"How did the Modern Revolution cause the First World War?"

Total war: global war in which all warring nations’ mobilize for the war effort including soldier and civilian populations, who are both participants and targets; usually defined as meeting four criteria: mobilization, blurring of lines between citizen and civilian, total control of society, and rejection of a compromise peace

Radar: a technology that uses radio waves to detect the location, speed, and direction of objects.

Sonar: A technique for determining the distance and shape of things underwater by sending out sound and measuring the echo

These days, anybody who lives long enough will see evidence in their own lifetime that the complexity of human society is increasing. Just think of this: The author of this article—and many of your teachers—were born before the invention of the cell phone. Never mind smartphones. We didn’t even have flip phones.

Vera Brittain is another good example. Brittain was born in Great Britain in 1893. For most of her youth, any traveling she did was on horses and trains. But before she died in 1970, she was living in a country where, for the first time, more than half of all households owned cars, and the first low-cost airlines were flying people around the world. Governments and corporations had started using computers, and a human had just set foot on the Moon.

Yet it’s important to remember that technological change doesn’t always make things better. For example, Vera Brittain survived two world wars. Both as a battlefield nurse and as a civilian, she witnessed the bombing of cities, the mechanization of warfare, and mass killings that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. After the First and Second World Wars, Brittain—like everyone else alive at the time—lived under the threat of nuclear war.

The wars that Vera Brittain lived through reveal something surprising about the story of increasing complexity: Wars destroy. People die, and whole societies are often devastated. The very innovations that made the Modern Revolution possible also made wars much deadlier, much more destructive.

But wars themselves have also been the source of surprising bursts of innovation, and these are also a part of the story of acceleration. The two world wars were responsible for sparking innovations that would lead to many of the advances Vera Brittain experienced between 1893 and 1970—including air travel, computers, and much else. In Big History, we need to consider that technology has often been used for both the good of humanity and for its destruction. Understanding this will help us prepare for the future.

Accelerating change and the two world wars

The long era of world wars that Vera Brittain lived through began in 1914, and it ended in 1945. In this 30-year period, there were two long periods of war that were separated by an uneasy peace of about two decades.

The First World War started in August 1914, after Archduke Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. But the war had many other causes. For example, population growth in European countries led to conflict as countries fought for land and resources. These conflicts spread to other parts of the world as big empires tried to conquer new colonies. These empires expanded their militaries to compete with each other for land and resources.

New technologies, especially steamships and railroads, meant that those empires could move troops and resources very quickly. This in turn meant that every country involved in the war wanted to get its soldiers ready and moving before the others. In June 1914, these conflicts and advanced technologies made people worried that their enemies might move faster than they could. These fears led Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and other countries to rush into war.

The First World War might have started because of the assassination of one man, but really, it was the result of the acceleration and new complexity sparked by the Modern Revolution.

New technologies and First World War

Industrial technologies made the First World War deadlier than previous wars. Artillery shells could be made by the millions, raining death on enemies who were miles away. Poison gas and machine guns were used to slaughter hundreds of soldiers at a time. Airplanes and zeppelins terrorized cities far behind the front lines.

To pay for this industrial war, countries embraced something called total war. They changed their entire economy to military production. In the end, it was their industrial economy that gave the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, the United States, and others) an advantage over the Central powers (Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire). The British fleet and its allies were able to stop their enemies from moving raw materials, money, and manpower around the world. Without resources to run their industry, the Central powers were forced to surrender.

New technologies and Second World War

Over 20 million people died in World War I. After the war, many people hoped that peace would last forever. It didn’t. Just 20 years later, the Second World War started. In 1937, Japan attacked China, seeking new territory and resources. Two years later, Germany attacked Poland for similar reasons. The causes of the Second World War are complex, but as in World War I, the countries that started this second war had economic goals that were tied to acceleration. They wanted resources—especially land, money, and raw materials—and they were willing to kill to get them.

And there was plenty of violence. The invading powers—especially Nazi Germany and Japan—had new weapons like bombers and tanks. And they were even less worried about killing civilians than in the First World War. In fact, their governments and armies were convinced that “enemy” civilians had to be killed to make room for their own expansion. They developed additional technologies like gas chambers and experimental diseases meant to wipe out entire populations of men, women, and children.

The Allied powers that opposed them also developed new technologies, and in the end, it was these technologies and the vast industrial economies behind them that won the war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain led an alliance that used science and industry to overwhelm their enemies. They developed radar to warn against bombers and sonar to defeat submarines. But not all their new technologies were defensive. Over the course of the war, British and American scientists developed the nuclear bomb. In 1945, the United States dropped two of these bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, but also ending the war.

Civilian technology from the world wars

Many of the new technologies developed to fight these wars were terrible. However, many of the technologies invented during the war also had useful civilian applications after the wars. The need for militaries to communicate better gave the world wireless radio. The huge number of people wounded in the world wars led to the development of new kinds of medicines, like antiseptics and antibiotics. Jet engines, which were first used in military planes, gave us fast air travel. Nuclear technology created terrible bombs, but it also has the potential to safely provide energy to power our cities and industries without burning fossil fuels.

The first digital computers were developed during the Second World War. They were used first to break enemy codes and assist with artillery calculations. Now, of course, they power our laptops and smartphones and are present just about everywhere in human society.

Vera Brittain saw all of these technologies first-hand, including on the battlefield. As a nurse in World War I, she treated men who had been cut apart by machine guns and choked by gas weapons. In World War II, she lived through the months-long bombing of the city of London. She lost many friends in both wars.

Because of her experiences, she became a leading pacifist. Brittain warned that technology, especially nuclear weapons, made destruction more efficient and widespread. “Modern war and modern civilization are utterly incompatible,” she wrote. “One or the other must go.”

It is strange that many of the same technologies so useful for killing and destruction in war give us advances that help us in our daily lives. In the future, technology is likely to remain double-sided, offering both great benefits and serious dangers. Throughout human history, wars and conflicts have often threatened the complexity of our societies—through destruction and devastation. At other times, wars have provided a spark of innovation that prompted remarkable progress, despite the suffering involved. As we head into the future, humans must learn to harness technologies for good, while avoiding the damage they can do. In an era of rapidly increasing complexity, this is no easy task.