Topic 7.1 Notes – Shifting Power After 1900

How States Shifted Power After 1900

Western industrial powers had the advantage at the start of the 1900s. Industry gave them modern weapons, railroads, steamships, and stronger economies. Imperialism gave them colonies, resources, and influence over world trade. Japan joined this group after the Meiji Restoration and proved it by defeating China and Russia.

The key pattern in this topic is that old land empires did not collapse from one cause. Internal weakness and external pressure kept feeding each other.

• Internal factors
  • Ineffective government meant rulers could not respond well to crisis.
  • Corruption and weak administration made reform slow and uneven.
  • Social and economic inequality pushed anger downward into revolts.
  • Peasant and worker hardship made daily life unstable.
  • Nationalist and revolutionary movements challenged dynastic rule.
  • Legitimacy crises meant people stopped believing the regime deserved to rule.
• External factors
  • Military defeat exposed weakness fast.
  • Foreign intervention damaged sovereignty.
  • Unequal treaties and economic penetration let outsiders control trade and money.
  • Territorial loss made governments look incompetent.
  • Pressure from industrial rivals raised the stakes.
  • Major wars often became the final blow.

What AP World wants from you is the interaction. A defeat abroad could spark revolt at home. Foreign influence increased resentment. Reform mattered, but partial reform often raised expectations without fixing the system. When collapse came, the old imperial regime was replaced by a substantially new political order.

The Three Major Imperial Collapses

Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans had been weakening for a long time because of Balkan nationalism, territorial loss, and European interference. The Tanzimat reforms and the 1876 constitution tried to centralize and modernize the empire, but they did not solve debt, separatism, or outside pressure. Abdülhamid II suspended the constitution and ruled as an autocrat.

The Young Turk Revolution in 1908 restored constitutional rule, and the Committee of Union and Progress became dominant. Still, the Balkan Wars weakened the empire even more. World War I was the decisive external blow. The map below helps you see the long arc from early expansion to the empire’s dramatic contraction by the early 1900s.

Ottoman territorial change, 1300 to 1920

After defeat, the sultanate was abolished in 1922, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

Qing China

The Qing were hit hard by foreign imperialism. The Opium Wars, unequal treaties, treaty ports, and spheres of influence all weakened sovereignty. Inside China, population pressure, peasant suffering, corruption, and anti-Qing feeling made things worse. The Taiping Rebellion devastated the state.

The Self-Strengthening Movement adopted some Western technology but kept old political structures. That is a classic example of reform being real but incomplete. Defeat in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to 1895 badly damaged Qing legitimacy. The Hundred Days’ Reform failed. The Boxer Uprising and Boxer Protocol made foreign control and Qing weakness even clearer.

The Wuchang Uprising started the 1911 Revolution. The last emperor abdicated in 1912. China became the Republic of China under Sun Yat-sen, then Yuan Shikai, but it soon broke into warlordism instead of becoming stable.

Russian Empire

Russia still had a huge empire, but Nicholas II ruled as an autocrat. Industrialization grew, yet peasants still faced land hunger, workers had terrible conditions, and minorities resisted Russification. The Russo-Japanese War exposed state weakness.

In 1905, Bloody Sunday triggered revolution and forced the tsar to allow the Duma through the October Manifesto, but reform stayed limited. World War I created casualties, shortages, inflation, and transport breakdown. That pressure led to the February Revolution in 1917 and the tsar’s abdication.

The provisional government shared power with soviets but stayed in the war, which destroyed its support. In the October Revolution, Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power with “peace, land, bread.” Civil war followed, and the USSR was created in 1922.

What These Collapses Had in Common and How They Were Different

These empires shared a lot:

Their outside pressures were different. The Ottomans faced European intervention and WWI defeat. The Qing faced unequal treaties and spheres of influence. Russia faced defeat by Japan and the disaster of WWI.

Their outcomes also differed:

• Ottoman Empire → Turkish nationalist republic
• Qing Empire → republic, then fragmentation
• Russian Empire → communist state, the USSR

A common AP nuance is that a “new state” did not erase the past. Successor states often kept territory, bureaucracy, and centralized power from the old empire.

The Mexican Revolution

Mexico was not an empire collapse, but it still fits this topic because people challenged the political and social order after 1900.

Under Porfirio Díaz, the Porfiriato brought railroads, mining, and foreign investment. It also meant rigged elections, repression, and concentrated landownership. Peasants and Indigenous communities lost land, so modernization helped elites more than ordinary people.

The immediate crisis came in 1910 when Díaz blocked Francisco Madero in the election. Madero’s Plan of San Luis Potosí called for revolt.

Main leaders mattered because they wanted different things:

• Madero wanted political democracy.
• Emiliano Zapata wanted land reform and issued the Plan of Ayala.
• Pancho Villa led major northern forces.
• Victoriano Huerta overthrew and murdered Madero in 1913.
• Venustiano Carranza and Álvaro Obregón helped defeat Huerta, then revolutionary factions fought each other.

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution

The Constitution of 1917 showed what the revolution changed:

• Article 27 allowed land redistribution and national control of subsoil resources.
• Article 123 gave labor rights.
• It also limited foreign ownership and church power.

This revolution came mainly from a domestic political crisis, even though foreign investment was part of the background. It pushed Mexico toward nationalism and social reform without becoming communist.