this is Crash Course World History and today

we’re going to talk about Nationalism,

the most important global phenomenon of the 19th century

and also the phenomenon responsible

for one of the most commented upon aspects of Crash Course:

my globes being out of date.

USSR: not a country.

Rhodesia?

South Vietnam?

Sudan with no South Sudan?

Yugoslavia?

Okay, no more inaccuracies with the globes.

Ugh, the little globes!

This one doesn’t know about Slovakia.

This one has East frakking Pakistan.

And this one identifies Lithuania as part of Asia.

Okay, no more globe inaccuracies.

Actually, bring back my globes.

I feel naked without them. [many people find comfort in inaccuracy]

[Intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

[intro music]

So, if you’re into European history,

you’re probably somewhat familiar with nationalism

and the names and countries associated with it.

Bismarck in Germany,

Mazzini and Garibaldi in Italy, a

nd Mustafa Kemal (aka Ataturk) in Turkey.

But nationalism was a global phenomenon,

and it included a lot of people you may not associate with it, like

Muhammad Ali in Egypt

and also this guy.

Nationalism was seen in the British Dominions,

as Canada, Australia and New Zealand

became federated states between 1860 and 1901.

I would say independent states instead of federated states,

but you guys still have a queen. [and royal Corgies]

It’s also seen in the Balkans, where Greece gained its independence in 1832

and Christian principalities fought a war against the Ottomans in 1878,

[Christians hate foot wrests?

in India where a political party, the Indian National Congress,

was founded in 1885,

and even in China, where nationalism ran up against the dynastic system

that had lasted more than 2000 years.

And then of course there are these guys,

who in many ways represent the worst of nationalism,

the nationalism that tries to deny or eliminate difference in the efforts

to create a homogeneous mythologized unitary polity.

We’ll get to them later,

but it’s helpful to bring them up now

just so we don’t get too excited about nationalism.

Okay, so,

before we launch into the history, let’s define the modern nation state.

Definitions are slippery but for our purposes,

a nation state involves a centralized government

that can claim and exercise authority over a distinctive territory.

That’s the state part.

It also involves a certain degree of linguistic and cultural homogeneity.

That’s the nation part.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green!

By that definition,

wouldn’t China have been nation state

as early as, like, the Han dynasty?

Dude, Me from the Past,

you’re getting smart.

Yeah, it could be,

and some historians argue that it was.

Nationhood is really hard to define.

Like, in James Joyce’s Ulysses,

the character Bloom famously says that

a nation is the same people living in the same place.

But, then, he remembers the Irish and Jewish diasporas, and adds,

or also living in different places.

But let’s ignore diasporas for the moment

and focus on territorially bound groups with a common heritage.

Same people, same place.

So how do you become a nation?

Well, some argue it’s an organic process

involving culturally similar people wanting to formalize their connections.

Others argue that nationalism is constructed by governments,

building a sense of patriotism through compulsory military service and

statues of national heroes.

Public education is often seen as part of this nationalizing project.

Schools and textbooks allow countries to share their nationalizing narratives.

Which is why

the once and possibly future independent nation of Texas

issues textbooks literally whitewashing early American history.

Still other historians argue that nationalism was

an outgrowth of urbanization and industrialization,

since new urbanites were the

most likely people to want to see themselves as part of a nation.

For instance,

Prague’s population rose from 157,000 to 514,000 between 1850 and 1900,

at the same time that the Czechs were beginning to see themselves as

separate from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Which is a cool idea,

but it doesn’t explain why other, less industrialized places

like India also saw a lot of nationalism.

The actual business of nationalization involves creating bureaucracies,

new systems of education,

building a large military,

and, often,

using that military to fight other nation states,

since nations often construct themselves in opposition to an idea of otherness.

A big part of being Irish, for instance,

is not being English.

So emerging nations had a lot of conflicts,

including:

The Napoleonic wars,

which helped the French become the French.

The Indian Rebellion of 1857,

which helped Indians to identify themselves as a homogeneous people.

The American Civil War.

I mean, before the Civil War,

many Americans thought of themselves not as Americans

but as Virginians

or New Yorkers

or Pennsylvanians.

I mean,

our antebellum nation was usually called

“these united states,”

after it became “the United States.”

So,

in the US, nationalism pulled a nation together,

but often,

nationalism was a destabilizing force for multi-ethnic land-based empires.

This was especially the case in the Ottoman empire,

which started falling apart in the 19th century as first the Greeks,

then the Serbs,

Romanians and Bulgarians,

all predominantly Christian people,

began clamoring for and, in some cases,

winning independence.

Egypt is another good example

of nationalism serving both to create a new state and to weaken an empire.

Muhammad Ali

[nope, not that one]

(who was actually Albanian and spoke Turkish, not Egyptian Arabic)

and his ruling family

encouraged the Egyptian people to imagine themselves as a separate nationality.

But okay,

so nationalism was a global phenomenon in the 19th century and

we can’t talk about it everywhere.

So, instead, we’re going to focus on one case study.

Japan.

You thought I was going to say Germany, didn’t you?

Nope. You can bite me, Bismarck. [fingers crossed for Freedonia, actually]

Japan had been fragmented and feudal until the late 16th century,

when a series of warrior landowners managed to consolidate power.

Eventually

power came to the Tokugawa family who created a military government or bakufu.

[gesundheit]

The first Tokugawa to take power was Iyeasu,

who took over after the death of one of the main unifiers of Japan,

Tyotomi Hideyoshi,

sometimes known as “the monkey,”

although his wife called him,

and this is true,

“the bald rat.”

[could've been worse, certainly]

In 1603 Ieyasu convinced the emperor, who was something of a figurehead,

to grant him the title of “shogun.”

And for the next 260 years or so,

the Tokugawa bakufu was the main government of Japan.

The primary virtue of this government

was not necessarily its efficiency or its forward thinking policies,

but its stability.

Stability: Most underrated of governmental virtues.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

The Tokugawa bakufu wasn’t much for centralization,

as power was mainly in the hands of local lords called daimyo.

One odd feature of the Tokugawa era was the presence of a class of warriors

who by the 19th century had become mostly bureaucrats.

You may have heard of them, the samurai.

[kinda like John McCain, John Kerry and my favorite, Daniel Inouye, etc.]

One of the things that made this hereditary class so interesting

was that each samurai was entitled to an annual salary from the daimyo

called a stipend.

This privilege basically paid them off

and assured that they didn’t become restless warriors plaguing the countryside

—that is, bandits.

We tend to think of samurai as noble and honorable,

[or as John Belushi on old skool SNL]

but urban samurai, according to Andrew Gordon’s book A Modern History of Japan,

"were a rough-and-tumble lot.

Samurai gang wars – a West Side Story in the shadows of Edo castle –

were frequent in the early 1600s.”

And you still say that history books are boring.

As with kings and lesser nobles anywhere,

the central bakufu had trouble controlling the more powerful daimyo,

who were able to build up their own strength

because of their control over local resources.

[like on the Sopranos?]

This poor control also made it really difficult to collect taxes,

so the Tokugawa were already a bit on the ropes

when two foreign events rocked Japan.

First was China’s humiliating defeat in the Opium Wars,

after which Western nations forced China to

give Europeans special trade privileges.

It was a wake up call to see the dominant power in the region so humbled.

[like when Andre the Giant was sadly bested by Hulk Hogan]

But even worse for the Tokugawa was the arrival of Matthew Perry.

No, Thought Bubble. Matthew Perry.

Yes.

That one.

The tokugawa are somewhat famous

for their not-so-friendly policy toward foreigners—

especially western, Christian ones—

for whom the penalty for stepping foot on Japanese soil was death.

The tokugawa saw Christianity in much the same way that the Romans had:

as an unsettling threat to stability.

And in the case of Matthew Perry,

they had reason to be worried.

Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So the American naval commodore arrived in Japan in 1853

with a flotilla of ships and a determination to open Japan’s markets.

Just the threat of American steam-powered warships

was enough to convince the bakufu to sign some humiliating trade treaties

that weren’t unlike the ones that China had signed after losing the Opium Wars.

And, this only further motivated the daimyo and the samurai

who were ready to give the Tokugawa the boot.

Within a few years, they would.

So what does have to do with nationalism?

Well, plenty.

First off,

even though the Americans and the Japanese didn’t go to war (yet),

the perceived threat provided an impetus for Japanese to

start thinking about itself differently.

It also resulted in the Japanese being convinced that

if they wanted to maintain their independence,

they would have to re-constitute their country as a modern nation state.

This looks a lot like what was happening in Egypt or even in Germany,

with external pressures leading to calls for greater national consolidation.

So, the Tokugawa didn’t give up w ithout a fight,

but the civil war between the stronger daimyo and the bakufu

eventually led to the end of the shogunate.

And in 1868,

the rebels got the newly enthroned Emperor Meiji to abolish the bakufu

and proclaim a restoration of the imperial throne.

Now,

the Emperor didn’t have much real power,

but he became a symbolic figure,

a representative of a mythical past

around whom modernizers could build a sense of national pride.

And in place of bakufu,

Japan created one of the most modern nation states in the world.

After some trial and error, the Meiji leaders created a

European style cabinet system of government with a prime minister