2 - Modernism

Summary

From the latter 1700s, new methods of industrial production, concentrated in the cities, had transformed the ways people lived and worked. In the nineteenth century, new modes of travel and communication had reshaped the ways many people experienced space and time. By 1900, developing forms of representative government and administration were giving the citizens of many countries increasing access to power and formal education, and, in the first half of the twentieth century, war and revolution tore through societies across the world. Meanwhile, modern scientific and humanistic study was rewriting what was known about nature, civilisation and the psyche. Across this period, and largely as a result of these events, former mainstays of society and tradition – the church, the monarchies, rigid class systems, patriarchy – were seeing their power challenged and diminished.