Part Five: The European Moment in World History &

Part Six: The Most Recent Century

Hollis Heydenreich

824918

Professor Argüello

World History 5

Chapter 17: Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes

Emily Davison• Emily Davison was a British women’s suffragette

activist who threw herself in front of King George V’s horse during a race at the Epsom Derby in Britain during the year 1913. She was trampled to death, although her actual intentions for stepping onto the track are debatable. Some say she was trying to place a WSPU flag onto the horse, others say she was simply trying to cross the track while carrying the banner, assuming all the horses had passed, and some reported that she had tried to pull the King’s horse down. Regardless of her actual intent, Emily died four days later due to a fractured skull and internal injuries caused by the accident. Davison’s action potentially harmed the suffragette cause rather than providing progress, due to the fact that the Monarchy was highly respected in Britain at the time.

• (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Davison)

Chapter 17: Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)• French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later named

Haiti. • Regarded as richest colony in the world at the time,

possessing 8,000 plantations. During the late 18th century, Haiti produced some 40% of the world’s sugar and around half of its coffee.

• The population consisted of: 500,000 slaves, 40,000 whites (divided by the well-to-do plantation owners, merchants, and lawyers), and the “petits blancs” (poor whites). The rest of the social group was made up of 30,000 “gens de couleur libres”, or free people of color.

• Given its mass inequalities and rampant exploitation, the colony was destined to explode.

• The principals of the revolution meant different things to different people. The grand blancs suggested greater autonomy for the colony as well as fewer economic restrictions on trade, but they resented the demands from the petits blancs, who sought equality for all whites. However, both groups of whites were opposed to the idea of freeing the people of color.

• The slave revolt began in 1791, where the slaves burned 1,000 plantations and killed hundreds of whites and mixed race people. Led by Toussaint Louverture, a former slave himself, the power gravitated toward the slaves in the 1790’s.

• The slaves overcame international resistance and foreign powers, and even managed to defeat an attempt by French Napoleon to reestablish control.

Chapter 17: Atlantic Revolutions and Their EchoesThe Creation of the European “Nation”

• Europe’s modern transformation provided the idea of nationalism.

• Printing and publishing industries standardized a variety of dialects into a much smaller number of European languages. This provided the reading public to consider themselves members of a common linguistic group.

• This provoked political and cultural leaders to articulate an appealing idea of their specific nations, and established a growing circle of people responsive to such ideas.

• This constructed the idea of “nation”.• It was the reawakening of previous

linguistic and cultural identities, and focused on the folktales, historical experiences, songs, dances, and collective memories of earlier cultures.

Chapter 18: Revolutions of IndustrializationThe First Industrial Society

• Wherever it spread, the Industrial Revolution produced, within less than a century, an economic miracle, especially in comparison to earlier forms of technology.

• Most of the dramatic increase in production was within mining, manufacturing, and services.

• This significantly decreased the importance of agriculture.

• Social life began to drastically change. “Daily life changed more than it had in the 7,000 years before,” wrote one prominent historian.

• Great Britain had the most obviously visible revolutionary effects of industrialization. They became the world’s first industrialized society.

• Industrialization both destroyed and created. For some, it was a very devastating process.

Chapter 18: Revolutions of Industrialization Urban Wealth

• As urban wealth became more prominent, landed aristocrats had to make way for the up-and-coming businessman, manufactures, and bankers who had discovered new success from the Industrial Revolution.

• The aristocracy’s declining political influence was demonstrated in the 1840’s when high tariffs on foreign agricultural imports, designed to protect the interests of British landowners, were finally put to an end.

• By the end of the century, landowners discontinued to be the basis of wealth, and businessmen, rather than aristocrats, led the major political parties.

Chapter 18: Revolutions of Industrialization The Laboring Class

• Manual workers in the mines, ports, factories, construction sites, workshops, and farms made up some 70% of Britain’s nineteenth-century population.

• Although their conditions varied completely and altered over time, the laboring classes were the people who suffered most and gained least from the monumental changes of the Industrial Revolution.

• Their efforts to accommodate, resist, protest, and change such conditions shaped much of the first industrial society.

• Long hours, low wages, and child labor were typical working conditions.

• Unlike those within the middle-class, many girls and young women of the laboring class worked in mills as domestic servants. Within the home, many working-class women earned money by taking in boarders, sewing, and washing clothes.

Chapter 19: Internal Troubles, External ThreatsOttoman Empire

• The Islamic world represented a very successful civilization that felt little need to learn from the “barbarians” of the West.

• That was, until it came in contact with a determined Europe in the nineteenth century.

• Islamic civilization had been a near neighbor to Europe for some 1,000 years.

• Most prominent state was the Ottoman Empire.

• Global power took hold of the Ottoman Empire, and although efforts were made to take on “defensive modernization” therefore strengthening their states while keeping their prior identity, some held tightly to old traditions, while others welcomed new ideas associated with modernity.

Chapter 19: Internal Troubles, External ThreatsRape of Najjing

• Japanese atrocity committed against China during World War II.

• Witnessed the killing of some 200,000 people, most civilians, and the rape of many women.

• “Najjing city was soaked with bloodshed and piles of bodies everywhere,” stated one survivor of said events.

• From the Chinese point of view, Japanese history text books had minimized the severity of the horrible events.

Chapter 19: Internal Troubles, External ThreatsEuropean “Science”

• In the nineteenth century, Europeans used science to support their racial preferences and prejudices.

• Phrenologists, craniologists, and occasionally physicians used scientific methods to determine the size of human skulls.

• To no surprise, they “concluded” that the size and shape of white people’s skulls were larger than those of the black’s, and therefore the white people were more advanced.

• A hierarchy of races was created with the whites atop, and the “less developed” beneath them.

• Fears that contact with “inferior” people threatened the well-being and even the biological future of those who were “superior” to them.

Chapter 20: Colonial EncountersCooperation and Rebellion

• Although violence was a dominant feature within colonial life, both during conquest and after, a plethora of groups and many individual people willingly cooperated with colonial authorities to their own advantage.

• Many men found employment, status, and safety and security in European-led armed forces.

Chapter 20: Colonial EncountersThe Indian Rebellion

• The Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858 was provoked by the existence of cartridges smeared with animal fat from cows and pigs, provided by the colony’s military forces.

• Cows are animals very sacred to Hindus, while pigs deeply offensive to Muslims, and both groups viewed the situation as a scheme to leave them violated, forcing them to covert to Christianity.

• Resistance among Indian troops in Bengal motioned rebellion, which soon spread to other regions of the colony and other social groups.

• India was in chaos. • Rebel leaders described their movement as an

effort to bring back the once Mughal Empire, appealing to a crowd containing strong resentments towards Britain.

• By 1858, the rebellion created diversity within the colonial India, as well as wore away at British endurance, those of which had betrayed their trust.

• This caused the British to be more cautious about attempting to alter Indian society due to worry of igniting another rebellion.

• As a result, this put an end to the era of British East Indian Company rule in the subcontinent.

Chapter 20: Colonial EncountersBelieving and Belonging

• The racism, social and economical upheavals, and exposure to European culture as a result of colonial ruling greatly effected cultural change within Asia and African societies.

• Adjusting to these changes caused many colonized people to change their views and beliefs about themselves as well as their communities.

• The transformations occurring within the colonial era created substantial and quick changes within people’s beliefs, as well as in how they viewed their societies. Those transformed identities continued to grow long after European rule was dismissed.

Chapter 21: The Collapse and Recovery of Europe

Christmas Truce of 1914

• British and German soldiers, complete enemies of World War I, briefly joined, exchanged gifts, and played football in the “no-man’s land” that existed between their entrenchments in Belgium.

Chapter 21: The Collapse and Recovery of Europe

The Treaty of Versailles • The Treaty of Versailles proved to have

created conditions that provoked a second world war only twenty years after its prior.

• Within the treaty, the Germans lost their colonial empire, as well as 15% of their European territory.

• Germany was forced to pay heavy dues to the “winners”.

• Germany’s military forces were greatly restricted.

• Germany was forced to be held accountable for the outbreak of the war.

• All of these factors caused Germany to hold great resentment.

Chapter 21: The Collapse and Recovery of Europe

Adolf Hitler• One of Germany’s many disenchanted soldiers. • Stated in 1922: “It cannot be that two million

Germans should have fallen in vain… No, we do not pardon, we demand- Vengeance.”

• The Nazi party, which took shape under Germany’s expression of European fascism, was lead by Adolf Hitler.

• Extreme nationalism, supported and used violence as a political tool, single-party dictatorship, opposed to the idea of parliamentary democracy, despised communism, and viewed war as a positive experience.

• The Nazi party, under Hitler’s leadership, represented a message of intense German nationalism and racial superiority, hatred towards the Jewish people, did not support communism, was strongly strong motivated to bounce back from the humiliating requirements of the Treaty of Versailles, and a willingness to decisively take on the country’s economic problems.

• Once in power, Hitler quickly got rid of all other political parties, cut out labor unions, arrested thousands of opposing people, controlled the media, and in general, promoted himself to controlling police power over the society.

Chapter 22: The Rise and Fall of World Communism

The Marriage Law of 1950• Although Communist, China

released The Marriage Law of 1950, which was a direct attack on Confucian traditions.

• Created free choice in marriage, the option to choose divorce (with relatively easy conditions), the removal of child marriage, permission for widows to remarry, and equality in regards to property rights for women.

Chapter 22: The Rise and Fall of World CommunismThe Cold War

• The most agonized battle of the cold war era was the one that never actually happened. This took place in Cuba.

• When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, his nationalization of American assets created great U.S. hostility as well as efforts to overthrow his regime.

• Such pressure only pushed this revolutionary nationalist closer to the Soviet Union, and over time he began to think of himself and his revolution as Marxist.

• In fear of losing their newfound Caribbean ally to American aggression, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev secretly distributed nuclear-tipped Soviet missiles to Cuba, believing that this would avert further U.S. action against Castro.

• In October 1962, when the missiles were discovered, the world waited for thirteen days as American forces surrounded the island and prepared for invasion.

• A nuclear exchange between superpowers seemed inevitable, but the situation was avoided due to a compromise made between Khrushchev and U.S. president John F. Kennedy.

• Under the conditions of said compromise, the Soviets removed their missiles from Cuba in return for an agreement from the Americans not to invade the island.

Chapter 22: The Rise and Fall of World Communism

Superpower of the West• World War II and the cold war left

the United States as a global superpower, taking on a role that has been compared to that of Great Britain within the nineteenth century.

• Much of that effort was impacted by the expected demands of the cold war, during which the United States led the Western effort to restrict a worldwide communist movement that seemed to be on the move.

• A number of global alliances alongside military bases were intended to create a barrier against further communist movement.

Chapter 23: Independence and Development in the Global SouthNelson Mandela

• The tedious struggle against white domination in South Africa was put to an end in April 1994, when the country had its first democratic, nonracial election.

• Log time political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, a symbol of said triumph, became head of the African National Congress, and the country’s first black African president.

• “During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the idea of a democratic and free society in which all persons life together in harmony and with equal opportunity. It is an idea which I hope to life for and to achieve. But, if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”-Nelson Mandela.

Chapter 23: Independence and Development in the Global SouthToward Freedom

• Colonial empires in Africa and Asia appeared as never-changing features of the world’s political features in the year 1900.

• Prior to the 20th century, they were gone.

• The first breakthrough occurred in Asia as well as within the Middle East in the late 1940’s, when India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel reached their independence.

• From the mid-1950’s though the 1970’s, African independence was achieved.

• Colony after colony began to break through, resulting in more than 50, and had been viewed as “the bright light of freedom.”

Chapter 23: Independence and Development in the Global South

Economic Development• Within the Global South, everyone

recognized that poverty was no longer inevitable, and that one could absolutely improve their living conditions for everyday life.

• Everyone’s main goal was: economic development.

• Now existing all over the planet, these ideas became universally accepted.

• Economic development was a central promise of all independent struggles, and it became the standard by which people began to judge the authenticity of their governments.

Chapter 24: Accelerating Global InteractionBarbie VS Sara and Dara

• “I think every Barbie doll is more harmful than an American missile,” stated Iranian toy seller Masoumeh Rahimi in early 2002.

• To Rahimi, Barbie’s skimpy clothing and figure, paired with her relationship with Ken, her longtime unmarried companion, were “foreign to Iran’s culture.” Therefore, she was pleased to welcome the arrival of Sara and Dara, two Iranian Muslim dolls meant to create a better influence than that which Barbie established.

• Sara and her brother Dara represented two 8-year-old twins. Sara was dressed in a headscarf to cover her hair in modest Muslim fashion, as well as a full-length white chador, covering her from head to toe.

• They were meant to help each other solve problems, while seeking support from their loving parents.

Chapter 24: Accelerating Global Interaction

• On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by Islamic militants.

• As a result, the U.S. first attacked Afghanistan in 2001, where the al-Qaeda instigators had been sheltered, followed by the attack against Iraq in 2003, where Saddam Hussein had supposedly been developing weapons of mass destruction.

• Even though the Afghan and Iraqi regimes were quickly defeated, creating lasting peace and fixing what had been damaged provided a very difficult task.

• The United States found itself in a global struggle- an effort to restrict Islamic terrorism.

Chapter 24: Accelerating Global InteractionGreen and Global

• Environmentalism began in the nineteenth century .

• Romantic poets, such as William Blake and William Wordsworth emphasized on the industrial era’s “dark satanic mills,” which inflicted danger on the “green and pleasant land” of a previous England.

• “Scientific management” of nature represented elements of environmental awareness.

• The “wilderness idea” aimed to preserve areas of which had been untouched by humans.

• However, it wasn’t until the second half of the twentieth century that environmentalism was considered a worldwide idea.