AD 1800-2000 Modern

In the 19th century AD, rapid industrialisation, scientific advance and booming colonial trade made Europe the ‘powerhouse of the world’. After Napoleon’s defeat (1815), Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia imposed a settlement that left the map of Europe largely unchanged until the First World War (1914-18). ‘Great power’ rivalry and an arms race preceded the war, in which Germany and the Austrian Empire were defeated by Britain and France, helped by the United States of America. In 1917, a Bolshevik revolution transformed Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Economic recession in the 1920s and 1930s encouraged the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany. Hitler’s invasion of eastern Europe provoked the Second World War (1939-45). Germany was again defeated, with the help of the USA and Soviet Russia. After 1945, divided into a democratic West and a Soviet-ruled East, Europe experienced the precarious peace of the ‘Cold War’ between the USSR and the USA.

After 1945, a movement for European unity in the West culminated in the creation of the mainly economic European Union (1991). Reforms by Gorbachev (1985-91) in the USSR and the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) led to the collapse of the USSR and the independence of its former satellites such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Balkans, after the end of Communist rule under Tito, descended into civil war in the 1990s.