1. English England to 1900

2. England 500-2015 Feudal economy (500-1500)
Land is valuable. Population is rural.
Society is organized around kings, lords/knights, and peasants, by ties of loyalty
Capitalist/Industrial economy ( )
Production and goods are valuable. Population is urban.
Society is organized around owners and workers, by ties of economic benefit
Knowledge economy (1968-)
Information is valuable. Population is online.
Society is organized around multiple and temporary arrangements of sharing and controlling information

4. West & East: the “Grain vs. Rice” theory

5. It’s of course a useful generalization
There is no such thing as human races—this was proven in 2000 with the mapping of the human genome.
Obviously, “western” and “eastern” are terms used for discussion, but are cultural simplifications– a Thai & Korean don’t think the same, and a Greek & Canadian don’t think the same.

6. Rome
At its height in 117, Rome held almost all of Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of northern Africa and western Asia. Oversized and racked by power disputes, the empire was divided into east and west in 293 and was ruled by two emperors and Caesars.  
Rome never ‘fell.’ The eastern part of the empire continued until being overcome by Muslim Turks in 1453, and the west deteriorated over centuries. Rome itself was sacked in 410, but there were still emperors until 476, and barbarian kings often saw themselves as the heirs of Rome. Charlemagne was crowned in 800 as Emperor of the Romans.

7. The Empire over-expands and splinters
A problem in late Rome was the difficulty of defending such a large area with sufficient Roman soldiers. The empire thus began to hire German barbarians as mercenaries. While this initially worked well, land pressures, corruption, and cultural differences caused the German chiefs and settlers to break away from Rome. With no legions to enforce its edicts, central authority withered and Europe broke up into petty kingdoms.

8. The Origins of England
One of these former Roman territories was England. After Roman soldiers abandon it around 400, Germanic Angle and Saxon chieftains take control.
Angle-land  England

9. The Normans Invade, 1066
In 1066, William the Conqueror, a French-speaking Viking, invades England with an army and seizes the country. William imports French language and government to the island. For about 200 years England is French until English language and culture reasserts itself.

10. Anglo-Saxon Culture
Political power lies in the folc
Kings are merely good fighters chosen by the people
Highest value is loyalty and love to one’s lord
Women could own property and had some rights
Land was a common good owned by everyone
Simple buildings and architecture
Norman French Culture
Political power lies in the king
Kings rule under divine right, chosen by heaven
Highest value is romantic service and love for a woman
A ‘chivalrous’ culture, but women had little legal standing
Land was owned by the king, who permitted or rented its use
Castles and stone works

11. Medieval English Literature
English literature begins with Germanic poems and stories, usually grim and warlike, but sometimes vulgar and funny. Post-conquest poetry, written in Middle English, becomes more concerned with French and Latin themes of love and romance. It reaches its height with Geoffrey Chaucer ( ).

12. Pinker’s “Better Angels” Theory: The State Monopolization of Violence A claimed 20% chance of dying violently (ancient) to <1% (modern)

13. The Black Plague ( )
The Black Plague originated in central Asia or Africa. By 1348 it reached England, where over three years it killed some 30-60% of Europe, 40% of Egypt, and 33% of China.
But plagues also helped cause the renaissance and industrial revolution. Labor shortages encouraged labor-saving devices and social changes leading to humanism and capitalism. The printing press might be explained as a result of labor shortage.

14. The Renaissance (c )
A “rebirth” of European civilization beginning in Italy, which led to new trends in culture, technology, and humanism
The fall of Constantinople, 1453
The invention of mechanized printing

15. Key Developments
1. The economic development of financial capitalism. The labor shortages of the 1300’s along with the expansion of trade brought new wealth and power into cities. Banking, stocks, and corporations grew as new technologies in metallurgy, coal, oil, and electricity led to industrial capitalism and the factory system.
All this caused a decline in the importance of land and agriculture, and spelled the death of the old feudal system based on personal ties of loyalty. Royal courts fell in prestige when the money was elsewhere.

16. Key Developments
2. The growth of international trade and colonization. Improved sea technology and better ships and navigation equipment allowed a huge expansion in markets as European countries raced to claim foreign lands in North and South America and Africa and Asia. At times missionaries conflicted with speculators and investors, or new diseases decimated native populations,
as these new lands became uneasily
tied into the growing global system
of capitalism and trade.

17. Key Developments
3. The expansion of industrialized war. Medieval wars were short and small-scale, because war was incredibly expensive. New technologies drove the mechanization of permanent armies and new, deadly weaponry such as cannons, rifles, warships, and machine guns. This made war bloodier and easier to wage, especially as castles and armor became useless.

18. Key Developments
4. The growth of nationalism, often in competition to older religious or folk traditions of identity. The growth of fixed countries based on language or land boundaries, as opposed to identity based on ethnic markings, solidified Europe as the Holy Roman Empire fragmented. This made early modern war particularly violent. On the plus side, nationalism often supported the progression toward democracy and voting rights.

19. Key Developments
5. The growth of humanism and science. Originally the new renaissance philosophies from the lost Roman Empire and Greece were not hostile to Christianity and many thinkers were also religious men. Over time the concept of truth as being revealed or reasoned out was in competition with the idea of empirical truth, information derived from direct observation or experimentation—the growth of modern science.

20. Key Developments
6. Religious war. As modern Europe divided into countries, tensions with the central Roman Catholic Church grew, worsened by the corruption which had increased in a wealthy and powerful central church authority. Both for theological and political reasons, England and Germany broke from the church and became Protestant, and Protestantism in turn splintered into sub-groups.
Combined with the growth in nationalism and military technology, this caused long wars between Protestant and Catholic nations. Fatigue from religious wars was one element in the anti-religiosity of the secular French Revolution and the birth of socialism and Marxism.

21. England after Shakespeare
English civil war ( ) between parliament and Charles I
Charles I executed for treason in 1648
The “Protectorate” rule by Puritan Oliver Cromwell
Cromwell dies 1658; protectorate fails and Charles II invited to throne (Restoration)
Brief war again in 1688; James II deposed; William III invited from Netherlands

22. The novel in England
Novels existed in some form in ancient Rome, Arabia, China, and India, and in early modern Europe, but did not spread to England until the 1600s with the growth of printing. The first modern novel in English is considered Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719).
Novels rejected older aristocratic poetic forms; they were popular with a mass audience and were cheap and easy to read. As they were usually read privately, they tend to deal with the growth and development of personal experience.

23. The English Enlightenment
The 1700’s in England is a time of urban prosperity and expansion in Britain. As the power of the royal court shrinks, science and technology become more prominent. Although the novel form expands, it is not a strong period for literature. Satire and more cynical styles are popular after the religious wars of the 17th century.

24. 19th Century Ideas
Political Economy was a methodology developed by early economists such as Adam Smith and Malthus which attempted to mathematically calculate relationships between production, consumption, and wealth creation. A predominant concept in this view was laissez-faires (leave it alone!)—that economies mostly worked best without interference from governments as it was in the natural interests of an industry to regulate itself for maximal profit and benefit.
Romanticism was a movement in Europe around 1800 in opposition to what was seen as the growing cynicism and rationalism of the 1700’s after the religious wars and the seeming dehumanization of humans in the age of factory production. Romanticism, in poet William Wordsworth’s words, involved “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” and prioritized feelings, passion, and nature in art, literature, and music.

25. The Victorian Era
Queen Victoria ( ) was a popular queen and ruled at perhaps the height of the British Empire. The 19th century was a time of territorial expansion and political and cultural dominance for England.

26. Victorian England
…Unless you were poor. As public farm lands were closed off and people came to cities to find industrial jobs, living standards for the poor involved dangerous and insecure work at low wages, dirt, and poverty. This also caused early labor and socialist movements.

27. Victorian Values: Respectability! (Or else.)

28. Or not…
The Victorian era has a stereotype of being prudish and sexually repressed, so much so that “Victorian” is now used as an adjective for this meaning. In fact, religious ideals of family respectability coexisted with confident, adult themes in art, photography, and literature.

29. Poetic Themes
Religious doubt and shock after Darwinian theory (Tennyson, Arnold)
Sensual, idealized imagery; religious and classical symbolism (Rosetti, Browning, Hopkins)
Poetry inspired by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ style of painting, which emphasized symbolic and idealized feeling over realism
Freer and looser poetic meter and lineation

30. Pre-Raphaelites The “Pre-Raphaelites” formed in 1848 and tried to restore painting to a more classical, romantic style.

31. Pre-Raphaelites

32. Pre-Raphaelites

34. Fin de Siècle: “End of the age”
At the end of the 19th century, Queen Victoria was getting old, and writers and painters tired of Victorian conventions of respectability.
A time of fatigue with English society and the decadence of empire
Increasingly shocking depictions of love and sexuality
Cynicism mixed with optimism for the new century

35. Fin de Siècle: “End of the age”
Strongly influenced by French culture, late Victorian intellectual activity was often marked by “stylish” cynicism and by disenchantment with the failure of democracy to spread wealth and benefits evenly from rich to poor.
Growing popularity of socialist movements
An intellectual movement of existentialism and depression

36. Storm Clouds
1. The decline in belief of man as divinely special. Darwin wasn’t an atheist until late in life, and he believed that evolutionary theory wasn’t in conflict with Christianity—many European churches believed that the Genesis story of creation wasn’t meant literally. But as evolutionary theory and the scientific process became more hostile to traditional concepts of man as created by God, the idea of man as having a higher moral spirit is challenged.

37. Storm Clouds
2. The decline of belief in man as rational. Freud’s studies begin to suggest that people’s mental states are unreliable and subject to neuroses. Henri Bergson writes on the perception of time as unstable and subjective. John Watson studies behaviorism, suggesting that people can be conditioned into different behaviors. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (1928) argues that matter itself is unpredictable.

38. England at 1900 Summary
Building political tension between European nations
Intellectual challenges: Maybe people are not blessed, or rational
Proto-socialist and Marxist movements, labor disputes
New technologies in sanitation, electrification, travel, and communication
The stage is set for “Make it new!”