Age of Industry Andrew Marr's History of the World

The 23rd of September, 1877.

A band of rebel samurai warriors was dug in on a hillside in southern Japan.

The samurai had been the elite warrior class for more than 700 years.

Now they faced oblivion at the hands of the Japanese army.

Japan's government was modernising fast,

rushing to embrace the Industrial Revolution.

The revolution that has shaped today's world.

The samurai would rather die than accept this new way of life.

This was a battle between the rural, traditional past

and the urban, industrial future.

And in the 19th century, it was raging all round the world.

From America...

..to Russia.

From China...

to Japan.

The old world of kings and landowners was crumbling

under the force of the Industrial Revolution.

The world was accelerating,

and the modern age of superpowers was being born.

But this is not the simple-minded story of progress.

It's also the story of all of those who said no.

300 years ago, something new appeared above the surface of the planet.

A thick, oily spectre, hanging in the air.

For longer than the cooking smoke from any town or city,

and larger than a forest fire or a volcano.

The Industrial Revolution was the biggest story to happen to mankind

since we invented farming.

And that dirty smear of smoke spread across North America,

much of Europe, China, Japan.

But it first billowed into the air over a modestly sized little island

which called itself, rather immodestly, Great Britain.

The engine for all of this was...the engine.

Steam engines burned up the buried energy of millennia, captured in coal,

and used it to create immediate power.

What a moment!

Through all of history, one thing had never changed -

there was a fixed limit on the amount of power that humans could use.

The own muscles, a few animals, the odd windmill and water wheel.

But soon, steam engines would be doing as much work in Britain

as 40 million people flat-out.

Why did this happen in Britain?

Was it because the British were uniquely clever?

No.

Was it because the country seemed to be half built on coal? Not really.

It was because the British had developed a new political system

which limited monarchy, gave everybody legal rights,

allowed the free flow of ideas,

and ensured that British geniuses owned their ideas,

so they could make a buck.

Enough liberty for free ideas, enough law for profit.

Allowing the emergence of new men,

far from the haunts of the rich and powerful.

Men like George Stephenson,

who in 1825 was busy connecting two towns in the north of England...

..Stockton and Darlington.

A man who'd been illiterate until he was 18,

driving his own invention,

an awkward-looking mash-up of pipes and fire

he called simply "Locomotion".

ENGINE GROWLS

PEOPLE GASP

Stephenson's machine was the biggest news of the age.

"Locomotion" had been built to carry coal,

but on its maiden voyage, people clambered into the coal carts.

There was even an experimental passenger carriage called..."Experiment".

Never before had so many people been carried so far...

so fast.

Now railways would start to knit together nations.

First Britain...

but soon the United States, Germany

and the rest of Europe.

Restless change, restless revolution.

Like most revolutions, the Industrial Revolution would have many casualties.

Men and women and children as young as eight or nine

worked 12-hour days in vast factories.

Many were maimed or even killed by the new machinery,

and they were working by artificial light and the factory clock,

not the rhythms of nature.

Protests were widespread and angry.

Every great new technology produces changes in society and politics,

and these new engines didn't just push pistons and locomotives,

they pushed ahead trade unionism, town planning,

political reform, new schools, democracy.

Quite powerful things, steam engines.

Britain went through the fastest social transformation in history.

People flooded from the countryside to work in urban factories.

Within a century, Britain went from a country

with just two cities with more than 50,000 people

to a country with 29 cities of this size.

It's very similar to what's happening in China right now -

a world of peasant farmers becomes a world of factories,

villages empty, and tall, angular buildings spring up.

HORN BLOWS

By 1860, Britain was tied together by more than 10,000 miles of railways.

Production of coal and steel and iron skyrocketed.

The cities sprawled, and new inventions - from steamships and iron bridges

to brilliantly lit streets - tumbled out of these damp and smoky islands.

And it was really this energy,

this restless search for raw materials, new markets and bigger profits,

that drove the British as they threw together

the biggest empire in the history of the world.

There have always been powerful empires and weaker peoples,

rich countries and poor ones.

What was new about the Industrial Revolution

was that it brought a great steel barrier crashing down

between the nations with the new power and the rest without it.

Which, in 1839, included China.

Britain wanted to do business with this Eastern giant.

Her 400 million people were a vast and lucrative market for British goods.

And Britain's new industrial middle class were eager to buy luxuries from China.

But there was a problem.

For 300 years, China had been closed off.

It was self-sufficient. It didn't need British goods.

There was only one place that merchants from outside

could come to get what they wanted, which was here,

what they called Canton in those days.

And what British merchants wanted most of all was tea.

Tea had become the national drink.

But it was a lot more than that.

A tenth of all the British government's revenues came from taxes on tea.

That was enough to pay for half of the Royal Navy.

So we had an nation of tea addicts

and a government that had become addicted to tea taxes.

And the Chinese didn't want to buy any British goods in return.

All they'd accept as payment for tea was silver.

Silver reserves were pouring out of Britain into China's coffers.

There must surely be something else that the British could trade in return for tea?

There was.

Opium.

The Chinese had a taste for this highly addictive and illegal drug.

And the British grew it in their imperial possession, India.

So there was a deal.

We could smuggle in the dangerous drug, opium,

and use it to pay for our benign drug, tea.

By the 1830s, the most successful drug pushers in the world

weren't Mexican bandits or Afghan warlords, but the British.

By March 1839, there were an estimated 12 million opium addicts in China.

The emperor sent one of his most trusted officials,

the famously incorruptible High Commissioner Lin, to Canton.

He began a thorough search of the trading district,

where the British merchants were smuggling opium into China.

HE SPEAKS CANTONESE

All pushers were to be sentenced to death.

Foreigners by beheading, Chinese by strangling.

HE SPEAKS CANTONESE

HE GIVES ORDERS IN CANTONESE

HE SHOUTS

Lin demanded that the British hand over all their opium supplies.

When they refused, he locked down the trading district.

Lin was ruthless.

No food was allowed in.

500 troops were drilled up and down outside the windows,

and huge gongs were sounded all night.

After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, the British surrendered.

The merchants handed over 20,000 chests of opium,

worth more than £160 million in today's money.

Lin destroyed it all.

Lin was triumphant, but he'd fatally misunderstood his enemy.

He had no idea how important this trade was.

Selling Indian opium for Chinese tea

was one of the most lucrative deals Britain's Empire traders had.

They weren't going to let it slip through their fingers.

Two great empires were now on collision course.

The Chinese fleet of wooden-built junks

was confronted by Britain's new weapon of the industrial age,

the world's first ironclad battleship.

The Nemesis.

The British blockaded the Pearl River and then sailed up the coast

bombarding and seizing the major towns.

On land, a Chinese army with bows and arrows

and spears and muskets were mown down.

Over two years, China was bludgeoned into submission.

The Chinese had no choice but to open up to British trade.

The terms were humiliating.

China was forced to pay the equivalent

of £2 billion in today's money for the lost opium,

and to pay for the war against them.

Five Chinese ports were forced to open to British traders.

Oh, and Hong Kong was thrown in as part of the deal -

a British colony on China's doorstep.

China had been forced at gunpoint to open herself up to the modern global economy.

The message was clear - industrialisation could transform

a tiny country like Britain into a world superpower.

To ignore this was to be doomed to the status of second-class nation.

All around the world, traditional rural societies took note.

19th-century Russia thought of herself as a European power,

but she was, in her way, just as trapped in the past as China.

22 million Russians were serfs, owned by aristocratic landlords.

Like slaves, serfs were property

and could be ordered to do any kind of work.

Many suffered physical and sexual abuse.

The system created a stagnant economy based on old-fashioned agriculture.

But now, this huge, proud nation came up against

industrialised Britain and her ally, France, in the Crimean War.

And, fighting right on her doorstep, lost.

But change was in the air.

After the humiliating defeat of the Crimean War,

the new tsar, the reforming Alexander II, realised

that if Russia was going to compete against the industrial powers in the West,

she'd have to sweep away the serf economy.

Easier said than done.

Russia's nobility and landowners were going to fight hard

to hang on to their power and their property.

In many ways, Russia's fate was now in the hands of its nobility.

And in the spring of 1853,

one young aristocratic landowner was gambling with his fellow army officers.

The stakes were high.

The young count had already gambled away entire villages he owned

and the serfs who lived in them.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Now he'd lost the house where he'd been born.

His name was Leo Tolstoy.

He'd go on to become a titan of Russian literature,

the author of War And Peace.

But he'd also become a key player in the political drama gripping Russia -

the fight to throw off serfdom.

Tolstoy was only 18 when he inherited the estate of Yasnaya Polyana,

which means "bright meadow".

It was vast and included 11 villages and 200 serfs.

This was a world in which entire villages and the people who lived in them

could be won or lost on the toss of a coin.

But Tolstoy was different.

The guilt so tore him apart that he came to believe that not only he had to change,

so did Russia.

Was there a different path between brutal industrialisation and rural tyranny?

Finding one became Tolstoy's mission.

He returned to what was left of his estate

and, dressed as a peasant, worked alongside his serfs.

In truth, he was a pretty rotten farmer,

and to start with, there must have been a bit of rural sniggering

behind his Lordship's back.

But Tolstoy was a dedicated, even reckless reformer.

Tolstoy decided to free his serfs,

which meant giving them or selling them land as well,

because the land was worth nothing without the serfs,

and the serfs would starve without the land.

So he offered them very generous terms - 12 acres apiece,

some of it free, some of it very cheap.

Noble, generous Count Tolstoy.

The serfs didn't see it like that.

They'd already heard rumours

that the Tsar was going to give them their land and liberty for nothing.

The count must be trying to swindle them.

So they looked at his offer

and, to his amazement and horror, said, "No, thanks."

But Tolstoy wasn't easily discouraged.

He believed that Russia was never going to move forward

while most of its people couldn't read or write.

So, in October 1859, he set up a school on his estate to educate young serfs.

Quite a few of whom, it has to be said, were his own illegitimate children.

Within three years, Tolstoy had opened 21 schools in the local area.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

Tolstoy was shunned by infuriated local landowners.

All round the world, it was the landowning class

with their privileges and traditions

who'd be the most threatened by change.

And in Russia, they fought a formidable rearguard action

against the Tsar's reforms.

It was one successful enough to sabotage them.

When, on the 3rd of March, 1861, the detailed plan was finally announced,

it turned out the serfs would be free in name,

but burdened by debts and many rules.

It was a tragic missed opportunity.

Had the Tsar had pulled this off, Russian history would have been very different.

And surely happier.

There was a great wave of anger and disappointment.

There were nearly 2,000 serf revolts,

some of which had to be put down by troops.

Tolstoy himself freed all his serfs and asked for no payment,

but across Russia, most peasants, though now technically free,

still had to pay for their land, they had to ask permission to travel

and they could still be beaten.

Alexander's reforms had failed.

Eventually many of the serfs drifted to the cities,

where they would eventually become the foot soldiers

for a revolution which would sweep away old Russia.

At exactly the same time, a remarkably similar problem was tearing America apart.

Here, too, a rural underclass lived alongside the modern industrial world.

The nation that had been built on the ideals of liberty and equality

was polluted by a system even worse than serfdom...

slavery.

In the mid-1800s, there were around 4 million slaves in the United States,

almost all of them in the South, working on plantations like this,

growing cotton and tobacco and much else.

Economically, slavery was a dynamic and efficient system,

and as America started to spread towards the West,

the Southern states wanted to see slavery spreading too.

But in the North, where many states had banned slavery,

they thought very differently.

They were determined that slavery would not grow.

America was split down the middle.

Things came to a head in 1860,

when the Northerner Abraham Lincoln became president.

But can we, while our votes will prevent it,

allow slavery to spread into the Northern Territories?

Lincoln believed that slavery was wrong,

but he also said that he had no intention of abolishing it,

hoping instead it would die out over time.

But Southern politicians realised that Lincoln's arrival in the White House

meant slavery would not now spread further, as they had hoped.

11 Southern states decided to break away from the union

and establish an independent government -

the Confederacy.

Lincoln had no choice but to declare war on the South to defend the union.

This was a struggle between two different ways of life.

In the South, it was an agricultural society -

traditional, conservative,

many people living on plantations which were virtually self-sufficient,

cut off from the rest of the world.

"Yes," said the North, "but all your wealth depends on slavery."

In the North - urban, industrial America,

based on steel and railroads and a rising middle class.

"Ah, yes," said the South, "whose prosperity is based on wage slaves."

So, two Americas, now no longer able to properly speak to each other.

On April the 12th, 1861, these two Americas duly went to war.

Lincoln mobilised the North's industrial might,

using railways to transport men and munitions.

But to start with, it went badly for him.

The South had better generals and a bolder fighting spirit.

SCREAMING

After 18 months, Lincoln was desperate.

He decided to destroy the foundation on which the South was built.

He'd free the slaves.

"We must free the slaves," he said, "or be ourselves subdued."

He hoped this would destroy the Southern economy and demoralise the people.

And so, on New Year's Day, 1863,

just two years after the Russians had announced the emancipation of the serfs,

Lincoln announced his Emancipation Proclamation -

that all the slaves in the rebel states would immediately be free.

Liberated slaves flocked to fight with the Northern forces...

..while the South struggled with shortages and inflation.

The tide of war turned in the North's favour.

On April the 9th, 1865,

after a devastating invasion, the South surrendered.

620,000 soldiers had been killed.

Nearly as many as in every other war the United States has fought put together.

In the final days of the war, Lincoln did something extraordinary.

He simply turned up at the Confederate rebel capital of Richmond, Virginia,

not very far from Washington.

His troops had just taken it, it was still burning.

No-one had any idea what to expect

when he arrived here by boat at Rocketts Landing.

There was a huge crowd, entirely black.

Lincoln had the most recognisable face in America

and he was spotted immediately.

There were cries of "Our Messiah!" and "Jesus Christ!"

One man knelt to him, and Lincoln said, "No, no, you only kneel to your God."

And then the group started to walk the two miles into the centre of Richmond,

and gradually there were more and more white faces in the crowd.

Sullen, silent, staring back from windows and the tops of buildings.

The people that he had just defeated.

And Lincoln's group were expecting shouts of abuse, possibly even shots.

Nothing.

And at that moment,

it seemed as if Abraham Lincoln had won all of America back.

I can see one means at least of keeping the Ravensdale estate in the family.

What is it?

By marrying your daughter to the mortgagee.

To you?!

LAUGHTER

Ten days after Richmond, Lincoln went to the theatre in Washington.

He hadn't been keen, but his wife had begged him to come.

A night off for the hero.

Did you see him?

No, but I see him!

AUDIENCE GASPS

CHEERING

But the defeated South would inflict one last act of bloodshed.

A second-rate actor and Southern Confederate supporter

called John Wilkes Booth saw Lincoln as a tyrant.

The actor Booth was about to make his final appearance.

And he knew the reviews would be mixed.

Well, I know enough to turn you inside out,

you sockdologizing old man-trap!

LAUGHTER

GUNSHOT

GASPS

SCREAMING

Booth cried out the Latin motto of the state of Virginia.

Sic semper tyrannis!

"Thus always to tyrants."

Help me!

Help!

The North mourned an immortal political hero.

In the South, they celebrated.

One Texan newspaper professed itself "thrilled by the death of our oppressor".

The American Civil War left a bitter legacy.

In the South, burned and devastated,

the whites remained very angry about what had happened,

and black Americans faced many, many decades of grinding rural poverty,

segregation laws and lynchings for those who stepped out of line.

But the union was preserved.

And in the North, this extraordinarily industrious, vigorous economy,

now linked together by railroads, stormed ahead -

the American colossus striding towards the 20th century.

Freed of its slave economy, the United States rushed to modernise.

For the first time, Americans began to impose themselves around the world.

Already, they were looking west, across the Pacific.

Japan had deliberately cut herself off from the rest of the world

for more than 200 years,

uninterested in the industrial West.

When Japan closed her doors, the United States didn't even exist.

So when, in 1853, the American Navy turned up under Commodore Matthew Perry,

it all came as a bit of a surprise.

The Japanese had never seen anything like the American steamships.

Some thought they were "giant dragons, puffing smoke".

Commodore Matthew Perry handed over a letter from the US President

insisting that Japan open her doors.

In effect, free trade or we shoot.

Remembering what had happened to the Chinese at the hands of the British,

Japan's rulers gave way to the Americans.

Realising they needed to strengthen Japan against any further Western threats,

the Japanese government rushed to modernise and industrialise.

I'd like to show you our plans.

Their slogan was, "Catch up, overtake."

They invited thousands of Westerners to teach and give advice.

They built railroads, telegraph lines and factories.

Out went kimonos, in came business suits and top hats.

But one class of society was devastated by the arrival of the Industrial Revolution.

The samurai.

For hundreds of years,

this hereditary warrior class had dominated Japanese society.

They had special privileges - the only people allowed to fight,

the only men allowed to carry their two swords in public,

they were exempt from taxation.

But Japan had been at peace for more than 200 years.

It was 1870.

Who needed mediaeval warriors any more?

And so, piece by piece, their privileges were stripped away -

their right to carry swords went,

their income was taxed, and the army was opened up to conscripts - peasants!

By 1876, the samurai class faced abolition.

Some decided to fight back...

..and turned to one of the country's leading samurai, Saigo Takamori.

Saigo was an unlikely rebel.

To start with, he backed the reforms, including the modernisation of the army.

This was a man torn between his deep samurai ideals

and his country's need to modernise.

And it was only when his back was against the wall

that Saigo decided to fight for the past against the future.

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

A poet and a dreamer, as well as a politician,

Saigo led a rebel army of 30,000 samurai to overthrow the modernisers in Tokyo.

And so, old Japan took on new Japan.

Saigo's rebel army was composed of traditional samurai warriors.

The government's was a modern conscript army

with the latest rifles and artillery

supplied by steamships and railways.

This was only ever going to end one way.

After seven months, Saigo's thousands were reduced to just a few hundred warriors.

And now they were surrounded.

60 to 1.

HE SPEAKS JAPANESE

Saigo told his warriors to face death with honour.

This was a tragic moment in Japanese history, tearing the nation apart.

The soldiers waiting to attack Saigo's samurai hated what they were about to do.

SCREAMING

Within two hours, the Japanese army had reduced Saigo's force to just 40 samurai.

At dawn, armed only with their swords,

the last samurai walked out to face certain death.

GUNSHOTS

Halfway down the hill, Saigo was shot in the right hip.

Badly injured, Saigo died after a botched act of ritual Samurai suicide.

Japan forged ahead with its programme of modernisation...

..becoming known as "the workshop of Asia".

No country modernised as fast and successfully as Japan.

In 1905, their new navy would astonish the world

by sending the Russian high fleet to the bottom of the sea -

the first time that an Eastern country had defeated a Western nation

since the Middle Ages.

And yet Japan could never quite shake Saigo off.

After his death, he was pardoned and became a national hero.

A tragic symbol of the old Japan, of honour and self-sacrifice.

The samurai soul that was still there

below the Western uniforms and the business suits.

Japan had saved herself from becoming a victim

of the new age of industry and empire.

Other parts of the world wouldn't be so lucky.

Africa was one of the least developed areas of the planet.

But it was rich with natural resources.

And it had remained almost untouched by the West.

But in the late 19th century,

the industrialised empires of Europe were on the hunt

for new territories to explore and exploit.

In 1877, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley,

a bit of a rogue who'd fought on both sides during the American Civil War,

became the first Westerner

to chart the entire 3,000-mile course of the Congo River.

The journey took him 999 days and cost the lives of 242 men.

But it would change the way the West saw the continent.

"This river," said Stanley,

"is and will be the great highway of commerce to the heart of Africa."

News of Stanley's great discovery soon reached Europe.

And nobody was more fascinated than Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

The problem with Belgium, he grumbled,

was that it was a small country with small people.

Leopold II was in the market. He wanted to rise in the world.

He wanted to be an emperor, so he needed a colony.

And he'd gone almost everywhere trying to buy one -

the Pacific, South America, the Far East, China...

the Faroe Islands!

Nothing doing.

So, when he heard of the great wealth of Central Africa,

he could barely contain his excitement.

"We mustn't lose an opportunity," he said,

"to gain for ourselves a slice of this magnificent African cake."

Leopold persuaded Stanley to work for him in the Congo.

His job was to negotiate with the Africans

and establish a network of trading stations

along the length of the river.

Leopold called his project

the International Association of the Congo,

and he sold it as a kind of benign crusade,

bringing religion to the Africans

and freeing them from the evil Arab slave-traders.

He built this monstrous great museum in Brussels

to sell his idea to the Belgian people.

But Leopold was - how shall we put this? - lying.

He was a cynical and slippery operator.

All he wanted was money and power for himself.

And he wrote to Stanley that these treaties with the Africans

"must give us everything".

And they did.

I bring you gifts from my kingdom.

From King Leopold.

African chiefs had no idea they were signing away their land

in return for European clothing, jewellery and gin.

To prosperity. And to King Leopold.

By May 1885, Leopold was in control of an area

76 times larger than Belgium itself.

His new land had vast natural resources, including ivory, rubber,

timber and copper.

We have a deal.

He began to strip them out and export them back to Europe.

Leopold now ditched the pretence of a charity

and declared himself King Sovereign of the Congo Free State.

"Free"?

This was in fact the most extreme example

of how industrial technology could allow small numbers of Europeans

to seize other parts of the world.

A truth which led to a general rush for African land.

The main players were France,

Germany

and Britain.

But Italy and Portugal were there, too.

This became known as "the scramble for Africa".

Leopold sat back and watched the money pour in,

but his dirty little secret was about to be rumbled.

In 1901, a young shipping clerk at Antwerp noticed something odd.

The ivory and the rubber and the profits were pouring in,

but nothing was going back out again.

Nothing except guns and ammunition.

CHATTERING

The horrible truth began to emerge.

Leopold's Congo was a military regime of terror.

Africans were forced, at pain of death, to work on Leopold's plantations.

If a village refused, the military were sent in.

GUNSHOTS

Africans who resisted - and many did - were systematically murdered.

Women and children were taken as hostages,

the men were used for rifle practice,

hanged and sometimes beaten to death.

The population of the Congo halved.

It seems almost impossible to believe,

but it's now thought that 10 million people died.

The word is genocide.

Leopold denied everything.

But in March 1908, the Belgian government finally intervened

and forced him to hand over the Congo to them.

By then, it had made him a billionaire in today's money.

The worst excesses of the Belgian Congo

ended after a campaign by Christian groups,

by newspapers and outraged individuals, which was really

the first ever international human rights campaign.

But the land grab went on.

And the later Africa of failed states can be traced back, literally,

to the lines drawn on the map

by the Italians, Germans, French, British and other Europeans.

Some of the worst things that happened in modern Africa,

from the use of amputation as a punishment, or child soldiers,

also go back to this European scramble,

this European frenzy.

National competition is part of life,

but frantic competition, driven by intoxicating industrial power,

now turned violent.

In 1914, the European tribes trained their guns not on unarmed natives

but on each other.

Britain, France and Russia against Germany and Austria.

The leaders may have expected a traditional war of cavalry and glitter.

What they got was unprecedented horror.

An industrial war.

But at least it wasn't yet a world war.

America's President Woodrow Wilson was determined

to keep his country out of the fighting.

But in 1917, Germany's new Foreign Secretary

was about to change America's mind.

Arthur Zimmermann had risen fast through the Foreign Service

to become the only non-aristocrat in the German cabinet.

He was good-natured, honest and loyal.

HG SPEAKS GERMAN

He was also a firm believer in world war.

He'd helped fund Irish rebellion against Britain

and he'd tried his hand at fomenting Islamic jihad in the Middle East.

Her, Junger. Prost!

But his biggest tricks were still to come.

Zimmermann's pen never stopped scratching.

His secretary's typewriter never stopped clacking.

He had a finger in every pie.

This was the golden age of the bureaucrat.

And Arthur Zimmermann was a near-perfect example of the type.

The American ambassador in Berlin described him as

"a very jolly, large sort of German".

Zimmermann dreamed of changing the world.

And he would.

Only not quite in the way he intended.

Indeed, there is a case to be made that Arthur Zimmermann

was one of the most destructive individuals of the 20th century.

Zimmermann's opportunity to change the world came in January 1917,

when the German military elite announced a new plan for victory.

Unrestricted submarine warfare, to destroy all merchant shipping coming to Britain.

They hoped this would starve the British into submission.

This was incredibly dangerous.

Why? Because it meant sinking American ships

and almost certainly bringing the United States into the war.

And once the Americans reached Europe, Germany couldn't win.

And yet the German high command decided it was a risk worth taking.

And on February the 1st, 1917,

they announced the start of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Arthur Zimmermann set about finding a way to distract America.

He came up with quite a distraction.

HE SPEAKS GERMAN

Zimmermann's plan was to persuade Mexico to invade America with German help,

seizing back Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

HE SPEAKS GERMAN

That would distract Washington, all right.

If Arthur pulled this off, he'd become a German national hero.

Eine gute Idee.

Danke sehr, mein Herr. Danke schoen.

Zimmermann drafted a telegram outlining his plan

to the German ambassador in Mexico.

He sent it on a secure line from Berlin.

BELL RINGS

Except that the line wasn't quite as secure as Zimmermann thought.

In Room 40 at the Admiralty in London,

British Naval Intelligence intercepted and decoded Zimmermann's telegram.

By 1pm on the 24th of February, 1917,

the contents of the telegram were being presented

to the President of the United States.

President Woodrow Wilson, who'd fought so hard to keep America out of the war,

rubbed his eyes in disbelief.

Then he released the news, first to the American congressmen

and then to the press, and all hell broke loose.

Yet even then, many Americans simply didn't believe it.

It was incredible that the Germans were up to something like this.

It must be a sneaky British plot to lure America into the war.

And they weren't that gullible, they weren't going to fall for that.

Re-enter Arthur Zimmermann.

Zimmermann was invited to deny the story about his telegram.

HE ASKS QUESTION IN GERMAN

But Arthur couldn't tell a lie.

HE REPLIES IN GERMAN

Oh, yes, he said, it was all true.

Well done, Zimmermann(!)

His surprise confession finally drove America to declare war on Germany.

This was now undoubtedly a world war.

But Zimmermann didn't stop plotting.

He now turned his attention to Germany's enemy in the East, Russia.

How could he undermine them?

Zimmermann's opportunity came in February 1917,

when the desperate, downtrodden people of Russia finally revolted against the Tsar.

Zimmermann wanted to pour oil on the fire.

He needed an anti-war Russian extremist

to seize power and withdraw Russia from the war.

Zimmermann's agents knew of just such a man.

He was living quietly and modestly in exile,

amid writers and artists, in Zurich in Switzerland.

Zimmermann's plan, what he called his revolutionising plan,

meant using this man to undermine Russia's will to fight.

His name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

We know him better as Lenin.

In 1917, Lenin was leader of the Bolsheviks,

a revolutionary communist faction who wanted Russia out of the war.

Lenin was described variously as being like a plague bacillus

or poison gas.

He was so desperate to get back to Russia and try to seize power

that he took the German money and the German offer.

If he succeeded, he'd sue for peace.

And so Zimmermann organised a sealed train

to take Lenin and the rest of the Bolsheviks

right the way across Germany to Petrograd in Russia.

It was like a syringe full of poison being squirted halfway across a continent.

In October 1917, Lenin led a successful Bolshevik revolution.

In just eight months, he had been transformed from a nobody in exile

to a man on his way to leading 160 million people

in the world's first communist state.

This time, Zimmermann got exactly what he wanted.

Soviet Russia withdrew from the First World War in March 1918.

But by then, the Americans were helping the Allies to defeat Germany.

When the war came to an end in November 1918,

two new powers had been firmly established on the world stage.

One capitalist...

..one communist.

The modern world would be dominated not by empires,

but by these two mass ideologies

and the new superpowers wielding them.

So, one fairly ordinary German civil servant had acted as midwife

to the birth of the 20th century's two great superpowers.

America, innocent no longer, plunged into the quarrels of the rest of the world.

And for the Russians, the Bolshevik revolution ushered in

a terrible age of mass famine,

civil war, slave labour camps and terror.

Arthur Zimmermann.

He was sacked in 1917 and never held office again.

And he died in 1940,

just as it was starting all over again.

In the next programme, Power Age - the world at war.

Cultural revolution...

and the triumph of clever machines.

If you'd like to know a little bit more about how the past is revealed,

you can order a free booklet called How Do They Know That?

Just call:

Or go to:

and follow the links to the Open University.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd