With all the changes inspired by wars, reforms, constitutional conflicts, radical thinking, and administrative tinkering, how strong were the states of 1900?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Religious institutions and allegiances—age-old rivals of the state—had proved remarkably strong. And although local, regional, and tribal loyalties were in retreat, they had only been checked, not destroyed. These loyalties would often reemerge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the end of the nineteenth century, some states, such as Japan, the United States, and Britain, looked as if they had met the challenges of the century successfully and recast themselves in lasting form. Others, such as the Ottoman Empire and China, seemed inadequately reformed and vulnerable. In between were superficially strong states, such as Germany, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire, which were to prove surprisingly fragile when tested in the twentieth century. While white empires continued to grow, there were signs that the days of their supremacy were numbered. Their power was founded on technological superiority, which, as we have seen, was a wasting asset. Nonwhite powers in Asia and Africa fought back by buying European technology, as Ethiopia had, or, like Japan, launching their own industrialization programs.