Despite the high aspirations of its advocates, democracy gained ground only slowly over the course of the nineteenth century. For example, the 1848 liberal revolutions in Europe mostly failed, and many of the reforms of Tsar Alexander II in Russia were undone by his successors.[193] In 1900 just 3 percent of the world’s population lived in what we would currently consider democracies, as even the United States still denied women the right to vote and enforced segregation against African Americans. By 1922, in the aftermath of World War I, that had climbed to 19 percent.[194]
