On a different track, the Italian philosopher GiarnbattistaVico stressed the role of
imagination in the creation of human personality. On the bayis of this, he argued for
the nourishnlent ofthe minds of children through the study of languages, poetry,
history and oratory. Some German ideologies argued on the other hand for a severely
regimented education for children, which would break their urge to disobey and sin
by carefully disciplining both body and spirit. In different ways, then, sotne of the
major thinkers and intellectual currents of the time tried to come to grips with the
question of how knowledge was to be imparted through education, and what kinds
of knowledge were most fit for transmission.

In the late eighteenth century, elementary education spread in absolute terms. The
school system was by now a major concern of the state in all the major European
countries, and the ideal - if not the reality- of universal compulsory schooling was
established.Running hand in hand with the extensionof state control over education
was the process of nutionalization: the systems of education that were now
established were harnessed to the structures and needs of the nation-state as never
before. In Prussia, Frederick I1 issued general school regulations across the country
in 1763,establishing compulsory schooling for children between five and 13 or 14
years of age. In 1787,school administration was centralized under a national board
of education. In Russia in the earlyeighteenth century, Peter the Great tried to organize
an educational system squarely harnessed to the needs of the state: religious and %

classical learning were eschewed, and replaced by training in mathematics,navigation,

artillery and engineering. Later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Tsar
Alexander I tried to extend these principles of utility: rural education involved
instructionto the peasantq in elements of agriculture as well as basic literacy; urban
schooling,on the other hand, was focused on education fit for civil servants-in law,
political economy,technology,and commerce.The transmission ofknowledgethrough
education, in these cases, was organized not as an end in itself, but as a means by
which properly educated and trained subjects could serve the State. The
adrniilastrative structure of education, and the subjects considered relevant for the
cmculum, were dictated in large part by the interests of the State.
25.2.2 Education ib the 19thCentury Knowledge Revolution:
Printing and Informatics

Major structural ch- in the economy and society underpinned the enormous
expansion of education in the nineteenth century. European expansion overseas
brought new wealth into the European economy, and sustained the rise of business
groups and the middle class. The growth of industrialization,initially in Britain and
later acrossthe continent, involved the development of mass labour, concentrated in
industrial cities.The spread of elementaryeducationto the industrialproletariat became
a concern of state and public, and was fuelled also by the demands of democratic
and radical agitators and intellectuals, who raised questions about the welfare of the
'common man', attacked privileges, and emphasized the creation of citizens who
could, through education,fulfil their entitlementto personal growth.
The first half ofthe nineteenth century saw significantgrowth in pedagogical thought.
Three figures stand out in this respect. The Swissreformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi,
at the beginning ofthis period, propounded the idea that the 'innate character' of the
child, rather than the external structures of the arts and the sciences, should be the
basis of a comprehensive intellectual, moral and physical educational progarnrne.
Working as he did with the children of the poor, he emphasized the importance of
education within the home. Another major educational reformer was the German
Froebel, who in 1837 began the kindergarten movement, which was characterized
by an accent on the importance of play in child education. Games, according to
Froebel, could tap the innate capacities of children. The kindergcartensthat spread
across Europe in the second half of the twentieth century marked a new departure:
earlier, institutionsfor small children (nursery and day-care centres) had merely been
spaces where they could be kept while their parents were at work; with the new
system, however, children could be, in Froebel's words, subjects for 'psychological
training.. .by means of play and occupations.' Johann Friedrich Herbart, a
contemporary of Froebel's who achieved immense posthumous fame, \vas among
the founders of fully developed theoretical pedagogy, a system he developed by
injecting metaphysics and psychology into the study of learning processes.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, national schooling systems came to be
fully articulated in many countries. External processes were an impetus to this: the
consolidationof national stateswedded educationto the building of 'national chamcter,
and enabled the administration of education by the State; the spread of modem
technology fuelled the growth of new 'modem schools' that taught modem languages
and exact sciences.Therewas an immense growth of vocational schools in this time,
and the increasing pace of secularizationin Europe was marked by the decline of the
church (relativeto the state) in educational matters. There was another factor: the
growth of democratic movements across large parts of Europe, which demanded
universal male adult franchise. For the state in England, France and Germany- the
three European countrieswe shall consider at length, and also the three that witnessed
major and sustained democraticagitations in the nineteenth century- education was
a means of mobilizing populations, but also, equally, a concession to popular
democratic demands.
Germany

Gennan~ witnessed the fastest development of the struches of national education

illthis time. Compulsory school attendance was established by the second half of
the eighteenth century, and in 1794a law declaring state supremacy over education
was passed. In 1807, following the traumatic defeat of the Prussian army at the
hands of Napoleon at Jena (1 806), there was a new emphasis on cultivating
nationalism through strictly state-controllededucationof the young, and the remnants
Revolutions of ecclesiastical educationwere snuffed out. Wilhelm von Humboldt, at the head of
a special section ofthe Ministry of the Interior that controlled education, established
in 1810 the first comprehensive system for the state examination of teachers. The
classical system of schooling (the nine-year Gymnasium with its accent on Latin
and Greektraining)persisted a long time, fhough, and it was not till well after German
unification and the establishment of the German Empire (1871) that 'modem'
schooling, with its emphasis on the sciences and the mother tongue, came to enjoy
similarprivileges.

The real supremacy of the German educational system was in the field of higher
education, which was centred around the universities of Berlin, Breslau, Bonn and
Munick, institutions that drew in students from all around the world. The major
universities in nineteenth-century Germany, far in advance oftheir counterp&s ir,
higher education elsewhere,integrated education with the steady accurnul~tionof
scientificknowledge that was proceeding across Europe by introducing scientific
training at an advanced level into the curriculum. Even more significantly,these were
the first modern educational institutions to combine teaching and research,integrating
two radical principles -the elective freedom of the student (to choose his own
programme of study) and the freedom of the professor to engage in research and
develop his subject.

France

In France, the universal right to education was proclaimed as a revolutionaryprinciple

in 1791, in the middle of the French Revolution. However, when educational
structures- formerly dominated by the Jesuits and other teaching orders - came to
be displaced by a new centralizing state apparatus under Napoleon in the early
nineteenth century, the revolutionary egalitaianism of the 1789-1793 period had
largely been eschewed, aqd+fapolemdevised his elaborate system of educational
trainingmainly for the ckifbrenofthe upper classes and rising professional bourgeoisie.
A detailed system of degrees and certificates for various levels of study was
established, and requisite grades of proficiency were earmarked for entry into law,
medicine, teaching and other professions. In 1854, France was divided into sixteen
administrative districts (academies)for educational purposes; these, however, had
little autonomy and bctioned as arms of the national state apparatus of education.
It was in the 1880sthat the major changes in the educational system came to be
legally defined: universally free and compulsory education was established,and
religious teaching was abolished in public schools.

England

Ehgland followed a slightly digcrent trajectory. The ideological hegemony of the

doctrine of laissez-faire limited, for a long time, the drive towards state control of,
and responsibility for, education. APthe turn of the nineteenth century, education
was considered the preserve of private enterprise, and much unstructured and
mystematic philanthropy was involved in the development of elementary education.
Voluntary schools were set up all over the country - among the earliest were the
Sunday schools from the 1780s,which mainly dealt in Bible reading - and were
accompanied by philanthropic educational orgarkations such as the Society for
Bettering the Conditions of the Poor, which was set up in 1796. Organizations
financed voluntarily, however, could not cope with the task of providing
comprehensive elementary education. It was in 1870that, partly spurred on by the
reproaches of Matthew mold (who served as inspector of elemenfary schools
between and 1 866), Parliamentpassed an ~lementaryEducation Act. In 1880,
 Knowledge Revolution:
elementary education, administered by local educational authorities or 'school Printing and Informatics
boards', was made compulsory throughout England and Wales, and in 1891 fees
were abolished in almost all elementary schools. Secondaryeducation, however,
continued to be left to voluntary and private enterprise, and the 'public school'
system (which was highly expensive and anything but public, despite the name)
continued to be thoroughly elitist in its nature and values.

Despite the slowness with which England and France achieved fke primary education,
mass literacy proceeded very quickly through the nineteenth century in both these
countries, as indeed it did in Germany. The German Reich was 88 per cent literate in
1871, at the time of unification. France and England were less developed in this
regard, but by the 1890s, 90 per cent literacy had been almost uniformly reached in
Western Europe. There were, of course, persistent regional disparities within
countries, and outside of the heartland of the mass literacy drives progress on this
front was much more halting. In Russia, where sporadicdrives towards a democratic
system of educationwere regularly halted by reactionary rollbacks, in 1900 nearly
70 per cent of the male population and 90 per cent of the female population remained
illiterate.

Outside Europe, too, tumultuous changes in educational systems were beginning to

be articulated.In the United States, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century
-again, significantly, index-linkedto the growth of radical democratic sentiment and
the celebrationof the 'common man' -the common school was established, as an
educational structure run on public funds, and open to every child. This was, given
the federal structureof the United States,not established at one go, but gradually, in
state after state, beginning with Massachusetts in 1837. Before long, some common
schools, acceding to demands for advanced public education, introduced courses
beyond the elementary level, and the 'high school' thus came to be established. In
the course of the nineteenth century, higher education in the United States was also
reshaped, as colleges surged in number, lost their formerly religious character and
became graduate schools of research.

European contact with Asia, in the form of colonialism, also introduced some
significant changes in existing educational structures.As an example of this -though
not necessarily a representative one - we shall consider India, the focal point of the
British Empire, which witnessed some significant shifts in educational systems and
patterns under colonial control. However, colonial education in India did not mean a
simple displacemeiltof indigenouspatterns of educationby Enghsh education.Matters
were much more complex. In general, colonial policy in the early nineteenth century
uneasily avoided intervention in education. Educational initiatives were started by
Christian missionaries, who, however, were never easily integrated into the
mechanisms of colonial control. Missionaries, printing books in the Indian vernaculars,
stimulatedthe development of Indian languages. From 1813, some limited public
expenditure on educationwas established,but the East India Company's government
spent this on the teaching of classical Sanskrit and Arabic, giving rise to what came
to be known as an Orientalist' policy of education. The earliest demands for
instruction in English -which was beginning to be recognized and experienced as a
language of power in the colonial context - came from Indian reformers like
Rammohan Roy in the early nineteenth century. It was not till the 1830s that an
aggressive body of government officials,who came to be known as the 'Anglicists',
demanded that Oriental learning be replaced by Western knowledge in the priorities
of the State, and had their way. In 1857, universities were established in Calcutta,
Bombay and Madras, and resulted in an expansion of college education.
However, there were gaping loopholes in the educational structures established
under the aegis of colonial rule. First, and most importantly, the near-complete
neglect of primary education kept the vast majority of the country illiterate- a state
of affairs that persisted into post-Independence times. Second,the unplanned growth
of private colleges and universities led to a significant growth in numbers of people
who, though educated, lacked access to suitable employment in a colonial
administrativestructurethat was stacked against them - Indians, for instance, could
not enter the higher rungs of the administrative service. This was one of the many
factorsthat fuelled discontent with colonial rule, and fiom the late nineteenth century,
one of the more interesting markers of nationalist discontent was the development
of educationalinstitutionsalong 'national' lines, such as the D.A.V. College in Lahore
or the Central Hindu College in Varanasi.
25.2.3 Education in the 20thCentury
Through the course of the twentieth century, education retained and intensified its
role as a catalyst of social change, as a marker of inequalities and differentials,as a
benchmark of state policy and accomplishments,and as a facilitatorof the circulation
of various kinds of knowledge. Structural processes and dramatic events in the
twentieth century, as in its predecessors, shaped the trajectory af educational
institutionsand practices, and moulded the nature of their impac~.
There was, first of all, the dislocation caused by the two world wars. To cocsider
the relationshipbetween war and education,however, one must probe slightlydeeper.
Through the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth,
European armies stood armed against one another, in a tense and unstable standoff,
as rivalries - largely fuelled by competing colonial ambitions- escalated between
different states. Policies of conscription were introduced, and there was a marked
militarization of society. This was, ironicallyperhaps, one of the engines that drove
the escalation and spread ofeducati~n.In societies continually preparing for war,
the state had to be ready to invest in military and technical training, and this invariably
involved a ceiTain degree of education.
The world wars ~ l s oin, the long run, weakened the power of the large European
powers. The major consequence of this, of course, was the staggering rise of the
United Statesand the Soviet Union as superpowers. However, another consequence
of this, as processes of decolonizationescalated after 1945,was that education as
a nationalist agendatook on a new meaning in the context of newly liberatedcountries,
trying to establish enduring and stable political and economic structures. Education
in the Third World came to be seen as an instrument of national regeneration.
Industrial and scientific development in the West called into being new kinds of
training innew kinds of technical knowledge. Old skills rapidly became obsolete as
scientific technology consistentlyrevolutionized itself, and new systemsofknowledge
were created, which necessitated education. Researchers, skilled workers, and
high-level professionals were - and continue to be - constantly produced by this
kin4 of education.
The same is true of academic knowledge. It was in the twentieth century that the
university emerged as a major centre ofboth knowledge production and consumption,
in various parts of the world. Mass universities and open universities pioneered the
 Knowledge Revolution:
Between 1950 and 1970 - a period often termed the 'Golden Age' of Printing and Informatics
western capitalism - the number of universities in many countries doubled or
trebled, and education, both mass and specialized, was enabled on a much larger
scale. In the Third World, too, universities catered to larger and larger numbers of
students.Structuresof mass education were established at higher as well as primary
levels.
If we look briefly at the experience of revolutionary Communist rule in the twentieth
century, the scale oftransformation in the field of education becomes a bit clearer.
Western capitalist countrieshad more or less achieved mass literacy -and in many
cases near-universal literacy - by the twentieth century. The same was not true of
Russia, under Tsarist despotism, and China, which sufferedfiom the combination of
a decaying monarchy, Western imperialist designs, and immense political turbulence
in the first half of the twentieth century. Both countries were stabilized, and brought
into line with technological and educational developments in the rest of the world,
under Communist rule which in both cases began by stirring genuine hopes for
expandedpopular sovereigntyand social egalitarianism, and ended up as revolutionary
despotisms. The Russian Empire experienced its revolution between 1917 and 1923,
and China came under Communist rule in 1949. Both revolutionary governments
launched massive programmes of social reconstruction, and education was at the
heart of this. Manual labour and productive work were emphasizedin the educational
systems of both States, and there was tremendous emphasis on basic literacy skills
and primary education. Enormous advances were made in both these fields in very
short time. The logic of revolutionary dictatorship seemed to demand this. On the
one hand, there was the need to keep citizens from questioningthe regime that ruled
them, and to this end education deployed sophisticatedpropaganda machines (as, it
has to be said, did many educational systems in many democratic countries). On the
other hand, there was a constant pressure to give citizens access to good - sometimes
excellent - standards of basic education, which was considered vital to socialist
construction.
In essence, Russia, China (and, interestingly, virtually all the left-wing
dictatorskps of the twentieth century) achieved in the course of a period of decades
in the twentieth century what the West had achieved a few generationspreviously: a
population with extremely widespread literacy and basic education, free and
compulsory for all. The achievements in this regard were remarkable: to this day,
primary education in most surviving socialist regimes is administered with care
and efficiency.
Theories of education in the twentieth century have taken many forms, increasingly
informed by a reliance on the findings and methods of other disciplines, such as the
social sciences,and, more directly, psychology.The progressive education movement
of the early twentieth century, pioneered by the educational reformer John Dewey,
was based largely in experimental American schools, and tried to break down the
traditional stiffness of school structures and allow the child to explore her latent
possibilities. Imaginative writing and reading classes, community-linkedprojects,
dramatics and informal activities?and self-assessment systemswere some of the
innovations of the progressive movement that have lasted. Another pedagogic
movement of the early twentieth century was characterized by the child-centred
approach, which argued that the school should be fitted to the needs of the child and
not vice versa. Maria Montessori, one of the early twentieth-century exponents of
this approach, viewed educational reform as a means of countering the suppression
of children's personalities by adults.
Revolutions
25.3 REVOLUTION AND THE WORD:
PRINTING, PUBLISHING, READING
To comprehend the nature of the transformation brought in the modern world
by the linkedpractices ofprinting, publishing, and reading, we need to imagine
a world without newspapers, books and bookstores, publishing houses and
printingpresses. We would be imagining a world, in other words, without the
foundationsof modem communications,which ti11the twentiethcentury were entirely
dominated by the printed word. When studying the successive revolutions in the
world of the 'print media' in modem times, it is necessary to consider not only the
techcal transformations in the field, which made the circulation of knowledge and
entertainmentof various kinds possible, but also the receptionof such media, in the
form of reading. Keeping this in mind, we can briefly s w e y the radical changes in
the world of the printed word in the last few centuries.
The details ofthe purely technical aspects of the printing revolutions sincethe fifteenth
renim-vneed not occupy us. It is generally held that Johannes Gutenburg invented
the first modem printing press, sometime between 1440 and 1450. Block printing
had already been practised in Europe sincethe beginning of the fifteenthcentury, but
Gutenburg introduced an entirely new craft of printing, involving movable metal
type, ink, paper and press. By the end of the century, this new innovation had been
carried through large parts of Europe, largely by German printers. Texts could now
circulate on a scale hitherto unimaginable: earlier, copying a manuscript had been
the only way to reproduce a text. Printing reduced the cost per copy of a book
drastically, and greatly shortened the time needed to produce a book. The logical
corollary of this was the production of books in larger numbers. Each book could
now reach greater numbers of readers than before.
Thaewere sigtllficantimprovementsin printing technolopy in the followingcenturies.
Notable among these are the constructionof the first all-metal press in England in
1795,the application of steam power to the printing process in the early nineteenth
century (which joined together the various operations of the process of printing in a
single cycle), the development of mechanical typecasting and typesetting, greater
sophisticationin the reproduction of illustrations through the nineteenth century, and
the perfection of colour printing in the twentieth century. These and other inventions
constituted a cluster that we can characterize as the industrializationof printing.
Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after Gutenburg's invention, printing
presses spread all across Europe, and printing was at the heart of some of the
bitterest political struggles and most dramatic social transformations ofthe time. The
church, the state,universities, and religious radicals all deployed printing technology
as a means of social communication and propaganda during the religious ferment of
the Reformation in Europe. There were several sustained attempts to regulate and
censor the spread of printed material and the activity of presses on the part of
church and state, and, on the other side, the use of cheaply printed literature to
spread radical ideas. In the mid-seventeenth century, the heyday of cheap print, the
EnglishRevolution, which produced the only republican experiment in British history,
witnessed the disseminationof radical tracts by religious and socialreformers: prinL~g,
here, was in the eye of the storm of a revolutionary period. This was a pattern that
was to replicate itself later as well: duringboth the Frenchand the Russian Revolutions,
for instance,the circulationof cheapprinted condemnationsof the royal family played
a major part in the unseating of monarchic regimes. Print became, over the course
 Knowledge Revolution:
Between the 15"' and the 18'" century, many of the characteristics of modem Printing and Informatics
publishing practice and book circulation came to be established. Despite attempts
at censorship,sometimes successful,by virtually all the European nation-states, the
book trade flourished in these centuries. Advertisementsfor books in the form of
handbills or broadsheets began to be printed from the 1460s.Publishers' lists and
catalogues began almost at the same time. Books were distributed along trade routes,
and at trade fairs such as that at Frankfwt in Germany. Frankfurt became the centre
of much European publishing, and a kind of clearing-housefor new publications: a
state of affairs that lasted till 1759,when imperial interference caused the centre of
the trade to shift to Leipzig. Over the course of these three centuries, the fimctions of
publisher, bookseller, and printer gradually came to be separated from one another.
By the nineteenth century, the publisher's dominance in the process of book
production and distribution was established.
The industrializationof printing in the nineteenthcenturyradically reduced publishing
costs. Paper, which had formed more than 20 per cent of the cost of a book till
1740,dropped in value till it constituted only 7 per cent in 1910. Cloth cases began
to replace leather bindings after 1820. Across Europe and America in this period,
the book trade expanded in tandem with the rise in population and the growth of an
educated public. The number ofnew books expanded enormously. In Britain, roughly
100 new titles were printed per year till 1750; this rose to 600 by 1825 and over
6000 by the turn of the twentieth century. As education expanded, popular series at
low prices began to be published, an early forerunner being Bell's The Poets of
Great Britain, which appeared in 1777-83.Cassell's National Library Series (209
volumes, 1886-1890) was the cheapest of these editions, costing three pence for a
paper binding and six pence for a cloth binding.
In the 20" century, book publishing became a large industry, embracing a number of
large concerns, some of which employed staffs of 1000 and more. Specialization
became arnarked feature of publishing houses, especially in the field of educational
books, which commanded an enormous market with the increase in literacy rates
and the rise of higher education. Companies like Macmillan in Britain and America,
and Methuen in London, began with specifically educational needs in mind. Parts of
the colonized world also slowly emerged as markets with a securereadership: India,
for instance, witnessed not only the mass entry of titles published in England, but
also the settingup of branches of British publishing houses, and the developmentof
a diversified indigenous publishing world.
The experienceoftwo world wars and the Depression of 1929rocked the publishing
industry in the West at severaljunctures, as book stocks were destroyed,purchasing
power shrank, and the price of paper periodically rose. In such a situation, finding
mean.. of cheaper circulation to stay afloat seemed a logical step to take. The British
publisher Allen Lane pioneered the paperback movement in response to this, and
thereby a much wider readership than before was tapped. Literature of various
kinds could spread much quicker within literate populations.
In the postwar period, publishmg expanded rapidly again, and book circulation found
new means of intensification, such as the rapid growth oftranslations.The paperback
revolution continued, creating millions of new readers across the world, dominated
by the Penguin Publishing House. Paperbacks were -and continue to be - sold in
not only bookshops, but also newsstands, drugstores, and railway stations. Academic
publications -editions of works of scholarshipin various disciplines,for the benefit
of the growing numbers of university students across the world - also began to be
published, initially in the United States in the 1950s,and then in various other parts
of the world with large student populations. This was publishing's response to the
Revolutions growth of knowledge in various fieldsindie arts and the sciencesthrough the twentieth
century, and the emergence of the student and scholarly community as a fertile
market for books to do with their subjects. University presses also grew in the
postwar period, as a means of disseminatingknowledge and research findings in
various specializedfieldswithout being too tied down to the more acute demands of
profit expansion.
To understand the implications of the revolution in printing and publishing, one must
consider the equally revolutionary ways in which readerships and reading practices
were transformed from the eighteenth century onwards. Prior to the eighteenth
century, the book in Europe had generally been seen as a form of social discipline,
imposed by the Church. Now, as new kinds of printed matter - most dramatically
perhaps the novel - penetrated the subjectivelives of people, the book acquired an
emancipatory function, and came to be seen as a vehicle for individual intellectual
growth and social opportunity.The mechanically reproduced text could be read far
more easily than any manuscript: the imagined life and world of the book, therefore,
could draw in readers far more effectively.And most importantly, of course, the
expanded number of books meant that readers could be drawn into the book in
large numbers: individual works, then, could exercise a significant social impict.
Lending libraries and reading societies grew: a new world of social intercoursethus
developed around the practice of reading.
Through the eighteenth century,regular reading remained limited to a small section
ofthe Europeanpopulation, mainly sections of the rising bourgeoisie.In the nineteenth
century, however, as the reading public ofthe Western world achieved literacy on a
mass scale, an enormous and inchoate world of new readers emerged. Women,
children and industrial workers constituted the bulk of the reading population that
emerged in this time, and books were written and circulated keeping their tastes -
real or supposed - in mind. Cookery manuals, magazines, and a large number of
cheap novels were published keeping women specifically in mind. Novels were
considered suitable for women partly because, unlike the male world of the
newspaper, they dealt with a world of the private sphere, inner life and personal
relationships -a realm considered fit for the feminine character, with its supposed
thralldom to imagination and fancy. Female readership came to constitute a distinct
market by the late nineteenth century. The Bible, novels like Robinson Crusoe, and
increasing numbers of fairy tales and fantasies were considered suitable reading
matter for children. Middle-class reformers laid much stress on the literaryeducation
of working-class men, who were afforded greater opportunities for reading than
before by the reduction ofthe working day. Classical and educational literaturewas
considered suitable and edif4ringfor the literate proletariat. However, the presence
of radical and socialist literature on the shelves of workers' libraries suggests that
there existed moves towards an independent working-class literary culture.
In the twentieth century, readership expanded further, with the advance of literacy in
various parts of the world. Reading has come to be supplanted, however, by other
kinds of leisure: cinema, rather than the book, is perhaps the definitive cultural form
of the century. This does not mean a death to reading, but it does perhaps signal a
slow decline. Potentially new forms of reading have developed with the growth of
electronic texts in recent times, which are substantially different from the printed
book. It is yet to be seen if this will herald another revolution in reading.
The Advent of Modern Newspapers
Few histories can give us as rich a sense of the texture of the 'knowledge revolution'
as the history of the modern newspaper. Contemporary life in the literate world
 K n o w l e d g e Revolution:
without access to news is unthinkable. We are so accustomed to being, in lesser or Printing and Informatics
greater degree, familiar with some manner of information from different parts of
the world that we tend to forget that this is a relatively recent development, and
is closely linked to changes in the nature of international, national and regional
communication. Through the twentieth century, vast numbers of people have
been accustomed to getting the news 'as it happens' through the media of radio,
television and more recently the Internet. However, the initial transformation in the
nature of information generation and the creation of 'news' happened through the
newspaper.
The emergence of news, as a given quantity of information that large numbers of
people have regular access to through determinate media, is perhaps the most
important dimension ofthe knowledge revolution in modern times. And newspapers
stood, for many generations, in the centre of this momentous change. Consider
some of the aspects of a news-producing and consuming world. Such a world is, in
an obvious sense, integrated as never before. This was a process that naturally took
time, but the trajectory was consistent: fromthe time newspapers and news production
became a major industry, increasing numbers of people had access to information
about parts of the world they would never see in their lifetime, and many parts of the
world they may not even have heard of. In o w own time, we are used to frequently
articulated worries about the future of the world, about nuclear holocaust and
envircnmental degradation, about political rivalries that threaten human existence.
Would these anxieties be conceivable in a world without widespread access to
news from vastly different regions and contexts?
The spread of news, then, created conditions for expanded awareness about the
world outside regional and national boundaries for vast numbers of pecple. At the
same time, it also created conditions for extremely - sometimes explosively -
sharpened awarenessof 'national' questionsand issues, as well as of national identity.
The assumption that people need to know first of all what is happening inside their
own nation is an assumption that helps in constructing that nation within popular
imagination. The fact that we as Indian citizens are likelier to know about a minor
corruption scandal in Indian political life than about a flood in Bangladesh or an
African fillnine is not 'natural', it is part of a reality constructed for us by the priorities
that our sources of information set for themselves. A national newspaper has
determined coordinates: it is going to be distributed among people within a given
geographical territory, and it is usually going to treat events that happen within the
space of the nation-state with much greater care and attention than it will events
outside it, even if suf£icient information is available about the latter. The rise of national
consciousness across the world has been historically paralleled by the rise of
newspapers as vast profitable concerns.
Till the turn of the nineteenth century and the advent of the Industrial Revolution,
news coverage was sporadic. The first rudimentary newsletters, passiig information
between traders, had emerged in the Middle Ages. The seventeenthcentury saw the
growth of the first semi-independent newspapers in Britain, America, and on the
European continent, though these were frequently subject to enormous censorship.
This in itself demonstrates that, even at an early stage of growth, the power of
'news' to shape public opinion was recognized by the powers-that-be. In North
America in the late eighteenth century, the press became a powerful social force,
being the chief propagandist of the new republic of the United States after the
Revolutionof 1776. Clandestinely published newssheetswere an agent in the creation
of public opinion and political conflict across large parts of Europe and North America
in this period.
Revolutions By 1800, educated citizens in the United States and most of Europe could expect a
certain degree of access to independent news coverage - a revolutionary
breakthrough in itself, in the ways in which people related to the world around them.
The era of the Industrial Revolution,however, produced conditions that supported
an unimaginable expansion of the scope of news dissemination. Part of this had to
do with the revolution in printing techniques and developments in transport and
cormunications. Till well into the nineteenth century, news had to largely spread by
road, or - in the case of international news -by sea, and the transmissionof information
was slow. One can speculate that 'news' across a sufficiently long distance in those
days would not have, in many cases, been of any real significance as a guide to
action. Imagine, for instance, news of a landslide or an earthquake in remote regions
in the eighteenth century. By the time news of this reached people who were in a
position to intervene,it would usually have been too late. In contrast,news in modem
times is definitely a shaping force: it not only reports actions and events, but also
propels them and determinestheir course. The speeding up of communicationin the
nineteenth century, through the invention of the telephone or the telegraph, made it
possible for news to be gathered instantaneously.In 1815, an event in Brussels took
four days to report in London. Within a few decades, things had changed so much
that it could be reported immediately.
In 1851, one of the legendary accomplishments in the history r?fnews occurred,
when Paul Julius Reuter began using the telegraph to supply foreign news to national
presses through telegrams,and thereby created the modem news agency.Newspaper
correspondentsalso had transformed responsibilities and powers in the era of instant
communication. Journalism - in the form of on-the-spot newsgathering-became a
major, and increasingly valued, full-time occupation. The structures of modem
joutllalism and the organization of the modern press were thus being set into shape.
All this enabled tlle efficient gathering of news, and itstransmission h m correspondent
to news agency to editorial desk. But what of the next stage in the production of
'news' -the conversion of this information to readable matter, available to thousands
of neaders? In the late nineteenth century, this too was revolutionized. The invention
of the Lino-type machine -which began to be used in 1886- cut down radically on
the time :&en t~ produce the newspaper. This machine was at the centre of a
cluster of technological innovations, which also involved the application of electricity
to the printing industry, and the creation of machines that could print and also cut,
fold and bind newspapers of any size together. As we can see, the late-nineteenth
century newspaper partook of the most dramatic and exciting scientific and
technological advances of the time, and deployed them in its service,
As railways, steamshipsand telegraphs slashed distances between and within nations
in the late nineteenth century, mass-produced newspapers became available to all
literate or even semi-literate sections of society: industrial workers, for instance,
rapidly became the major consumers of the daily paper. By the end of the century,
the circulation figures of some popular newspapers had touched the million mark,
which indicatesthe intensity and scale of news consumption.Newspapers began to
take diverse forms in the content they bore in this period. The London Times, which
was an influential supporterof Parliamentary reform in Britain, proclaimed the ideal
ofjournalistic objectivity,and the right to criticize gcvernments, a task it took on at
the time of the Crimean War, for instance. The New York Tribune's sustained
opposition to slavery ws: another instance of a newspaper assuming democratic
political values as standards for its own practice. Other newspapers branched out in
different directions, and reflecteddifferent preoccupations. For the New YorkSun,
for instance, 'human-interest stories' without any particular political consequence
 Knowledge Revolution:
were seen as a lucrative investment. Cheaply produced and extremely sensationalist Printing and Informatics
newspapers - a prototype of which remains the Sun in London, the proverbial
'tabloid' - also acquired a mass readership.
Newspapers also witnessed significant growth in colonial contexts. Colonial
governmentsnaturally exercised particularly vigilant control over the press, especially
its political publications. Demands for a freer press, however, became a live issue in
colonized countries as it had in their metropolises. In India, The Times of India and
The Hindu emerged as major English-language newspapers, with high standards of
journalism. Many other newspapers- the Dhyanodyaya in Maharashtra, to take a
random example -published pages in both the vernacular and in English. There was,
through the late nineteenth century, a remarkable growth of vernacular newspapers.
Educated Indians in the colonial government's service painstakingly translated these,
so that reportage offensive or threatening to the government could be scrutinized
and, if necessary, censored. An openly nationalist press emerged in the late
nineteenth century, and, through complicated stages, moved to the heart of the
s t r u ~ l eagainst colonialismin the twentieth century. The press retained its importance
after Independence, and the number of newspapers and their circulation both
expanded.
In the late nineteenth century, then, newspapers across the world had become an
industry with a mass market. Their earlier identificationwith a narrowly literary world
was now snapped, and they entered the realm, and - in multiple ways -the logic of
big business. As the press came to require more and more sustained investment,
advertising revenue became increasingly important in the composition of newspaper
finances. By the 1890s,the 'press baron', a businessman (not infrequently a multi-
millio...ure) who owned chains of newspapers, had become a pivotal figure in the
world of news. A short story will illustrate this.
William Randolph Hearst, who was the biggest New York press baron at the turn of
the cenh IT, had initially been somethingof a campaigner against political corruption.
His rise to power, however, was based largely on his decision to shelve his earlier
ethics, and concentrate single-mindedly on what made news, and also what made
news sell. Hearst was the figure who inspired Orson Welles' great film Citizen
Kane, which explores the relentless logic of the corruption and power that resillt
from such manipulation of news and popular sentiment. In 1898,Hearst's Morning
Journal was publishing exaggerated and hysteric stories about the political tensions
between the United States and Spain over Cuba. Hearst is reported to have cabled
an illustrator for his paper in Cuba, asking for pictures of atrocities. The illustrator
responded that there were no atrocities to illustrate. Hearst apparently replied 'You
furnish the pictures and 1'11 furnish the war'.
This narrative illustrates two things. First, the decision of a substantial section of the
newspaper business to eschew the press's traditional proclamations of commitment
to truth and honesty in reportage. Second, and linked to this, the enormouspower of
news to shape the world that people inhabit. Hearst's statement, whether true or
not, reflects an assumption that many subsequent press barons - as also many political
regimes - have made: control over the news can shape the ways in which people
think and behave, in a world dominated by the mass media. This is something that
has often been exaggerated. Dictatorships, despite their control over the news and
people's access to it, have frequently proved unable to convince their subjects of
their legitimacy through media manipulation. People have, in large numbers and
collectivebodies, acted in ways contrary to the expectationsof newspaper magnates
and governments. But there remain serious grounds for anxiety, given the continually
enhanced reach and scope ofthe media, especiallywhen conjoined with governmental
Revolutions projects of control. The popular Hollywood satire Wag the Dog, made in the late
1990s,narrates a story of an U.S. administration's bid to retain power by creating
and circulating news of a phoney war. Such anxiety may often seem paranoic, but
also points to somethingvery real, because events like this, for all their fictive and
fantastic quality, are actually well within the realm ofpossibility.
Press barons building newspaper chains - not all of whom were necessarily as
unscrupulous as Hearst - dominated the landscape of American newspaper
ownership in the early part of the twentieth century. The logic of mass news
production that had helled the rise of newspapers as big business remained, but the
ownershippattern itself gradually changed, in both America and Europe. The older
press baron had combined the functions of editor and management executive. Over
the course of the twentieth century, the latter came to predominate over the former.
The world of the newspaper in the twentieth century has also been shaped by the
fierce competition that defines the corporate world as a whole. The newspaper
industry has been characterizedby fierce struggles for greater circulation,one concern
trying to top another's share in the news market. In this context, takeovers of smaller
concerns by larger news enterpriseshave been frequent. A contemporary example
of this is the vast internationalmedia empire built up by the Australian entrepreneur
Richard Murdoch.

25.4 RADIO AND TELEVISION BROADCASTING

Newspapers have retained, by and large, their mass circulation and reach, their
social force and relevance. However, over the course of the twentieth century they
were gradually supplanted as the most advanced disseminators of knowledge and
information by what we call the audio-visual media:radio ad television. If economic
forces, transport and communication welded the world together by creating new
connections between different regions, radio and television played an equally
revolutionary role. By making it possible to transmit events as they happened to
various parts of the world, broadcasting dissolved distances of space and time,
creating a virtual space -the radio set or the television screen - where events
could be simultaneouslv reported in various corners of the globe. In a very real
sense, the world shrank through the intervention of the mass media, both printed
and audio-visual,but especially the latter.
The first known radio programme was broadcast in Massachusetts in the U.S.A on
Cllristmas Eve, 1906. It was after the Second World War, however, that radio
broadcasting really took off, as a form of news transmission and - perhaps even
more vitally in the long run - as a source of popular entertainment,through the airing
ofmusic, drama, and so on. David Sarnoff, later of the Radio Corporation ofAmerica
and the National Broadcasting Corporation, was the first to suggest the possibility
of a radio receiver in every home, in 1916. This alerted experimenters in radio to
the commercialpossibilities of the form. The manufacture and sale ofradio receiving
equipment offered great possibilities for profitmaking, and radio -like the newspaper
before it and television after - entered into a symbioticrelationship with advertising,
which began to provide a substantial portion of its revenues, and in return used
airtime on radio stations as an advertising medium. In the early i 920s, the business
of constructing and selling radio receivers boomed, and concomitantly so did the
business of radio broadcast, as more and more broadcasting stations were set up.
Initially pioneered in England and the United States, radio spread extremely rapidly.
By the end of 1923,there were radio stations established in Canada, France, the
Soviet Union, Belgium, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Denmark and Australia.
Shortly afterwards, Asian countries began tojoin the world of radio communication.
 Knowledge Revolution:
Organized radio broadcasting began in Japan in 1925,and the Indian Broadcasting Printing and Informrties
Company had stations in Bombay and Calcutta in 1927.
Initially developed for its commercial possibilities, radio also offered immense
scope for public educational and awareness programmes. National
governments, alerted to this, encouraged the growth of what came to be known as
public-service broadcasting. The prototype for this was - and remains - the
British Broadcasting Corporation, set up as a public corporation in 1927. The
BBC was made answerable to Parliament, but day-to-day control was left in
the hands of the Board of Governors. This was a model that influenced many
other countries.
Politicians soon realized the enormous potential of radio to shapepublic opinion and
deployed this in qualitatively new kinds ofpolitical campaigns, where the radio played
an increasingly important role. In the 1920s, the Republican Party in the United
States spent over 20 per cent of its campaign funds on radio broadcasting. The
1932 presidential contest between Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt saw
an unprecedented deployment of radio propaganda on both sides. In an even more
concentrated form, Hitler's use of public radio was central to his success and
popularity in Germany. During the Second World War, radio became a channel for
political mobilization on an unprecedented scale. The wartime rhetoric of Hitler,
Stalin, and Churchill is legendary; it had the social impact it did because of the
expanded reach of radio. Citizens were made more aware of their relationship to
their national g o v e m e n t through radio broadcasting in both wartime and peace-
time; simultaneously,radio was used - as print had been - to mould particular kinds
of citizens, obedient and loyal to the State. The requisite degree of pliancy, however,
was not easy to achieve, for the expansion of news networks -and the increasing
access many radio listeners had to overseas networks as the century advanced -
made it possible for radio to generate very different kinds of responses to government
policy. One way or another, though, political consciousness and awareness was
intensified in the era of broadcasting, as nation-states were knitted into coherent
political unitsmuch more effectivelythan before.
Socially, broadcasting in the West responded to some major changes in the
relationship between the private space of the family or individual home, and the
world outside, changes implicitin the developmentof industrial capitalismthat h c e e d
in the early twentieth century, Relative improvementin wages and working conditions,
changes in the length of the working day, and the limited expansion of leisure time,
combined to produce an emphasis on the improvement of the small family home. At
the same time, to maintain the self-suffciencyof the home, it was important to have
access to regular and quick access to news from the 'outside' world - about
employment, prices, weather, and wars, to take random examples. The development
of popular aesthetic tastes and interests also led to a desire for entertainment that
could be accessed at home. The development of sound broadcasting in the 1920s
served exactly this purpose, making news and entertainment accessible within
the home.
Televisionbroadcasting, which became a technical feasibility £rom the early 193Os,
drew upon the early experience of radio transmission, and also upon other techno-
cultural innovationsof the nineteenth and twentieth century. These included the use
of electricity, the development of telegraphy, photography, and the early growth of
cinema, with its invention of techniques of filmingand projection that allowed images
to be captured andtmnsrnittedinmotion, rather than photographic stillness. Television
created a unified virtual space, where people sitting in their homes could watch
images collated and produced from all over the wurld. As television developed, and
Revolutions on-the-spot news broadcasting and reportage grew, it became possible for the
circulation of informationto take on a radically new form. For the first time, news
was tangible, if only in virtual terms: the TV screen relayed images of actual events,
attaching faces and forms (as the radio had attached voices and sounds) to persons,
events, and processes that people had really only been able to imagine earlier. The
live telecasting of sport is a prime instance of this development, for it fuses together
the history of information and entertainment.For most people, TV and radio -but
especially TV -finally provided a substitute for the live sports events that most of
them would never have a chance of watching in the flesh. An eerily comparable
development is the telecasting of war: the Gulf War of the early 1990swas the first
war where large-scale military action was telecast live over substantial periods of
war. These two instances illustrate a common truth about television - it enablesthe
deeper involvement, and (in sometimestroubling ways) the vicarious participation
of viewers in the events they witness.
Early television broadcasting was pioneered in Britain, the United States being slower
off thz n;ar!c. The BBC in London began its television service in 1936, and the
NBC in New York began telecasting in 1939. This pattern of established radio
networks entering the field of television broadcasting, was taken up by many other
companies,especially in the United States. In the 1950s,radio was rapidly cvertaken
by television in popular appeal.
Television was dominated by the Anglo-Americanworld in its early decades of
growth. Other countries did not develop comparable television networks till well
after the Second World War, in the 1950s. Thereafter, the growth of television
across enormous parts of the world has been exponential. The Third World was
awakened to the possibilitiesoftelevision in the postwar period, in part because of
the boom in populations. In India, for instance,the expansion of television has been
linked to the growth in the numbers of middle-class consumers, though TV actually
taps audiencesacross diverse social strata. State control over telecasting was relaxed
in the 1990s, with the advent ofprivatizationand economic liberalization,one of the
dimensions ofwhich was the growth of cable TV networks, which are now almost
universally available to middle-class homes.
Radio and television broadcasting, over the decades, have in many ways
wrought revolutionary transformations in the circulation and consumption of
both news and entertainment. The volume of information available to the
viewer of TV or to the radio listener is immeasurably greater than earlier recipients
of news. Potentially, TV and radio also democratize knowledge. The literacy
required to access a newspaper is not needed to listen to the radio or to watch TV.
In third world countries, in particular, high rates of illiteracy have meant a great
reliance on broadcasting (especially radio, TV being a more expensive medium)
for information
Broadcasting has been, from the outset, intricately linked with big business, but
many programmes on both TV and radio have also been noted for their aesthetic
value. The performance of drama and comedy on radio and TV channels, the
production of documentaries for both media, and the making of films for television,
are instancesof this. Some television comedies in particular- the late- 1960sBritish
series Monty Python h Flying Circus,for instance - have been important statements
of twentieth century culture in their own right. The screeningof films on TV, which
has gone hand in hand with the international decline in cinema hall audiences, has
linked cinema and television together closely, sincethe former is now often viewed
through the medium of the latter, and the latter borrows many of its forms wd much
of its aesthetic from the former.
 Knowledge Revolution:
With all of this, the dimensions of personal leisure have changed dramatically, Printing and Inforn~aties
for people across the world. Very often, radio and television are referred to as
belonging to the world of 'mass communication'. In purely quantitativeterms, this is
true - these are forms of communication that reach much larger numbers of
people than any other. But the term is also misleading, for radio and television do
not reach people as masses, but as atomized consumers, individuals and families.
The image of a person sitting in front of a TV set for hours on end points to this
cultural dimension of broadcasting - huge numbers of people are targeted by radio
and television, but they receive programmes as private viewers. In this respect,
television is the polar opposite of the cinema hall, which thrives on collectivity. Of
course, there are frequently occasions when people crowd around a radio set or a
TV placed in a public place and watch or listen as a congregation- during cricket
matches broadcast live in India, for instance. Be that as it may, the most important
social consequences of broadcasting are probably to be found in the ways in which
it has influenced family and personal life, the ways in which watching a film, for
instance, can be integrated with eating, or cooking, or washing clothes, or even
fitted in between naps. Technological innovation in the field of broadcasting has
been geared towards the privatization and personalization of reception. The rapid
development of the pocket radio after World War 11is an instance of this. Portable
radios had been in vogue for a while before this, but this new innovation made it
possible to listen to the radio entirely on one's own, to make it part of one's personal
space, as it were.

25.5 THE INTERNET

The last of the major revolutions in the dissemination of knowledge and social
communicationup till the present day is the Internet.The full implicationsof Internet
technology will probably take a whilelo redize. There are many imponderables in
its growth. While Internet enthusiasts cla& an immediately revolutionary status for
this form of communication- and there are good reasons for this, since cyberspace
has opeRed up previously unimaginable possibilities- there are also grounds for
some skepticism. Operatingthe Internetinvolves both general and computer literacy,
which meamthatthe web-linked communityremains numerically somewhat limited
in comparison to, say, radio listeners in the middle of the century. One thing can be
said with reasonable certainty, though: the fbll extent of the Internet's impact upon
knowledge production and circulation will take a while to manifest itself. At present,
we can only grasp some of its dimensions.

For a form of communication that has had such significance for radical lefirwing
movements in recent times, the origins of the Internet are strange and surprising. In
the 1960s, the RAND Corporation, the most important strategic think-tank in
Arrlerica during the Cold War, trying to find a way of making communications among
U.S. authoritiessecure, even in the eventuality of a nuclear war, hit upon an interesting
idea. This built upon the growing importante of computers forpurposes of information
storage. One of RAND'S engineers imagined a decentralized computer network,
which could run because of a kind of internal anarchy: the absence of a central
controllingmechanism meant that the relevant information could be simultaneously
stored in severd imrlinked computers. Computer resources, then, could be shared.
The idea that was to become today's Internet, then, arose within the parameters of
U.S. defencethinking.

Ifthe creation of the basic idea of the Internet was the consequence of the search for
secure military command, its transformationinto a 'free' community of users came
Revolutions from a diametrically opposite impulse: an insurgent student politics that, closely
connected to anti-war agitation, also demanded the free sharing and dissemination
of knowledge. In 1979, some American university graduate students developed
some programmes by which computers using a particular operating system (Unix)
could call one another and exchange files. Communicationbetween people through
the computer became possible (e-mail) as well as postings of information on a
network that could be viewed simultaneously on different computers This elaboration
of the Internet principle proved genuinely revolutionary. Within a few years, this
students' insurgent computer network connected thousands of 'websites7where
information was posted. In 1988, there were over 11,000 sites, a ~ over d 1,800
articles of various kinds were being posted daily. The creation of the World Wide
Web in 1990 signalled the M e r development of the world of networked computers
and the disseminationof information.
Since the 1970s and 1980s, the Internet has undergone many changes. The left-
leaning libertarianism of the late-70s movement, which demanded free and
open access to the Net, has been partially overridden by the forces of
commerce and big capital. Corporate enterprise has taken over, with Bill
Gates' Microsoft Corporation now controlling - and making enormous
revenue from -a large number of the personal computers through which people
access the Intemet.
Still, the Internet remains, in many ways, the touchstone of a major democratic
revolution in knowledge-sharing and dissemination.It is virtually impossibleto police
or censor the Net, because of the incredibleproliferation ofwebsiteswhere material
md news of all kinds is posted. Communications have been unimaginably speeded
up. This has enabled,among other things, the formation of what are known as 'Internet
communities', networked users who communicate intensively, sometimes by the
hour, exchanging messages and posting material on the Web. Many kinds of
knowledge are disseminated on the Internet. Academic activity, for instance, has
been greatly stimulated, since web searches can often produce hundreds or even
thousands of referencesand articles on the Web when one is looking for information
on particular themes. School and university students with access to the Internet find
it an invaluable aid, as do scholars and researchers. Other kinds of information are
also available: the Net is, among other things, the first place where fresh news
breaks, much before it is printed in newspapers and usually before it can make it
- to the TV or radio. The quantity of news and information is so immense partly
because the space for fresh inputs of knowledge into the Web is to all extents and
purposes infinite, unlike the space in a newspaper or the limited time slots in
broadcasting networks.
In some ways, with the Internet, we have come full circle in the history of
the knowledge revolution. When print exploded upon the European scene in
the fifteenth and sixteenth century, reactions must in some ways have been
similar. Apparently uncontrollable new material - information, news,
propaganda, entertainment - circulated with remarkable and unprecedented
freedom, and proved immensely difficult to manage and regulate. The opportunities
this pro-vided for business and profit making were soon realized, and large capital
soon entered the printing industry and turned it into big business. However, the
unmanageable and even radical edge of the print media could never be fully
diluted, as knowledge, opinions, and arguments poured out of the presses and
hugely expanded the quantity of recorded thought in the world. It could be that
similar processes are in store today, with the rise of a radically new medium of
communication.
 Knowledge Revolution:
25.6 SUMMARY Printing and Informatics

This Unit and the one that follows has tried to demonstratetwo important features of
the modem world. One, the various technological inventions have brought about
fundamentaland irreversible changesin the world. As a result, in the last three centuries,
the pace of change has accelerated to such an extent that the world today appears
to be unrecognizably different from what it was, say in the 17Lhcentury. At the same
time, the world has also become, and is increasingly becoming. more and more
comprehensibleto more and more people. This has happened with the expansion of
education, the discovery of the print,the newspaper revolution, the radio and television
networks, and finally the Internet. This Unit has examined these aspects in detail,
their role in the making of the modem world and their significance for the wol-ld
today. The next Unit will take up some of the major technological breakthroughs
that contributed to the same process.

25.7 EXERCISES

1) In what concrete ways is the growth of knowledge related to technological

grqwth?

2) Write a note on the development and expansion of education in Europe.

3) The development of print technology and the beginning of s3e~rsp-s tnzly

constitutea revolution. Comment.
UNIT 26 TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION:
COMMUNICATIONS AND
MEDICAL
Structure
26.1 Introduction
26.2 Power Technology and Steam
26.3 Communications: Transport
26.3.1 Steam Locomotives
26.3.2 Steam Shipping
26.4 Electricity
26.5 Communications: Ideas, Words, Images
26.6 Developments in Modem Medicines
26.7 Technology in the 20thCentury
26.7.1 Industry and Innovations
26.7.2 Improvements in Iron and Steel
26.7.3 Modern Medicine and Pharmaceuticals
26.7.4 The Human Genome Project
26.7.5 lhentieth Century Communications
26.8 Summary

26.1 INTRODUCTION
The tern1 'Industrial Revolution' does not imply a singular transformation from a
pre- to a post-industrial society. Industrial and technological changes had been
proceeding for several centuries prior to the 18th. There was, however, a faster
tempo in the rate of growth and a markedly global character to the Industrial
Revolution, which, although it occurred firstin Britain, spread to continentalEurope
and North America md radically altered the socio-economic life of the colonised
world as well. Technological development during the European Middle Ages had
been slow. In the succeedingperiod change was associated with profound social
and institutional upheavals. The emergence of the nation-state, the Protestant
Reformation, the Renaissance and its accompanying scientificrevolution, and the
expansion of European colonialism were all linked to developingtechnology.Thus,
imperial expansion was made possible by advances in seafaring, navigational
technology and new firepower. The new printing presses of the Reformationhelped
disseminate all points of view, its intellectual ferment stimulated scientific and
technological innovation. Many of the inventors and scientists of the period were
Protestants.
This Unit will examine some of the major technological innovations that happened
during the course of the last three centuries. In particular it would focus on
technological discoveriesmade in the fields ofelectricity, communications and medical
sciences. Since the pace of changes accelerated tremendously in the 20thcentury,
the changes in the last century will be discussed separately. Apart from discussing
the technological changes, the Unit would also examine the factorsthat motivated
and propelled these changes and their profound influences on human life.
 Technological Revolution:
26.2 POWER TECHNOLOGY AND STEAM Communications and Medical

An outstanding feature of the Industrial Revolution was the advance in power

technology.At the beginning of this period, the major sources of power available
were animate energy and the power of wind and water, the only exception being the
atmospheric steam engines that had been installed for pumping purposes, mainly in
coal mines. The use of steam power was exceptional and remained so for most
industrial purposes until well into the 19th century. Steam did not simply replace
other sources of power: it transformed them. The same sort of scientificenquiry that
led to the development of the steam engine was also applied to the traditional sources
of inanimate energy, with the result that both waterwheels and windmills were
improved in design and efficiency.Numerous engineerscontributed to the refinement
of waterwheel construction, and by the middle of the 19th century new designs
increased the speed of the waterwheel and prepared the way for the emergence of
the water turbine.
The revolution in communications had a great deal to do with the development of
steam-driven power and locomotion. Scientists, such as Robert Boyle of England
(who worked on atmosphericpressure), Otto von Guericke (the vacuum), and Denis
Papin (pressure vessels), developed the science of steam power. Technologists
Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen were pioneers of steam engines. Savery's
apparatus condensed steam in a vessel, to create a partial vacuum. The first
commercially successful steam engine, was invented by Newcomen. Newcomen's
engines were heavy fuel consumers, u s e l l mainly in the British coalfields where they
kept deep mines clear ofwater and fulfilled a pressing need of 18th century British
industry. Water power and wind power would now gradually be replaced by a
mechanism with tremendous potential. Its most important application, the steam
railway engine, would (in tandem with modern metallurgy) transform the basis of
transport and communications the world over.
Steam became the characteristic power source of the British Industrial Revolution.
Little development took place in the Newcomen atmospheric engine until James
Watt patented a separate condenser in 1769, but from that point onward the steam
engine underwent continuous improvements. Watt's condenser separated the two
actions ofheating the cylinder with hot steam and cooling it to condense the steam
for every stroke of the engine. By keeping the cylinder permanently hot and the
condenser permanently cold, a great economy could be effected. The Birmingham
industrialist Matthew Boulton, helped convert the idea into a commercial success.
Between 1775 and 1800, the Boulton and Watt partnership produced some 500
engines, which despite their high cost were eagerly acquired by the tin-mining
industrialists of Cornwall and other power users who needed areliable source of
energy. Boulton and Watt introduced many important refinements, by converting
the engine fiom a single-actinginto a double-acting machine that could be applied to
rotary motion. The rotary action engine was adopted by British textile manufacturer
Sir Richard Arkwright for use in a cotton mill, Many other industries followed in
exploringthe possibilities of steam power, and it soon became widely used.
The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick introduced higher steam pressures in 1802,
and the American engineer Oliver Evans built the first high-pressure steam engine in
the United States at the same time. High-pressure steam engines became popular in
America. Trevithick made the first successful steam locomotive for a tram in South
Wales in 1804. (The age of the railways had to wait for the permanent way and
locomotives). Another consequence of high-pressure steam was the practice of
compounding, of using the steam twice or more at descendingpressures before it
Revolutions was finally condensed or exhausted.The technique was first appliedby Arthur Woolf,
a Cornish mining engineer.
A demand for power to generate electricity stimulated new thinking about the steam
engine in the 1880s.The problem was that of achieving a sufficiently high rotational
speed for the dynamos. Full success in achieving a high-speed engine depended on
the steam turbine, amajor technological innovation invented by Sir Charles Parsons
in 1884. By passing steam through the blades of a series of rotors of gradually
increasing size (to allow for the expansion of the steam) the energy of the steam was
converted to very rapid circular motion, which was ideal for generating electricity.
This method still provides a major source of electric power. Even the most modern
nuclear power plants use steam turbines because technology has not yet solved the
problem of transformingnuclear energy directly into electricity. In marine propulsion,
too, the steam turbine remains an important source of power despite competition
£?om the internal-combustionengine.

The sea was the greatest comnlercial highway, stimulatingtechnological changes in

sailing ships. These came in various forms, Elizabethan galleons withmaneuverability
and firepower, Dutch fishing vessels with spacious hulls and shallow draft, and the
fast clippers of the East India companies. Reliable navigation dcmanded better
instruments. The quadrant was improved upon by the octant, which then developed
into the modern sextant. The construction of clocks that could keep accurate time
helped sailors determinehow far east or west of Greenwich the ship lay (longitude).
The British Board of Longitude awarded a prize in 1763 to John Harrison for a
chronometer that fulfilled all the requirements. Transportprovides an example of a
revolution within the Industrial Revolution, so complete were the changes in the
period 1750-1900. The first improvements in Britain came in roads and canals in
the second half of the 18th century.Anetwork of hard-surfaced roads was built in
France in the 17thand early 18th centuries and copied in Germany.Piern. Trdksaguet
of France improved road construction in the late 18th century by separating the
hard-stone wearing surface from the rubble substrataand providing ample drainage.
By the beginning of the 19th century,British engineers were innovating in road and
canal-building techniques, with J.L. McAdam's inexpensive and long-wearingroad
surface of compacted stones andThomasTelford's canals.The outstanding innovation
in transport, however, was the applicationof steam power.
26.3.1 Steam Locomotives
First was the evolution of the railroad: the combination of the steam locomotive and
a permanent travel way of metal rails. Experiments in the first quarter ofthe 19th
century culminated in the Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825. The
Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830, and was the first railway service
with freight and passenger traffic relying entirely on the steam locomotive. It was
designed by George Stephenson, and its locomotives the work of Stephenson and
his son Robert. The first locomotive was called the Rocket. The opening of the
Liverpool- Manchester line was the inauguration ofthe Railway Era, whichcontiqued
until World War I. During this time railways were built across all countries and
continents, opening up vast areas to the markets of industrial society. Locomotives
increased rapidly in size and power, but the essential principles remained those
establishedby the Stephensons :horizontal cylinders mounted beneath a multi-tubular
boiler with a firebox at the rear and a tender carrying supplies of water and fuel.
Meanwhile, the construction of the permanent way underwent an improvement
borrowd from preceding tramroads: wrought-iron, and eventually steel rails Technological Revolution:
Communications and Medical
replaced the cast-iron rails. Very soon, a well-aligned track with easy gradients
and substantial supporting civil-engineering works became a common place.
26.3.2 Steam Shipping
The other major application transformed marine transport. The initial attempts to use
a steam engine to power a boat were made on the Seine River in France in 1775,
and experimental steamshps were built by William Symington in Britain at the turn of
the 19th century. The first commercial success in steam propulsion for a ship, was
that of the American Robert Fulton, whose paddle steamer the "North River
Steamboat," commonly known as the Clermont after its first overnight port, plied
between New York and Albany in 1807,equipped with a Boulton and Watt engine.
A similar engine was installed in the Glasgow-built Comet, put in service on the
Clyde in 1812 and which was the first successful steamship in Europe.
All early steamships were paddle-driven, and all were small vessels suitable only for
ferry and packet duties because it was long thought that the large fuel requirements
of a steatnshipwould preclude long-distancecargo carrying.The further development
of the steamship was thus delayed until the 1830s, when I.K. Brunel began work on
the problems of steamshipconstruction. His three great steamships each marked a
leap forward in technique. The Cneat Western (launched 1837),was the first steamship
built specifically for oceanic service in the North steam shipAtlantic,and demonstrated
that the proportion of space required for fuel decreased as the total volume of the
ship increased. The Great Britain (launched 1843)was the first large iron ship in the
world and the first to be screw-propelled; and was in service until as late as 1970.
The Great Eastern (launched 1858), with a displacement of 18,918tans, was the
largest ship built in the 19thcentury. By the end of the century, steat-nshipswere well
on the way to displacing the sailing ship on all the main trade routes of the world.

26.4 ELECTRICITY
The pioneering work in the development of electricity as a source of power had
been done by an international col!ection of scientists including Benjamin Franklin of
Pennsylvania,Alessandro Volta of the University ol'Pavia, Italy, and Michael Faraday
of Britain.The latter demonstrated the nature of the relationshir hptween electricity
and magnetism in 1831, and i~ls experiments PI.-videdthe point of departure for the
mechanical generation of electric current, previously available only from chemical
reactions and the utilizatioil of such current in electric motors. Both the mechanical
generator and the motor depend on the rotation of a continuous coil of conducting
wire between the poles of a strong magnet. Both generators and motors underwent
substantial development in the middle decades of the 19th century. In particular,
French, German, Belgian, and Swiss engineersevolved the most satisfactoryforms
of armature (the coil of wire) and produced the dynamo, which made the large-scale
generation of electricity commercially feasible.
Continental Europe and North America rapidly developed markets for electricity. In
the United States Thomas Edison invented the carbon-filament lamp for domestic
illumination. The success of the carbon-filament lamp did not mean the supersession
of gas lighting. Coal gas had been used for lighting in Cornwall, in 1792, and in
Birmingham in 1798. Gas lighting was adopted by firms and towns all over Britain in
the first half of the 19thcentury. Under competition fi-omelectric lighting the quality
of gas lighting was improved, and remained popular until the middle of the 20th
century. Lighting alone could not provide an economical market for electricity because
Revolutions century.Lighting alone could not provide an economicalmarket for electricity because
its use was confined to the hours of darkness. The popularity of urban electric
tramways and the adoption of electrictraction on subwaysystems such as the London
Underground coincided with the widespread construction of generating equipment
in the late 1880s and 1890s.The subsequent spread of this form of energy is one of
the most remarkable technological success stories of the 20th century, but most of
the basic techniques of generation, distribution, and utilization had been mastered
by the end of the 19th century.

26.5 COMMUNICATIONS: IDEAS, WORDS,

IMAGES
Communications were equally transformed in the 19th century. The steam engine
helped to mechanize and thus to speed up the processes of papermaking and printing.
In the latter case the acceleration was achieved by the introduction of the high-
speed rotary press and the Linotype machine for casting type and setting it in justified
lines (i.e., with even right-hand margins). Printing had to undergo a technological
revolution comparableto the 15th-century invention of movable type to be able to
supply the greatly increasing market for the printed word. (On the increasingdemand
for the printed word, see 25.2 of the previous Unit). Another important process
that was to make a vital contribution to modem printing was discovered in the 19th
century: photography.The first photograph was taken in 1826or 1827by the French
physicist J.N. Niepce, using a pewter plate coated with bitumen. Daguerre and Fox
Talbot adopted silver compounds to give light sensitivity. By the 1890s George
Eastman in the United Stateswas manufacturing cameras and celluloid photographic
film and the first experiments with the cinema were beginning to attract attention.
Telegraphs and Telephones
The p a t innovationsin communicationstechnology, however, derived fiom electricity,
and were propelled rapidly into usage by a combination of business and military
motivations. The first was the electric telegraph, invented or at least made into a
practical proposition for use on the developingBritish railway systemby two British
inventors, Sir William Cooke and Sir Charles Wheatstone, who collaboratedon the
work and took out a joint patent in 1837.The same year, the American inventor
Samuel F.B. Morse patented and devised the signalling code that bore his name and
was subsequently adopted all over the world. The first public telegraph line opened
from Baltimore to Washington in 1844.Within a decade, telegraph lines had sprung
up in the USAand Europe, and in 1848,Julius Reuter partnered Bemhard Wolff to
open the first news agency in Germany. By the 1860 is, the continents of the world
were linked telegraphically by transoceanic cables, and the main political and
commercial centres were brought into instantaneous communication. Rapid
communicationeroded parochial and national barriers, telegraphtreaties and unions
were formed, and the International Telegraph Union (formed in 1865) in Paris, soon
grew into the International Bureau of Telegraph Communication- the world's first
permanent international organisation,established in Vienna, in 1868.
To be truly effective internationallyhowever, telegraph cables needed insulation in
order to cross the seas and oceans. One of the most successfd inventors of insulation
was an English doctor in the East India Company's Bengal Army, and chemistry
professor at the Calcutta Medical College. In 1838 he suspended 22 kilometres of
wire on bamboo poles, with the last 3 kilometres under the surface of the Hoogly
river. This was the first underwater circuit, but went unnoticed in Europe. However,
 Technological Revolution:
experimentation was taking place elsewhere, with the rapid spread of the telegraph. Communications and Medical
France and Britain were linked in 1850, and lines across the Mediterranean laid,
withpartial successthrough the next two decades. (France was particularly interested
in establishingstable links with its Algerian colony in North Africa). The Crimean
War, wherein France and Britain were pitted against Tsarist Russia, was the first
one conducted with long-distance contact between armies and command
headquarters. This could prove to be a mixed blessing for local commanders who
could be subjected to long-distancemeddling by political leaders as well. In India,
the recently installed telegraph played a major role in colonial-imperial
comn~unicationsin the Revolt of 1857.
The telegraph system also played an importantpart in the opening up of the American
West by providing rapid aid in the maintenance of law and order. The telegraph was
followed by the telephone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and adopted
quickly for short-range oral communication in American cities and at a slower pace
in Europe. Meanwhile theoretical work on the electromagnetic properties of light
and other radiation was beginning to produce experimentalresults, and the possibilities
of wireless telegraphy began to be explored. By the end of the nineteenth century,
Guglielmo Marconi had transinitted long-distance messages over many miles and
was preparing the apparatus with which he made the first transatlantic radio
comn1unication on December 1901. The world was being drawn inexorably into a
closer community,

DEVELOPMENTS IN MODERN MEDICINES

The development and use of the compound microscope (invented slightly earlier, in
Holland) was the work of Galileo (1564- 1642).He was the first to insist upon the
value of measurement in science and in medicine, replacing guessworkwith accuracy.
The view of the French philosopher RenCC Descartes (1596-1650) that the
human body is a machine and that it functions mechanically had its
repercussions in medical thought.One group adopting this explanation viewed
life as a series of chemical processes, and were called iatrochemists. Santorio Santorio,
working at Padua, was an exponent of this view and a pioneer investigator of
metabolism. Another Italian, who developed the idea was Giovanni Borelli, a
mathematicsprofessor at Pisa University, who gave his attention to the mechanics of
the human body and the laws that govern its movements. The discovery of the
circulation ofthe blood based on precise observation and scrupulousreasoning was
a landmark of medical progress. In 1628 William Harvey, who studied at Cambridge
University and then at Padua, published his classic book Concerningthe Motion
ofthe Heart andBlood Following the method described by the philosopher Francis
Bacon, he drew the truth from experience and not £tom authority. Meanwhile, in the
18thcentury, medical education grew, and prominent schools bctioned at Leiden
(Holland), Padua (Italy), and Edinburgh (Scotland).In 18th-century London, Scottish
doctors were the leaders in surgery and obstetrics. William Smellie's Treatise on
the Theory andpractice ofMidwijery published in 1752-64, placed midwifery
on a sound scientific footing and helped to establishobstetrics as arecognizedmedical
discipline. It contained the first systematic discussion on the safe use of obstetrical
forceps, which have saved countless lives. The science of modem pathology also
had its beginnings in this century. Giovanni Morgagni, of Padua, in 1761 published
his massive work The Seats and Causes oj'Diseases Investigated by Anatomy,
based on 700 postmortem examinations.

, A highly significant medical advancewas vaccination The often fatal disease smallpox,
was widely prevalent. Inoculation, which had been practised in the East, was
Revolutions popularized in England in 1721-22 by Lady Mary Montagu, who had seen it practised
in Turkey. In 1796 Edward Jenner, a country practitioner began inoculations with
cowpox (the bovine form of the disease).This procedure - vaccination - has been
responsible for eradicating the disease. Public health received more attention during
the 18thcentury, with population statistics, health legislation and hospitals. In Paris,
Philippe Pine1initiated reforms in the care of the mentally ill, discardingthe notion
that insanity was caused by demon possession. Conditions improved for sailors and
soldiers. James Lind, a British naval surgeon from Edinburgh, recommended citrus
juices to prevent scurvy. In 1752 the Scotsman John Pringle, published his
Observations on the Diseuses of the Army. His suggestion in 1743 that military
hospitals be regarded as sanctuaries eventually led to the establishment of the Red
Cross organization in 1864.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the structure of the human body was almost
l l l y known, due to new methods of microscopy and of injections. The understanding
of physiological processes was rapidly elucidated, especially in Germany, where
physic!qy became established as a distinct science under the guidance of Johannes
Miiiiller, a professor at the University of Berlin. France's brilliant physiologist Claude
Bernard, made important discoveries based on carehlly planned experiments. He
clarified the role of the pancreas, revealed the presence of glycogen in the liver, and
explained the hnctioning of the blood vessels. His work, An Introduction to the
Study ofExperimentu1 Medicine (1865) is still studied.
The great medical advance of the 19th century was the demonstrationthat certain
diseases and surgical infections were caused by minute living organisms. This
discovery changed the face of pathology and the practice of surgery. A pioneer in
the parasitic theory of infection was Agostino Bassi of Italy, who showed that a
disease of silkworms was caused by a fungus that could be destroyed by chemical
agents. The main credit for establishing bacteriology goes to the French chemist
Louis Pasteur (1822-95), who proved that the fermentation of wine and the souring
of milk are caused by living microorganisms. His work led to the pasteurization of
milk and solved problems of animal and human diseases. He employed inoculations
to prevent anthrax in sheep and cattle, chicken cholera in fowl, and finally rabies in
humans and dogs. From Pasteur were derived concepts that led to the antiseptic
principle in surgery. In 1865 Lister, a surgeon at Glasgow University, began using
carbolic acid as a disinfectant.His pioneering work led to more refined techniques
of sterilizingthe surgicalenvironment.An important development in tropical medicine
(and of great consequence to colonial projects of conquest) was the extraction of
quinine from the cinchona bark by the French chemists Pierre Peletier and Joseph
Caventou in 1820. This made it possible to treat the malaria, one of the most dreaded
of all diseases especially in the 'Orient'. It was only in 1897 that the anopheles
mosquito was identified as the vector of malaria.
The most famous contributionby the United States to medical progress at this period
was the introduction of general anesthesia, a procedure that not only liberated the
patient from pain and enabled the surgeon to perform more extensive operations.
There were many claimants for priority, some used nitrous oxide gas, and others
ether. But it was William Morton who, on October 16, 1846, in Boston, first
demonstrated the use of ether as a general anesthetic. General anesthesia soon
became prevalent in surgery. In November 1847 chloroformwas tried with complete
success, and soon it was preferred to ether and became the anesthetic of choice.
Preventive medicine was considered as important as the cur^ of disease. The 20th
century witnessed the evolution of national health services. (We may pay attention,
in passing to Ivan Ilich's observation that the two most significant safeguards for
 Technological Revolution:
public health have been sanitation and clean water supply). Spectacular advances in Communications end Medical
diagnosis and treatment followed the discovery of X rays by Wilhelm Roontgen, in
1895, and of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie in 1898. Before the turn of the
century, too, the new field of psychiatry had been opened up by Sigmund Freud.
The increase in scientificknowledge during the 19th century radically altered and
expanded medical practice, and led to the establishment of public and professional
bodies to govern the standards for medical training and practice.

TECHNOLOGY IN THE 20thCENTURY

Recent history of technology is notoriously difficult to write, because of the mass of
material and the problem of distinguishing the significant h m the insigtllficantamong
events that have virtually the power of contemporary experience. In respect to the
recent history of technology,however, one fact stands out clearly: despite the immense
achievements of technology by 1900,the following decades witnessed more advance
over a wide range of activities than the whole of previously recorded history. The
airplane, the rocket and interplanetary probes, electronics, atomic power, antibiotics,
insecticides,and a host of new materials have all been invented and developed to
create an unparalleled social situation, 1 1 1of possibilities and dangers, which would
have been virtually unimaginable before the present century.
In venturing to interpret the events of the 20th century it will be convenient to separate
the years before 1945 from those that followed. The years 1900 to 1945 were
dominated by the two world wars, while those since 1945 have been preoccupied
by the need to avoid another major war. The dividing point is one of outstanding
social and technological significance: the detonation of the first atomic bomb at
Alarnogordo, N.M., in July 1945.
There have been profound political changesin the 20th century related to technological
capacity and leadership. It may be an exaggeration to regard the 20th century as
"the American century," but the rise of the United States as a superstate has been
sufficiently rapid and dramatic to excuse the hyperbole. It has been a rise based
upon tremendous natural resources exploited to secure increased productivity through
widespread industrialization, and the success of the United States in achievingthis
objective has been tested and demonstrated in the two world wars. Technological
leadershippassed fiom Britain and the European nations to the United States in the
course of these wars. This is not to say that the springs of innovation went dry in
Europe: many important inventions of the 20th century originated there. But it has
been the United States that has had the capacity to assimilate innovations and to
take 1 1 1 advantage from them at times when other nations have been deficient in one
or other of the vital social resources without which a brilliant invention cannot be
converted into a commercial success.As with Britain in the Industrial Revolution,
the technological vitality of the United States in the 20th century has been
demonstrated less by any particular innovations than by its ability to adopt
new ideas from whatever source they come.
The two world wars were themselvesthe most importantinstrumentsof technological
as well as political change in the 20th century. The rapid evolution of the airplane is
a striking illustration of this process, while the appearance of the tank in the first
conflict and of the atomic bomb in the second show the same signs of response to an
urgent military stimulus. It has been said that World War I was a chemists' war, on
the basis of the immense importance of high explosives and poison gas. In other
respects the two wars hastened the development of technology by extending the
institutional apparatus for the encouragement of innovation by both the state and
Revolutions private industry. This process went further in some countries than in others, but no
major belligerent nation could resist entirely the need to support and coordinate its
scientific-technologicaleffort. The wars were thus responsible for speeding
the transformationfrom "little science," with research still largely restricted
to small-scale efforts by a few isolated scientists, to "big science," with the
emphasis on large research teams sponsored by governments and
corporations, working collectively on the development and application of
new techniques. While the extent of this transformation must not be overstated,
and recent research has tended to stress the continuing need for the independent
inventor at least in the stimulation of innovation, there can be little doubt that the
change in the scale of technological enterprises has had far-reaching consequences.
It has been one of the most momentous transformations of the 20th century, for it
has altered the quality of industrial and social organization. In the process it has
assured technology, for the first time in its long history, aposition of importance and
even honour in social esteem.
26.7.1 Industry and Innovations
There have been technological innovations of great significancein many aspects of
industrial production during the 20th century. It is worth observing, in the first place,
that the basic matter of industrial organization has become one of self-conscious
innovation, with organizationssetting out to increase their productivity by improved
techniques. Methods of work study,fust systematically examined in the United States
at the end of the 19thcentury, were widely applied in U. S. and European industrial
organizations in the first half of the 20th century. These evolved rapidly into scientific
management and the modern studies of industrial administration, organization and
method, and particular managerial techniques. The object of these exercises has
been to make industry more efficient and thus to increase productivity and profits,
and there can be no doubt that they have been remarkably successful. Without this
superior industrial organization it would not have been possible to convert the
comparatively small workshops of the 19th century into the giant engineering
establishmentsof the 20th wit! their mass-production and assembly-linet e h q u e s .
The rationalizationof production, so characteristicof industry in the 20th century,
may thus be legitimately regarded as the result of the application of new techniques
that form part of the history of technology since 1900.
26.7.2 Improvements in Iron and Steel
Another field of industrial innovation in the 20th century has been the production of
new materials. As far as volume of consumption goes, man still lives in the Iron Age,
with the utilization of iron exceeding that of any other material. But this dominance
of iron has been modified in three ways:
by the skill of metallurgistsin alloying iron with other metals;
by the spread of materials such as glass and concrete in building; and
by the appearanceand widespread use of entirely new materials, particularly
plastics.
Alloys had already begun to become important in the iron and steel industry in the
19th century (apart from steel itself, which is an alloy of iron and carbon); self-
hardening tungsten steel had been first produced in 1868, and manganese steel,
possessing toughness rather than hardness,& 1887. Manganese steel is also
nonmagnetic;this fact suggests great possibilities for this steel in the electric-power
industry. In the 20th century steel alloys multiplied. Silicon steel was found to be
usell because, in contrastto manganese steel, it is highly magnetic. In 1913the first
 Technological Revolution:
stainless steelswere made in England by alloying steel with chromium, and the Krupp Communications and Medical
works in Germany produced stainless steel in 1914. The importance of a nickel-
chromium alloyinthe development of the gas-turbine engine in the 1930shas already
been noted. Many other alloys also came into widespread use for specialized
purposes.
26.7.3 Modern Medicine and Pharmaceuticals
An even more dramatic result of the growth in chemical knowledge has been the
expansion of the modem pharmaceutical industry.The science of pharmacy emerged
slowly from the traditional empiricism of the herbalist, but by the end of the 19th
century there had been some solid achievements in the analysis of existing drugs and
in the preparation of new ones. The discovery in 1856 of the first aniline dye had
been occasioned by a vain attempt to synthesize quinine from coal-tar derivatives.
Greater success came in the following decades withthe production of the first synthetic
anti-fever drugs and pain-killing compounds, culminating in 1899 in the conversion
of salicylicacid into acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin), which is still the most widely used
drug. Progress was being made simultaneouslywith sulfonalhypnotics and barbiturate
drugs, and early in the 20th century Paul Ehrlich of Germany successfullydeveloped
an organic compound containing arsenic which was effectiveagainst syphilis. This
discovery, made in 19 10, was the first to overwhelm an invading microorganism
without offending the host. In 1935 the discovery that Prontosil, ared dye developed
by the German synthetic-dyestuffindustry,was an effective drug against streptococcal
infections (leadingto blood poisoning) introduced the important sulfadrugs. Alexander
Fleming's discovery of penicillin in 1928was not immediately followed up, because
it proved very difficult to isolate the drug in a stable form. But World War II gave a
fresh urgency to research in this field, and commercial production of penicillin, the
first of the antibiotics, began in 1941.These drugs prevented the growth of pathogenic
organisms. All these pharmaceutical advances demonstrate an intimate relationship
with chemical technology.

In 1901, for the United Kingdom the expectation of life at birth was 48 years for
=ales and 5 1.6years for females. By the 1980s life expectancy had reached 7 1.4
years for males and 77.2 years for females. With the exception of diseases such as
cancer and AIDS, attention has become focused on morbidity rather than mortality,
and the emphasis has changed from keeping people alive to keeping them fit. The
rapid progress of medicine was reinforced by improvements in comm~?:,;c-ation
between scientists. And although specializationincreased, teamwork became the
norm. In the first half of the century, the emphasis was on combating infection, but
landmarks were also attained in endocrinology and nutrition. Following World War
11,new discoveries in biochemistry and physiology led to more precise diagnostic
tests and therapies; and spectacularadvances in biomedical engineering enabled the
physician and surgeon to probe into the structures and functions of the body by
noninvasive imaging techniques like ultrasound (sonar), computerized axial
tomography (CAT), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). With each new scientific
development, medical practices ofjust a few years earlier became obsolete.

26.7.4 The Human Genome Project

This scientificeffort to analyzethe DNA of human beings and of several lower types
of organisms began in the United States in 1990 under the sponsorship of the U.S.
Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health and was completed in
2003. Related programmes were begun in several other countries in coordination
1 with the American programme. Every cell of an organism has a set of chromosomes 67
containing the heritable genetic material that directs its development - i.e., its genome.
Revolutions The genetic material of chromosomes is DNA. Project goals were to identify all the
approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA, determine the sequences ofthe three
billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA, store this information in
databases, improve tools for data analysis, transfer related technologies to the private
sector, and address the ethical, legal, and social issues that may arise.

Human genome projects undertaken concurrently in Japan, the United Kingdom,

Italy, France, and Russia are coordinatedwith the American effort through the Human
Genome Organization,whose members include scientists fiom throughoutthe world.
The potential utility of the Human Genome Project is immense. The information
gathered will serve as the basic reference for research in human biology and medicine
and will provide hdamental insights into the genetic basis of human disease. The
new technologiesdeveloped in the courseof the project will be applicable in numerous
other fields of biomedical endeavour. Though the HGP is finished, analyses c?fthe
data will continue for many years.

26.7.5 Twentieth Century Communications

The spectaculartransport revolution of the 20th century has been accompaiiied by

a communications revolution quite as dramatic, although technologically springing
fiom different roots. In part, well-established media of communication like printing
have participated in this revolution, although most of the significant changes-such
as the typewriter, the Linotype, and the high-speed power-driven rotary press-
were achievements of the 19thcentury. Photography was also a proved and familiar
technique by the end of the 19th century, but cinematographywas new and did not
become generally available until after World War I, when it became enormously
popular.

The real novelties in communicationsin the 20th century came in electronics.The

scientificexamination of the relationship between light waves and electromagnetic
waves had already revealed the possibility of transmitting electromagnetic signals
between widely separated points, and on Dec. 12, 1901, Guglielmo Marconi
succeeded in transmittifig the first wireless message across the Atlantic. Early
equipment was crude,but within a few years striking progress was made in improving
the rnems of transmitting ayd receiving coded messages. This was essentially a
development f?om the carbon-filament electric light bulb. In 1883Edison had found
that in these lamps a current flowed between the filament and a nearby test electrode,
called the plate, if the electric potential of the plate was positive with respect to the
filament. This current, called the Edison effect, was later identified as a stream of
electrons radiated by the hot filament. In 1904, Sir John Ambrose Fleming of Britain
discovered that by placing a metal cylinder around the filament in the bulb and by
connecting the cylinder (the plate) to a third terminal, a current could be rectified so
that it could be detected by a telephone receiver. Fleming's device was known as
the diode, and two years later, in 1906, Lee De Forest of the United States made
the significant improvement that became known as the triode by introducing a third
electrode (the grid) between the filament and the plate. The outstanding feature of
this refinementwas its ability to amplify a signal. Its applicationmade possible by the
1920sthe widespread introduction of live-voice broadcasting in Europe and America,
with a consequent boom in the production of radio receivers and other equipment.

This, however, was only one of the results derived from the application of the
thermionic valve. The idea of harnessing the flow of electrons was applied in the
electron microscope, radar (a detection device depending on the capacity of some
 Technological Revolution:
radio waves to be reflected by solid objects), the electronic computer, and in the Communications and Medical
cathode-ray tube of the television set. The first experiments in the transmission of
pictures had been greeted with ridicule. Working on his own in Britain, John Logie
Baird in the 1920s demonstrated a mechanical scanner able to convert an image into
a series ofelectronic impulses that could then be reassembled on aviewing screen as
a pattern of light and shade. Baird's system, however, was rejected in favour of
electronic scanning,developed in the United States by Philo Farnsworth and Vladirnir
Zworykin with the powerful backing of the Radio Corporation of America. Their
equipment operated much more rapidly and gave a more satisfactory image. By the
outbreak of World War 11, television serviceswere being introduced in several nations,
althoughthewar suspendedtheir extension for a decade. The emergence of television
as a universal medium of mass communication is therefore a phenomenon of the
postwar years. But already by 1945 the cinema and the radio had demonstrated
their power in communicatingnews, propaganda, commercial advertisements,and
entertainment.

The dominant lines of development continue to be those that were established before
or during World War 11. In particular, the rapid growth of television services, with
their immenseduence as media ofrnass communication,has been built on foundations
laid in the 1920s and 1930s, while the universal adoption of radar on ships and
airplaneshas followed the invention of a device to give early warning of aerial attack.
But the development of communications age has produced important innovations.
The transistor,so significant for computersand control engineering,has also made a
large contribution to communicationstechnology.The establishment of space satellites,
considered to be a remote theoretical possibility in the 1940s,had become part of
the accepted technological scene in the 1960s, and have played a dramatic part in
telephone and television communication as well as in relaying meleorologicalpictures
and data. The development of magnetic tape as a means of recording sound and,
more recently, vision, has provided a highly flexible and useful mode of
communication. New printing techniques such as photo-typesetting and xerography,
have increased the speed of publication. New optical devices such as zoom lenses
have increased the power of cameras and prompted corresponding improvements
in the quality of film available to the cinema and television. Physical techniques such
asthe laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation)are making available
an immenselypowerfd means of communicationover long distances. The laser also
has acquired significance as an important addition to surgical techniques and an
instrument of space weaponry. The final comunications innovation is the use of
electromagnetic waves other than light to explore the structure of the universe by
means of the radio telescope and its deriwitive,the X-ray telescope. This technique
was pioneered after World War 11 and has since become a vital instrument of satellite
control and space research. Radio telescopes have also been directed toward the
Sun's closest neighbours in space in the hope of detecting electromagnetic signals
from other intelligent speciesin the universe.

26.8 SUMMARY
The story of technological revolutions is, in many ways, a continuing story. New
innovationsfeed on the old ones and make them obsolete. This Unit has traced the
story of a whole range of technological breakthroughs-cumulatively called
technological revolution-in the field of electricity, communications,and medical
sciences. Although technological changes had occurred prior to 18" century, their
pace accelemted dramatically afterthe industrial revolution and they also increasingly
Revolutions acquired a global reach. In the 20h century, however, a few decades were able to
achieve levels of technological developmentsunmatched in the preceding centuries.
This technological advance has brought about enormous changes in the socio-
economic life of mankind across the globe, and continues to govern and shape
human life in avariety of ways.

26.9 EXERCISES
1) Discuss the major breakthrough that occurred in the field of medical sciences
both prior to and during the course of the 20'' century.

2) Mention some of the major technological developments in communications.

3) How are transport, electricity and telegraph connected to one another?

4) Examine some of the major technological innovations made in the 20thcentury.

SUGGESTED READINGS FOR THIS BLOCK
Adon E., Russia: The Tsarist and Soviet Legacy, London, 1995.

Baker, Keith Michael, Inventing the French Revolution, Essays on French

Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, 1990.
Bayly, C.A., The Birth of the Modern world, 1 780 - 1914.
Cobb R.C., Reactions to the French Revolution, 1972.

Daniels R.V., Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 191 7,New York, 1967.
Ellis, John., The Social History of the Machine Gun, Pantheon, 1975.
Furet, Francois and Ozanf, Mona (eds), Critical Dictionary of the French
Revolution, 1989.

Furet, Franqois, Interpreting the French Revolution.

Gill, Graven,Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution, London 1979.

Goodwin,Albert, The French Revolution, 1953.

Headrick, Daniel R., The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the
Age, of Imperialism 1850-1940, Oxford, 1988.
Headrick, Daniel R., The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and
International Politics 1851-1 945, Oxford, 1991.

Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technologyand European Imperialism

in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 1981.
Hobsbawm, E.J., The Age of Revolution, 1 789 - 1848, New York, 1962.

Jones, Howard, Steam Engines: An International History, London, 1973.

Jones, Peter (ed.),The French Revolution: In Social and Political Perspective,

1966.

Kaplow, Jiffiy (ed.j, New Perspectives on French Revolution, 1965.

Keep, J.L.H., The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, London,
1976.

Kerr, Ian J., Building the Railways of the Raj, 1850-1900, Oxford, 1995.
Kochan, Lionel and Keep John, The Making ofModern Russia, London, 1997.
Kumar, Deepak, (ed.), Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context, Delhi,
1991.

Lucas, Colin (ed.),The French Revolution and the Creation ofModern Political
Culture.

Mcluhan, Marshall, Understanding Media, London, 1960.

Mona Ozonf,Festivals and the French Revolution, 1988.

Palmer R.R., The Age ofDemocratic Revolutions: A Political History of Europe
and America 1 760 - 1800 (2 Vols), 1989.

Riasanovsky, N.V.. A History of Russia, Oxford, 1993.

Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis ofFrance,

Russia and China, Cambridge, 1979.

Talmon, J.L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy.

Watson, Hugh Seton, The Decline of Imperial Russia. -

Williams,Raymond, Television,London, 1972.