Contemporary Age - What it is, characteristics, stages, facts

Contemporary Age: We explain what the Contemporary Age is, when it began, its characteristics and stages. In addition, its most important facts.

What is the Contemporary Age?

The Contemporary Age is the stage of history that corresponds to the period that reaches the present day. Its beginning coincided with the end of the Modern Age, which took place when the French Revolution of 1789 broke out, although some place its beginning at the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776. These events shook the political and social order of the Western world and anticipated the radical changes that the world experienced in the following centuries.

The Contemporary Age is one of the most intense and rapid changes in the world. Right from the beginning, which some historians call the Age of Revolutions, from the end of the 18th century to the middle of the 19th century, a profound transformation was observed in the economic, social and political spheres, compared to the medieval and modern heritage. You must read about Renaissance once!

It is often said that the Contemporary Age meant the triumph or consolidation of many of the processes of change that began during the Modern Age, such as the political rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of the Ancien Régime (that is, of monarchical absolutism and the privileges of the nobility and the clergy).

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During this stage, democratic and republican values were prioritized, at least in the West, hand in hand with economic transformations such as the Industrial Revolution and the global spread of capitalism. Unprecedented technological advances radically changed production, communication, transportation and consumption.

However, the Contemporary Age also presented its challenges and difficulties. With two world wars, the rise of totalitarianism, the development of nuclear technology and a Cold War between two superpowers in the 20th century, humanity was for the first time on the brink of its own extinction. Today, some of the main challenges are socio-economic inequality, military conflicts and environmental disasters. Maybe you should definitely read about Marxism once!

KEY POINTS

The Contemporary Age is the era of universal history that began with the French Revolution in 1789 and continues today.
It is characterized by its profound and accelerated political, social, economic, technological, cultural and human rights transformations.
It is an era of great revolutions (French, Russian, Chinese), which went through two world wars and successful struggles for independence and decolonization.
At the end of the 20th century, capitalism was consolidated with the fall of the USSR, new information and communication technologies, and globalization.

Characteristics of the Contemporary Age

The Contemporary Age is one of the most complex to describe, given the enormous volume of changes that occurred in less than three centuries. Broadly speaking, its main characteristics are:

Sociopolitical characteristics of the Contemporary Age

What began to manifest itself in the Modern Age became concrete in the Contemporary Age: the decline of the traditional powers, the nobility and the clergy, which controlled the Western world since the Middle Ages, in favor of the bourgeoisie, which did not have a noble origin but possessed capital.

The bourgeoisie managed to conquer political power with the slogan of liberty, equality, fraternity and property. The values of the French Enlightenment influenced liberalism, which promoted a republican and democratic agenda, with separation of powers and legal equality, although not socioeconomic equality. Thus a new society of social classes was born, separated no longer by their birth but by their capacity to consume and generate money, within the framework of an economic system known as capitalism.

Alongside the bourgeoisie, an antagonistic class emerged, the proletariat, the result of the transformation of the medieval peasantry into urban workers who sold their labour in exchange for a wage.

Geopolitical characteristics of the Contemporary Age

With the fall of the Ancien Régime, a new configuration of global powers slowly emerged, as military, economic and commercial competition became internationalised.

The large colonial extensions of the European empires saw their decline during the Contemporary Age, especially after the wars of independence. In other cases, they agreed to a consensual liberation, when it was more convenient for them to trade with their former colonies than to continue administering them. This led to a complex process of decolonisation throughout the world, which involved conflict and much violence.

The First and Second World Wars, for their part, altered the international order and displaced the former powers of Western Europe from their role as power, in favour of two new superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. These two countries faced each other in a Cold War that involved much of the world, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. After what seemed to be the total victory of American capitalism, new poles of power emerged with the European Union and especially with China, commercial rivals of the United States today.

Economic characteristics of the Contemporary Age

Capitalism was consolidated and expanded during the Contemporary Age. In the mid-nineteenth century, within industrial society, movements arose that were contrary to the capitalist economy or that defended the interests of the proletariat: socialism, anarchism and communism.

In the twentieth century, the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia established a communist regime and since then two poles have been formed, that of liberal society, organized around the notion of the free market and its self-regulation, and that of the centrally planned economy, in which the State administered all orders of society. Both models were represented during the Cold War by the capitalist Western bloc, led by the United States, and the communist Eastern bloc, led by the Soviet Union.

The contemporary economy favors urban areas, where industrial production and services abound, although it is supported by primary production that comes from rural areas and the generation of raw materials, which are often obtained from less developed countries. At the end of the 20th century, after the fall of Soviet communism and with advances in communication technology, market integration and the consolidation of a globalized economy advanced, allowing investment and the flow of goods and capital beyond national borders.

Cultural characteristics of the contemporary age

Culture has diversified enormously in the contemporary age, largely due to new social and political freedoms and the breadth of cultural exchanges in an increasingly globalized world.

For the most part, the Western world was freed from many of the moral precepts of religion, whose dogmas weakened after the spread of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The separation between Church and State was consolidated in many parts of the world, and art left academic or religious spheres to become part of consumer society.

This meant coming into contact with new forms of mass communication (press, radio, television, Internet) and going through a profound identity crisis. For its part, rock music had a significant international impact on youth attitudes and fashions from the mid-twentieth century onwards. In addition, contemporary philosophy went through periods of nihilism and pessimism, especially after the world wars.

Later, with the arrival of global society, new philosophical trends spread in the West, generally based on the premises of postmodernism (opposed to the rationalist principles of modern and enlightened thought), and Eastern practices and beliefs were adopted by a public eager for new ways of thinking.

Technological characteristics of the Contemporary Age

No other period in human history witnessed such a large and accelerated technological transformation as the Contemporary Age. The Industrial Revolution changed the scale of production through the use of machines and other technical and technological innovations that maximized yields. This promoted the automation of work and the emergence of the consumer society.

The enormous advances in medicine and pharmacology extended human life expectancy to unprecedented levels. Furthermore, the appearance of the computer radically transformed information processing and became a powerful tool for industrial and domestic use, which allowed telecommunications to multiply towards the end of the 20th century and led to the birth of the so-called information society.

Likewise, land, air and sea travel had substantial improvements and even the exploration of outer space began, although many of these technological advances resulted in a significant cost in terms of environmental damage, the effects of which were perceived at the beginning of the 21st century.

Stages of the Contemporary Age

The Contemporary Age can be divided into the following stages:

The Age of Revolutions (1776-1848):

It was a time of drastic changes. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technology and industry took a great leap forward. The American independence, the French Revolution and the independence struggles in Latin America occurred, as well as other cycles of change, especially in Europe.

The Age of Capital and Empires (1848-1914):

Once capitalism was established as the dominant economic system, the great European powers proceeded to divide up the world in search of raw materials to feed their incipient industrial machinery. During this period, the philosophy of positivism prevailed, which proposed technical and scientific progress as the way to resolve social problems and guarantee the well-being of humanity.

The Thirty Years’ Crisis (1914-1945):

Colonial aspirations and rivalry between powers, in the context of an emerging mass society, led to periods of economic crisis and great conflict. The First World War (1914-1918) took place, then the Great Depression (also known as the crisis of 1929 or the crisis of the 1930s) and the rise of totalitarianisms (such as Italian fascism, German Nazism, Soviet Stalinism and Japanese nationalist militarism). Then came the Second World War (1939-1945), which caused millions of deaths, many of them in Nazi concentration camps or caused by the two atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Japan.

The Cold War (1945-1991):

During this period, a long series of conflicts took place, framed within the so-called Cold War (1945-1991), which pitted two blocs headed by the Soviet Union (USSR) against the United States. These included wars that caused many victims, such as those in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Central America, and massacres such as those committed in Cambodia. It was a passive confrontation between the two nuclear powers, which made many think of the possible end of humanity if a direct war between the United States and the USSR were to break out.

The globalized world (1991-present):

After the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991), capitalism was consolidated worldwide and the victory of the market economy model promoted by the United States was affirmed. Hand in hand with technological and scientific innovation, capitalism became global and surpassed all geographical borders. However, this same process promoted the emergence of economic, territorial and migratory crises, and the 21st century was characterized by the multiplication of terrorist attacks, the result of the tensions inherited from the previous century.

Most important events of the Contemporary Age

Some of the most significant events of the Contemporary Age were:

1776 – The Independence of the United States is declared.
1789 – The French Revolution breaks out.
1804 – Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of the French.
1810 – The Latin American independence processes begin.
1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte is defeated at Waterloo and the Europe of the Restoration is born.
1824 – The royalists are definitively defeated in Latin America.
1848 – The revolutions of 1848, called “the spring of the peoples”, put an end to the Europe of the Restoration.
1859 – Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published.
1861 – The American Civil War begins.
1864 – Louis Pasteur discovers pasteurization. The International Working Men’s Association (First International) is founded.
1867 – Karl Marx publishes Capital.
1868 – The Meiji era begins in Japan.
1870 – Italian unification is completed. The Franco-Prussian War begins.
1871 – Bismarck unifies Germany and creates the German Empire.
1876 – The telephone is patented.
1884 – The formal division of Africa among the European powers begins.
1893 – New Zealand is the first country to approve women’s suffrage.
1900 – The Boxer Rebellion takes place in China.
1905 – Albert Einstein publishes his theory of special relativity and Sigmund Freud his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Bloody Sunday occurs in Russia.
1908 – Henry Ford launches the Ford Model T automobile.
1910 – The Mexican Revolution begins. Japan annexes Korea.
1911 – The Chinese Revolution begins, which establishes the Republic a year later.
1914 – The First World War begins. The Panama Canal is inaugurated.
1915 – The Armenian genocide occurs.
1917 – The Russian Revolution breaks out.
1919 – The Treaty of Versailles is signed.
1920 – The League of Nations begins to function.
1922 – The USSR is created. Benito Mussolini founds a fascist regime in Italy.
1926 – The Cristero War begins in Mexico.
1928 – Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. Joseph Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan begins in the USSR.
1929 – The fall of the New York stock market triggers the Great Depression.
1930 – Coups d’état take place in Argentina and Brazil. Mahatma Gandhi carries out the Salt March.
1931 – Japan invades Manchuria. The Second Republic is proclaimed in Spain.
1932 – The Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia begins.
1933 – Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany. Franklin D. Roosevelt promotes the New Deal in the United States.
1934 – Mao Zedong begins the Long March.
1935 – Nazi Germany enacts the Nuremberg Racial Laws.
1936 – The Spanish Civil War breaks out.
1937 – The Sino-Japanese War begins. The Estado Novo is established in Brazil.
1938 – Germany annexes Austria and the Sudetenland.
1939 – The dictatorship of Francisco Franco begins in Spain. The Second World War begins.
1942 – Nazism begins to implement the plan to exterminate Jews known as the “final solution.”
1945 – Hitler takes his own life and Germany signs its surrender. Mussolini is executed. The United States drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan, and World War II ends. The UN is born.
1947 – The Marshall Plan is launched to provide U.S. aid for the reconstruction of Europe. India and Pakistan declare their independence.
1948 – Gandhi is assassinated. The UN proclaims the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The State of Israel is born.
1949 – The Chinese Communist Revolution takes place, giving rise to the People’s Republic of China. Germany is divided into the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. NATO is born.
1950 – The Korean War breaks out.
1953 – James Watson and Francis Crick propose the double helix model of DNA. 1954 – The Algerian War begins. Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala is overthrown with the help of the CIA.
1955 – The countries of the socialist bloc sign the Warsaw Pact. The Vietnam War begins.
1956 – The Suez Crisis occurs.
1957 – The USSR puts the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. The European Economic Community (EEC) is born.
1959 – The Cuban Revolution triumphs, bringing Fidel Castro to power.
1961 – The Berlin Wall is built. The USSR sends the first human being into outer space.
1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis occurs.
1967 – Israel wins the Six-Day War.
1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. The French May, the Prague Spring and the Tlatelolco massacre occur. 1969 – Humans reach the Moon with the American Apollo 11 mission.
1973 – General Augusto Pinochet stages a coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. The Yom Kippur War takes place.
1975 – The Vietnam War ends with the defeat of South Vietnam. The Khmer Rouge establish a dictatorship in Cambodia. Franco dies and the transition to democracy begins in Spain.
1976 – A coup d’état begins the last military dictatorship in Argentina.
1979 – Cambodia is invaded by the Vietnamese army, ending the Cambodian genocide. Israel and Egypt sign a peace treaty. The Islamic Revolution breaks out in Iran. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. The Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua.
1981 – The IBM PC, one of the most popular personal computers in history, is launched on the market. Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat is assassinated. 1982 – The United Kingdom defeats Argentina in the Falklands War.
1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev assumes leadership of the USSR and begins the implementation of perestroika and glasnost.
1986 – A nuclear accident occurs at the Chernobyl power plant.
1989 – The Berlin Wall falls. The Tiananmen Massacre takes place in China.
1990 – Germany is reunified. The Gulf War begins. Nelson Mandela is released and the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa begins. The Hubble Space Telescope is put into orbit.
1991 – The World Wide Web is publicly announced. The USSR collapses. The wars in Yugoslavia break out.
1993 – The European Union (EU) is born.
1994 – The Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico comes into force. A Zapatista uprising occurs in Chiapas. 1996 – Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal in history, is born.
2001 – The terrorist group Al-Qaeda carries out an attack on the Twin Towers in New York, United States. The war in Afghanistan begins.
2003 – A US-led coalition invades Iraq and the Iraq war begins. The sequence of the human genome is completed.
2008 – The Great Recession occurs after the bursting of a financial and real estate bubble.
2010 – The protests and rebellions known as the “Arab Spring” begin.
2020 – The Covid-19 pandemic spreads.
2021 – The James Webb Space Telescope is launched into space.
2022 – Russia invades Ukraine and a war breaks out between the two states.

Contemporary Age – What it is, characteristics, stages, facts