Prologue - Twilight of a Century
The overwhelming optimism with which the 1880s had ended came to an abrupt and ugly end almost as soon as the new decade had begun. The
Russian influenza pandemic roared to life in January and February of 1890, rapidly moving throughout Europe and before long to the United States and the rest of the Americas. It was, at that point in time, one of the worst outbreaks of influenza in recorded history, perhaps famous in particular for the prominent figures whose lives it took - the British statesman
Lord Salisbury, the Queen of Spain, and the eldest two sons of Alexander III of Russia. Worse, the spider's web of massive European loans to developing foreign countries ground to a massive halt with the
Paris Bourse Crash that same February, partly out of fears of the spiking wave of flu cases.
[1] With the Bourse closed for nearly a week, the French banking system virtually collapsed overnight as soon as it reopened, triggering a similar bank run and crash in tandem in London, where
Barings Bank was already spiraling into a crisis due to its investments in Argentina, which would see a total economic collapse concluding in the
Revolution of the Park which brought the radical and progressive
Civic Union of
Leandro Alem to power. Collectively, this would be the worst banking panic in history up to that point, dwarfed only by the 2002 crisis a century later.
These twin gut punches to the world economy - first the nasty flu that would linger deep into 1893, and then the collapse of the world's two largest financial centers - served as fuel on the populist fire growing around the world. Unlike 1870 - from which Britain had arguably still not recovered when the even-worse Panic of 1890 struck - the labor movement had consolidated itself as a genuine force by the last decade of the 19th century, and agrarian agitation by increasingly destitute farmers ruined by the farm credit crisis as well as poor harvests combined to erupt in a massive social upheaval that would dramatically change politics all over the globe. Incumbent governments - the Tories in the UK, Democrats in the United States, National Liberals in Spain, the Autonomists in Argentina - were battered by their oppositions throughout the first years of the decade, and political violence emerged as a potent tool of the lower classes, first and foremost in America, where George Custer became the first President to be assassinated when he was gunned down by the Native American son of a woman his men had killed twenty years prior at a Washington train station.
The burst of radicalism onto the political scene manifested itself in many different ways. Most prominently, in Britain it led to the rise of
Joseph Chamberlain, a man whose political career had largely thought to be over by the late 1880s after an ascendancy in the Hartington years but who came to stand as the central figure of the radical wing of the British Liberal Party. Upon his appointment as Prime Minister in 1892, he immediately began an aggressive program of reform that overshadowed the more piecemeal approach taken by Hartington a decade earlier, managing through his polarizing campaigns with the assertive and sophisticated internal party pressure organization the
National Liberal Federation to pass a small-scale land reform, universal manhood suffrage, and the early inklings of the British welfare state; at the helm of the Liberals, Chamberlain won landslide elections in 1894 and 1899 that served to essentially permanently make the Commons the superior House of Parliament. His time in office also would see the expansion of the British presence in Uganda and Nigeria, and despite not solving much of the fundamental grievances of Ireland or colonial
India during his fourteen years of consecutive office at 10 Downing Street, it was nonetheless seen as a time of peace, recovering wages and newly confident British imperialism behind the muscular, cocksure position of Chamberlain.
This was not to say that Chamberlain's tenure was entirely without controversy or conflict. He had entered office at the same time that
Albert Victor had infamously renounced his succession rights to marry his love,
Helene of Orleans, because she was forbidden by both her father and the Pope to convert to Anglicanism; a year later, Victoria passed away aged 74 shortly after the marriage of her grandson and heir,
George V. His first year was also dominated by fears of war with France, or Germany, or both - the
Siam Crisis over French attempts to invade the Lao Highlands of northern
Siam had seen the French Navy park itself within cannon distance of Bangkok and Germany, Siam's chief ally and patron from Europe, respond with fleet response of its own. The
Treaty of Madrid that December, regarded as Chamberlain's finest diplomatic work, largely cooled the tensions but the episode revealed the extent to which European powers would begin having to not just pay great attention to what happened in Asia, but the ways in which they could be dragged into conflicts of their own by it.
The vast social changes of the 1890s revealed how quickly those who just years before had seemed like innovative and forward-thinking men now appeared anachronistic fossils. After returning to power in 1892 behind an uninspired but straightforward campaign largely on reassuring competence from former Secretary of State Hay, the Liberals in the United States found that they had gone from being the modernizing, reformist aspirants of the Blaine years to an increasingly tired defender of an increasingly unpopular
laissez-faire status quo which their wealthy, WASPy party apparatus in
New England seemed to typify and embody, particularly the brash, cunning and ambitious Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. The Hay administration's interests, thanks largely to the aloof President atop it, was preoccupied primarily with foreign matters, and so in the 1890s the People's Party burst onto the scene in the American West, demanding vast new regulations of the economy to protect farmers and other working men. For a moment, it appeared that they could perhaps eclipse the Democratic Party - vote-splitting certainly had an impact in buffing up the otherwise-dwindling Liberal Congressional majorities of the time - but instead they were slowly over the 1890s instead absorbed state-by-state into Jackson's baby, with the Democrats by the end of the decade having remarkably pivoted clear across the political spectrum from the party of the old-fashioned Jacksonian small-government ethos to advocating for a more muscular role in regulating economic affairs, particularly going after the much-hated trusts that the
Hoar Anti-Trust Act of 1892 had failed to fully quell. This shift was embodied in both politics and media, with the symbiotic rise and partnership of the wealthy businessman
William Randolph Hearst to Governor of New York on the backs of an expansive, pro-labor populist platform using the "yellow press" newspapers of bombastic news baron
Theodore Roosevelt as his chief advocate and bullhorn.
The Hay years in the United States were associated largely with the recovery from the early 1890s depression and, at least in the view of Liberal bosses, a return to the staid and sunny optimism of the Blaine era, with the 1896 reelection campaign largely trying, with a fair deal of success, to ape and mimic Blaine's own triumph in '84. However, times had changed, both at home and abroad. Despite Liberals being keen to leverage the technological, cultural and architectural marvel that was the seminal, era-defining
1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the city just a year later was struck by the
Pullman Strike, the largest mass strike in American history that ground Illinois to a halt and inspired the nascent
Socialist Party for decades to come. Foreign relations, despite Hay's experience at the helm, were no more smooth in the more complicated 1890s; despite Mexico's remarkable recovery from its civil war and the early 1890s depression under the Premierships of
Felix Zuloaga and Miramon, rivalries with the Confederacy and Mexico over Central American markets and the development of a canal across Nicaragua were starting to bubble up, particularly with
John Tyler Morgan, a more thuggishly uncooperative Confederate President, now at the helm after the controversial process in which he was essentially foisted upon Democrats at the 1891 convention in Nashville by party bigwigs including Longstreet. The Continentalist program of Blaine and Hay in the Americas was starting to unravel, though Hay would not live to see it collapse - indeed, he would not live to see the decade out, felled by an Italian anarchist's bullet in an assassination inspired by the stabbing of the
Prince of Orleans in Geneva, the bombing death of Austrian crown prince
Rudolf and his wife in Budapest by a Hungarian nationalist, and most immediately the murder of
Umberto I of Italy in Milan. America closed the 1890s largely how it had started them - with the country in stunned shock as a President was killed.
Europe was no stranger to the rise of mass politics either, but it varied in how it approached them. In Germany, after the death of Friedrich from resurgent cancer, his heir
Heinrich I (his elder brother having died of a boating accident in 1880) made efforts to continue his father's liberal reforms while rebuilding his relationship with Prussia's conservative landed nobility, and as with all things German it managed to be both a failure and a success simultaneously, depending on one's perspective. Belgium took a markedly different approach - following the assassination of his father in 1888 by a socialist, King
Leopold III had emerged as possibly Europe's most reactionary monarch outside of Russia in addition to being regarded as a cad personally, and he encouraged his sons to largely take after him and gave them a front-row seat to what a "parliamentary autocracy" could indeed look like with his oppressive practices and use of parliamentary majorities to quash his opposition.
[2] French policymakers were certainly taking notes; having risen up in the ranks militarily and in the Cabinet over the preceding decade,
Georges Boulanger, Minister of Defense, had accumulated enough power and influence to essentially have his own parliamentary bloc in his
Ligue des Patriotes to act as a shadow Premier and
eminence grise, and after the death of his ally
Felix Faure of a heart attack whilst in the middle of receiving fellatio
[3], he finally achieved the top spot with a growing and hard-edged right-wing governing bloc in the rubberstamp
Corps legislatif behind him, to the point that it caused even Napoleon IV some consternation.
As Siam had revealed, though, it was in Asia that Europe's attention really belonged, as the aftershocks of the Sino-French War continued to ripple out. The reforms of a
Japan that had no intention of being treated like China were beginning to cause some consternation for European policymakers, but the creakiness of Qing China finally saw its breakdown in the
Tiananmen Putsch in which military officers loyal to Cixi undid the Hundred Weeks' Reforms, imprisoned and slaughtered reformists by the thousands and forced hundreds more into exile, and placed the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest even though his powers were not curtailed formally. This conservative counterreaction by the most ardently traditional elements of the Manchu court came at a time when China was already destabilizing rapidly due to poor harvests and resentments in villages over Western extraterritoriality and the mass conversion of Chinese peasants to Christianity by European and American missionaries, and in the last months of 1899 a violent rebellion rose up across much of northern China, concentrated at first in Shandong but then spreading slowly outwards.
At first, this grassroots uprising did not cause Europeans much alarm - they were more distraught by the events at Tiananmen the previous year - but it should have. Spain had already discovered the ferocity with which Asian peoples would fight to drive European influence from their lands as they dealt with an unstoppable insurgency in the
Philippines that had failed to capture
Manila thanks only to the brutal and inhumane tactics of the colony's new Captain-General, the grim
Valeriano Weyler, who had pivoted from killing Carlists and anarchists to now rounding up Filipinos by the hundreds of thousands to place them in
reconcentrados - concentration camps. What started as an insurrection in the Philippines over resentment at the powers of the monastic orders ordained by Spain to help govern it would before long have an unintentional mimic on the mainland, as the dawn of the new century would bring with it a sun tinged red with the blood of millions as China became the center of the world's attention for the age of imperialism's most infamous colonial conflict...
[1] I can distinctly remember how eerie it felt writing about all this back in early 2021... art imitating life, as it were
[2] For those new to the Cincoverse, "Evil Belgium" is probably the OG absurd meme for this timeline that we've just kept running with
[3] Again, true story, and Peak French