19th Century: Conservative Liberalism, Economic Shifts, and Imperialism
Conservative Liberalism
The Bourbon Restoration was the return of the Bourbon dynasty to the throne of Alfonso XII in Spain. Spain did not recover the monarchical system after the First Republic. The shift of games was a system introduced by Cánovas that consisted in the two major parties, Conservative and Liberal, taking turns.
- The Conservative Party: Founded by Cánovas del Castillo, it brought together political moderates. Its social wing was based on the aristocracy, the gentry, and the traditional middle classes.
- The Liberal Party: Founded by Sagasta, it was inherited from the ideology of this administration and progressive middle classes.
Economic Modernization
Demographic Change
The population grew in the 19th century. A slow internal emigration developed from the countryside to the city. Receiving areas were areas of incipient industrialization in the Basque Country and Catalonia and administrative centers such as Madrid and some provincial capitals.
Agricultural Changes
Agriculture in the nineteenth century was the most important sector of the economy. The land remained in the hands of the aristocracy.
Industrial Change
The Industrial Revolution was later than in other European countries due to a lack of capital, technological backwardness, and a lack of raw materials or the poor quality of some of them, like coal.
Changes in Transport
The fundamental change in any process of economic modernization is the existence of a national market. Therefore, building and extending the railroad was one of the main objectives of the new liberal politics.
Financial Changes
Economic development needed financial institutions that provided plenty of money and loans to entrepreneurs. In 1856, the Bank of Spain was founded.
United States: A Nation of Immigrants
The large number of European emigrants who arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century found a dynamic country with two major political parties, Republicans and Democrats, who vied for power every four years. The southern states, even though they had freedom to admit slaves after the Civil War, limited and sometimes suppressed the right to vote of citizens of color, while establishing a regime of racial segregation and rampant violence against the black population.
The Third Republic
In 1871, France saw the last great revolutionary convulsions of the century in the popular district of Paris.
The Colonial Empires
In the last third of the 19th century, coinciding with the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, the major European states extended their rule throughout the world. Africa, the most unknown continent, was the main objective of European colonial expansion, also known as imperialism.
Causes of Imperialism
- The development of new raw materials needed for industrialization, which were sometimes found in remote territories.
- The large increase in the European population stimulated emigration overseas.
- Political prestige and strategic needs.
- There were also ideological and cultural factors, such as an awareness of the civilizing role of Europe in the rest of the world, sometimes with some racial superiority.
Colonial Territories
The situation of each continent was different, so the imperialist action suited different circumstances.
Africa
In 1885, Germany hosted the conference in Berlin to regulate the sharing of Africa. All countries were interested in stopping the British Empire.