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King Edward VII, known as Bertie, ascended the throne at the death of his mother, Queen Victoria, in 1901. Bertie turned the monarchy into a national pageant. He opened the parliament in 1902, worked hard to improve foreign relations (including the entente withFrancethat allowed for the Anglo-French alliance), and gave every encouragement to military reform. Domestically, Bertie championed tolerance by going out of his way to show that Jews and Indian princes were not, by nature, inferior to himself. Bertie's love of pageantry ensured that people noticed this attitude and British society grew more tolerant. By 1906, Bertie's health showed signs of decline while a constitutional crisis brewed. The question arose as to whether the Lords or the House of Commons should deal with financing the arms race withGermany. As the dispute flared in 1909, Bertie vacationed inFrancealthough elections were imminent. He returned to political chaos, succumbed to bronchitis, and died in the spring of 1910. At the end of the nineteenth century,Britainruled an empire that encircled the globe. However, the degree to whichBritaincontrolled the areas of the map it marked in pink or red was questionable or in decline. ExacerbatingBritain's anxiety, European nations increasingly challenged her hegemony. The most brazen was Germanyand the most worrisome wasRussia.Britainsought to pacify her challengers. She successfully formed an alliance withFrancethrough trade concessions and military agreements. The United States, clearly on its way to being a great industrial power, was pacified and war between the two nations became unthinkable if not quite impossible. Challenges in other areas of the Empire (namely, Ireland,Palestine, Africa, andIndia) were not so easily dealt with. At home, the suffragette movement had taken its demands to the streets. Through various militant displays, women publicized their demand for the right to vote. They did not win this right until 1918; New Zealandwas the first nation to grant suffrage to women in 1893, while theUnited Statesgranted the right in 1920. Trade unionists and a very strife-ridden parliament made the latter half of the first decade tumultuous. This strife would lead to a series of strikes in 1911 and 1912. Still, by the eve ofWorld War I, Britainwas the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. Since the Renaissance, wealthy Europeans and salaried intellectuals have traveled toItalyin order to regain the knowledge and riches of Roman civilization. During the eighteenth century, ItalyrivaledFranceas the necessary stop for any gentleman completing his education with a Grand Tour. This interest inItalyits ancient ruins, museums, and art treasures—continued into the nineteenth century. The strength of the British currency and the money accruing to its upper classes enabled a lively tourist trade in Italy. This is the basis for Forster'sA Room with a View but its depictions of Italians as the passionate idyllic peasants of old is false.Italyduring Forster's sojourn was caught in the throes of modernization. Officially adopting a modern parliamentary system in 1861,Italystill had to overcome centuries of international intervention, internal strife, the Catholic Church, and an underdeveloped economy. For the first fifty years, barely two percent of the population had the right to vote. However, the industrial regions in the north grew their economy at a phenomenal rate and, in southernItaly, the number of literate people began to outnumber the illiterate. By the eve of WWI,Italy's yearly steel output had gone from negligible to nearly one million metric tons and the nation was a producer of cars, typewriters, motorcycles, silk, and fertilizer. These successes concentrated in the north; many Italians from the rest of the peninsula sought opportunity elsewhere. More than half a million Italians left the country each year of the first decade of the century. Many went overseas and a majority to theUnited States. In addition to its lopsided development,Italyadopted imperial ambitions beyond its abilities. This led to the humiliating defeat of the Italian army by the Abyssinians atAdowa in 1896. Italy's policy of irredentism—a desire to control areas inhabited by people speaking the same language outside national boundaries—led it to attempt annexation of Trieste and Tripoli. Failure in these areas by 1912 added fuel to the fire that would implode as World War I. Though the term has been applied to numerous epochs and movements, as a label for a specific period it denotes the bridge from post-impressionism through cubism to surrealism (roughly 1906-1930). The avant-garde was a series of art movements whose practitioners saw themselves leading society to better and better plateaus through art. Usually this meant remaking society with socialist or Marxist doctrine. At minimum, the artist of the avant-garde saw himself as an interpreter of the place of the individual in an industrial world. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti began one such movement, futurism. Marinetti believed that industrialization was the only means forItalyto achieve its ambition to become a world power. He wantedItalyto destroy its museums and build factories in their place. He further believed that a consumerist society was the ultimate form of living. He therefore advocated a state of war (the purest state of consumption by any society) that would eventually destroy relics of the past and spawn new machines. Many adherents of futurism died during World War I and Marinetti went to work for Benito Mussolini. InEngland, the most famous avant-garde movement was the Bloomsbury Group. This group was composed of Cambridge Apostles, including Forster, who had moved toLondon. The group met alternatively at the homes of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell in the Bloomsbury district adjacent to theBritish Museum beginning in 1907. The group's early discussions centered around the agnostic ponderings of G. E. Moo re's Principia Eth-ica and the Principia Mathematica by A. N. White-head and Bertrand Russell. The group survived World War I but disintegrated by 1930.
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