What is the Contemporary Age?

What Does Contemporary age Mean

We explain what the Contemporary Age is, when it began, its characteristics and stages. Also, your most important facts.

What is the Contemporary Age?

The story is divided into several stages, of which the Contemporary Age or Era or contemporaneity is the latest, that is, is the closest Ages to the present .

It is considered that the beginnings of the Contemporary Age lie in the end of the Modern Age , that is, it begins with the Declaration of Independence of the United States in 1776 or in the French Revolution of 1789 . These events shook the political and social order of the world at the time and anticipated what was to come later. Its culmination is the present itself.

The Contemporary Age is one of the most intensely and rapidly changing the world since the origins of humanity . Already in its beginnings, in the so-called Era of Revolutions, from the end of the 18th century to the mid-19th century, a profound transformation was observed in the economic, social and political, compared to the medieval and modern heritage .

It can be said that contemporaneity is the triumph and exacerbation of many of the processes that began after the fall of the Middle Ages, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and the fall of the Old Regime, that is, the absolutism of the feudal monarchy.

Democratic and republican values were prioritized , at least in the West, as the aspiration of the peoples. This New Regime was born in the heat of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism .

However, the contemporary age also presents its challenges and difficulties: socioeconomic inequality, the rise of totalitarianism , the automation of work and the environmental catastrophe are just some of the inconveniences that afflict society . Humanity for the first time is faced with the possibility of causing its own extinction as a species .

See also: Ancient age

Characteristics of the Contemporary Age

The Contemporary Age is one of the most complex to describe, given the enormous volume of changes that have occurred in less than three centuries. Therefore, it is preferable to summarize its characteristics very roughly, according to your specific area of interest:

• Sociopolitical characteristics. What the Modern Age predicted, in the Contemporary Age had its place from the beginning: the fall of the traditional powers , associated with the nobility and the clergy, who controlled the world since the Middle Ages , in favor of the newly created middle class, lacking blue blood but possessing capital . Thus, the bourgeoisie displaced its traditional rivals, taking over the leadership of the destinies of humanity and establishing its values of freedom , equality , fraternity and property . Thus, the values of the French Enlightenment engendered Liberalism, and the possibility of following a republican and democratic agenda, with separation of powers and legal equality, although not socioeconomic. Thus was born the society of social classes , separated no longer by their birth but by their ability to consume and generate money: capitalism. With it arose a new historical rival of the ruling bourgeoisie: the proletariat, the result of the transformation of the medieval peasantry into urban workers .
• Geopolitical characteristics . With the fall of the Old Regime, a new matrix of global powers slowly emerged, as military, economic and commercial competition became internationalized. The great colonial extensions of the European empires saw their decline in contemporaneity, finally succumbing to wars of independence. In other cases, they agreed to a consensual release when it was more convenient for them to trade with their former colonies than to continue managing them. This led to a complex process of decolonization throughout the world, but not before going through the most cruel and destructive conflicts that humanity has had in its history, given the new technological level reached. The First and Second World Warsshook the foundations of the world and toppled the old powers, leaving the United States and the Soviet Union in a "Cold War" for the world, until the latter collapsed in 1991. New poles of power emerged after what seemed the total victory of Western capitalism, with the European Union and especially with China, commercial rivals of the US today.
• Economic characteristics. Capitalism triumphs and consolidates during the Contemporary Age. It faces a new rival born of industrial society itself: Communism or Socialism , conceived as of the working class. Two poles were formed, that of a liberal consumer society, organized around the notion of the free market and its supposed self-regulation (the “invisible hand of the market”), and that of a society with a centrally planned economy , that is, in the that the stateit imposes the order that the market lacks. Both models stress the different stages of the contemporary age, especially in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the rest, the contemporary economy privileges the urban and the factory as the place where production occurs, leaving the generation of raw material in the hands of less developed countries. At the end of the 20th century, the integration of markets and the emergence of a globalized economy were advancing, which allowed the economic interests of one hemisphere to invest without problem in the other.
• Cultural characteristics. The culture flourished and diversified tremendously in the Contemporary Age, hand of newly acquired human freedoms. For the most part he was also freed from the moral yokes of religion , greatly weakened after the evolutionary work of Charles Darwin. The separation between Church and State occurred entirely in most of the world, and bourgeois art abandoned the academic or religious spheres, to become part of the consumer society . This meant coming into contact with the new forms of mass communications (press, radio, television , Internet) and subjected them to a deep identity crisis, from which many have not yet managed to overcome. Furthermore, contemporary philosophy went through periods of nihilism and pessimism, especially after the World Wars. In the case of the West, there was talk of an existential impasse. Subsequently, the arrival of global society was responsible for spreading new Eastern philosophies and trends to a Western public eager for new ways of thinking.
• Technological characteristics . No other period in human history represented a technological race as accelerated and unbridled as contemporaneity, especially the final stages of the 19th and 20th centuries. The Industrial Revolution supposed the automation of work and therefore the maximization of its effectiveness, being able to produce at massive levels and thus allow the emergence of the consumer society. The enormous advances in medicine and pharmacology extended the life expectancy of the human being to its greatest historical limits. The appearance of the computer gave us the most powerful tool ever achieved, thanks to which telecommunicationscould multiply and towards the end of the 20th century the so-called information society took place . Likewise, land , air and maritime displacement were only the prelude to the exploration of outer space, but all with the terrible cost of sustained environmental damage , the effects of which were only beginning to be perceived at the beginning of the 21st century.

Stages of the Contemporary Age

Broadly speaking, contemporaneity could be divided into the following stages:

• The "Era of the Revolution" (1776-1848). A time of drastic change . At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the technical and industry were prepared to take a big leap forward. The French Revolution and the Independence Revolutions occurred in Latin America , as well as other cycles of violent change throughout the world.
• The Age of Capital or Empires (1848-1914). With capitalism established as a system, the great European powers proceeded to divide the world, in search of raw material with which to feed their incipient industrial machinery. Within this framework, the philosophy of “positivism” prevailed, which posits technical and scientific progress as the way of salvation for humanity.
• The Crisis of the Thirties (1914-1945). Colonial aspirations and rivalry between the powers, within the framework of the nascent mass society, led to times of economic crisis and enormous conflict. The First World War (1914-1918) took place, then the Great Depression (also called the Crisis of 29 or 30 years) and the rise of totalitarianism, especially in the eastern world. Then the Second World War (1939-1945) occurred, with its concentration camps and its two atomic bombs . Humanity plunged into discouragement.
• La Cortina de Hierro (1945-1991). En este lapso se produjo una extensa serie de conflictos sangrientos durante la Guerra Fría (1945-1991), azuzados por los bandos enfrentados: la URSS y los EEUU. Entre ellos hubo gigantescas masacres en Vietnam, Camboya, Centroamérica, el Cono Sur Americano, etc., Era un enfrentamiento pasivo entre potencias nucleares, que hizo pensar a muchos en el posible fin de la humanidad.
• El mundo globalizado (1991-en adelante). Tras la caída de la URSS y del Muro de Berlín, se proclamó la victoria del capitalismo sobre sus alternativas. El mundo marchó hacia una economía que no conociera fronteras geográficas, de la mano de la innovación tecnológica y científica. Sin embargo, este mismo proceso supuso la aparición de crisis migratorias y atentados terroristas, fruto de las tensiones heredadas del siglo anterior.

Hechos más importantes de la Edad Contemporánea

Un recuento de los hechos más significativos de la Edad contemporánea incluiría más o menos los siguientes:

• 1776 – Independencia de los Estados Unidos.
• 1789 – Estallido de la Revolución Francesa.
• 1801 – Inicio de las Guerras Napoleónicas.
• 1810 – Inicio de los procesos independentistas latinoamericanos.
• 1815 – Derrota de Napoleón Bonaparte en Waterloo.
• 1820 – Revolución de 1820 en Europa.
• 1830 – Revolución de 1830.
• 1833 – Abolición de la esclavitud en el Reino Unido.
• 1835 – Charles Darwin llega a las Islas Galápagos, gracias a lo cual escribió El origen de las especies .
• 1839 – Ocurre la primera Guerra del Opio entre China e Inglaterra, en el marco de las políticas coloniales británicas en Asia.
• 1848 – La Primavera de los Pueblos pone fin a la Europa de la Restauración.
• 1853 – Inicia la Guerra de Crimea.
• 1861 – Inicia la Guerra de Secesión estadounidense.
• 1864 – Louis Pasteur y Claude Bernard descubren la pasteurización.
• 1867 – Karl Marx publica El capital .
• 1868 – Inicia la era Meiji en Japón.
• 1870 – Fin de la reunificación italiana. Inicia la Guerra Franco-Prusiana.
• 1871 – Bismark reunifica a Alemania y crea el Imperio Alemán.
• 1880 – Inicia el reparto de África por parte de las potencias europeas.
• 1889 – Segunda Internacional Comunista.
• 1893 – Nueva Zelanda aprueba el voto femenino.
• 1905 - Albert Einstein publishes his Special Theory of Relativity and Sigmund Freud his Theory of Sexuality.
• 1910 - The Mexican Revolution begins.
• 1914 - The First World War begins.
• 1915 - The Armenian genocide occurs.
• 1917 - The Russian Revolution begins that deposes Tsarism.
• 1919 - The Treaty of Versailles is signed.
• 1922 - Creation of the USSR.
• 1928 - Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin, the first antibiotic in history.
• 1929 - The Crisis of 29 or "Great Depression" begins.
• 1931 - Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
• 1933 - Adolf Hitler comes to power in Germany.
• 1936 - The Spanish Civil War breaks out.
• 1939 - The Third German Reich invades Poland, formally initiating World War II.
• 1940 - Russian dissident Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico.
• 1945 - The United States drops two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan. Thus ends the Second World War.
• 1947 - The Marshall Plan for US aid for the reconstruction of Europe is launched.
• 1948 - Mahatma Ghandi is assassinated. The UN proclaims the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• 1949 - The Chinese Communist Revolution occurs, ending the long Chinese Civil War that began in 1927.
• 1950 - The Korean War breaks out.
• 1953 - Watson and Crick propose the double helix model of DNA.
• 1955 - Signature of the Warsaw Pact between the countries of the socialist bloc.
• 1957 - The USSR puts the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit.
• 1959 - Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution triumphs.
• 1960 - The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.
• 1961 - The Portuguese Colonial War begins in Angola and Mozambique.
• 1969 - The human being reaches the Moon with the American Apollo 11 mission.
• 1973 - General Augusto Pinochet gives a bloody coup against Salvador Allende in Chile.
• 1975 - The Vietnam War ends with the defeat of the United States.
• 1978 - The Iranian Revolution breaks out.
• 1979 - Cambodia is invaded by the Vietnamese army, ending the Cambodian Genocide.
• 1980 - The Iran-Iraq War begins.
• 1981 - The IBM PC, the most popular home computer in history, is released.
• 1989 - The Berlin Wall falls. In China there is the Tian'anmen Massacre.
• 1991 - The Internet World Wide Web is publicly announced. That same year, the Soviet Union collapsed.
• 1996 - “Dolly” is born, the world's first clonic sheep.
• 2001 - The terrorist group Al-Qaeda carries out an attack on the Twin Towers in New York, USA.
• 2008 - The Great Recession occurs after the bursting of the financial-real estate bubble.
• 2009 - Barack Obama is the first black president of the United States.
• 2016 - The complete sequence of the human genome is achieved.
• 2019 - Scientists at the Event Horizon Telescope take the first real photo of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87.