Late modern period


In many periodizations of human history, the late modern period followed the early modern period. It began around 1800 and, depending on the author, either ended with the beginning of contemporary history in 1945, or includes the contemporary history period to the present day.
Notable historical events in the late 18th century, that marked the transition from the early modern period to the late modern period, include: the American Revolution, French Revolution, and beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1760.

Definition

Possible end of the Late Modern period

There are differing approaches to defining a possible end or conclusion to the Late Modern period, or indeed whether it might be considered to have concluded at all. If that period is indeed concluded, then there are various options for how to label the subsequent era, i.e. the current contemporary era, as described below.
  • The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century, characterized by a rapid epochal shift from traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an economy primarily based upon information technology.
  • Some researchers typify the end of the Late Modern period by the concerns for the environment which began in 1950, as this marks the end of modern confidence about humanity's domination of the natural world.
  • The Postmodern era is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity, while some believe that modernity ended sometime after World War II. The idea of the post-modern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state, such as e.g. regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
  • The Post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to similar sociological theoretical concepts such as post-Fordism, information society, knowledge economy, post-industrial economy, liquid modernity, and network society. They all can be used in economics or social science disciplines as a general theoretical backdrop in research design. As the term has been used, a few common themes have begun to emerge. Firstly, the economy undergoes a transition from the production of goods to the provision of services; also, producing ideas is the main way to grow the economy. The term is used by various researchers and social scientists.

    Possible subdivisions

Additionally, the Late Modern period has been divided into various smaller periods; there are differing opinions and approaches on which time periods to assert in doing so.
The development of the steam engine started the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. The steam engine was created to pump water from coal mines, enabling them to be deepened beyond groundwater levels. The date of the Industrial Revolution is not exact, but some studies suggest it occurred after the East India Company's conquests of Mughal Bengal, Kingdom of Mysore and the rest of India, which were already observing the proto-industrialization. Eric Hobsbawm held that it "broke out" between 1789 and 1848, while T.S. Ashton held that it occurred roughly between 1760 and 1830.

19th century

Historians define the 19th century historical era as stretching from 1815 to 1914. Alternatively, Eric Hobsbawm defined the "Long Nineteenth Century" as spanning the years 1789 to 1914.

European imperialism and empires

In the 1800s and early 1900s, the great and powerful Spanish, Portuguese, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires began to break apart. Spain, which was at one time unrivaled in Europe, had been declining for a long time when it was crippled by Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion.
The Ottoman Empire was wracked with a series of revolutions, resulting with the Ottoman's only holding a small region that surrounded the capital, Istanbul.
The Mughal Empire, which was descended from the Mongol Khanate, was bested by the upcoming Maratha Confederacy. All was going well for the Marathas until the British took an interest in the riches of India and the British ended up ruling not just the boundaries of Modern India, but also Pakistan, Burma, Nepal, Bangladesh and some Southern Regions of Afghanistan.
Portugal's vast territory of Brazil reformed into the independent Empire of Brazil. With the defeat of Napoleonic France, Britain became undoubtedly the most powerful country in the world, and by the end of the First World War controlled a Quarter of the world's population and a third of its surface. However, the power of the British Empire did not end on land, since it had the greatest navy on the planet. Electricity, steel, and petroleum enabled Germany to become a great international power that raced to create empires of its own.
Substantial decolonization of the Americas occurred through various revolutions and wars of independence fought by new countries in the Americas against European colonizers in late 18th and early-to-mid-19th centuries. The Spanish American wars of independence lasted from 1808 until 1829, directly related to the Napoleonic French invasion of Spain. The conflict started with short-lived governing juntas established in Chuquisaca and Quito opposing the composition of the Supreme Central Junta of Seville. When the Central Junta fell to the French, numerous new Juntas appeared all across the Americas, eventually resulting in a chain of newly independent countries stretching from Argentina and Chile in the south, to Mexico in the north. After the death of the king Ferdinand VII, in 1833, only Cuba and Puerto Rico remained under Spanish rule, until the Spanish–American War in 1898. Unlike the Spanish, the Portuguese did not divide their colonial territory in America. The captaincies they created were subdued to a centralized administration in Salvador which reported directly to the Portuguese Crown until its independence in 1822, becoming the Empire of Brazil.
The Meiji Restoration was a chain of events that led to enormous changes in Japan's political and social structure that was taking a firm hold at the beginning of the Meiji era which coincided the opening of Japan by the arrival of the Black Ships of Commodore Matthew Perry and made Imperial Japan a great power. Russia and Qing dynasty China failed to keep pace with the other world powers which led to massive social unrest in both empires. The Qing Dynasty's military power weakened during the 19th century, and faced with international pressure, massive rebellions and defeats in wars, the dynasty declined after the mid-19th century.
European powers controlled parts of Oceania, with French New Caledonia from 1853 and French Polynesia from 1889; the Germans established colonies in New Guinea in 1884, and Samoa in 1900. The United States expanded into the Pacific with Hawaii becoming a U.S. territory from 1898. Disagreements between the US, Germany and UK over Samoa led to the Tripartite Convention of 1899.
Decolonization of the Americas

British Victorian era

The Victorian era of the United Kingdom was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from June 1837 to January 1901. This was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop. Some scholars would extend the beginning of the period—as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political games that have come to be associated with the Victorians—back five years to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.
In Britain's "imperial century", victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in central Asia. Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the Pax Britannica, and a foreign policy of "splendid isolation". Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain's dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many nominally independent countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been generally characterized as "informal empire". Of note during this time was the Anglo-Zulu War, which was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Empire.
British imperial strength was underpinned by the steamship and the telegraph, new technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the Empire. By 1902, the British Empire was linked together by a network of telegraph cables, the so-called All Red Line. Growing until 1922, around of territory and roughly 458 million people were added to the British Empire. The British established colonies in Australia in 1788, New Zealand in 1840 and Fiji in 1872, with much of Oceania becoming part of the British Empire.