Preface

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About *World History*

*World History* is designed to support both semesters of the world history course offered at both two-year and four-year institutions. Serving a student base of both majors and non-majors in the field, as well as an institutional variation in requirements of one or two semesters depending on the plan of study, the course introduces students to a global perspective of history conveyed within an engaging narrative. Concepts and assessments are presented in ways to help students think critically about the issues they encounter so they can broaden their perspective of global history and how the topics studied apply to their current life as citizens of the world.

Pedagogical Foundation

Answers to Questions in the Book

The end-of-chapter Review, Check Your Understanding, and Reflection Questions are intended for homework assignments or classroom discussion; thus, student-facing answers are not provided in the book. Answers and sample answers are provided in the Instructor Answer Guide, for instructors to share with students at their discretion, as is standard for such resources.

About the Authors

Additional Resources

Connections Across Continents, 1500–1800

Understanding the Past

Introduction

Developing a Global Perspective

World History as Preparation for Life After College

History is more than a series of names and dates; those are simply its building blocks, the pieces necessary for completing the whole picture. History is a story, the human story, that connects us both to each other and to the generations that lived before us. And today we study history in a way that grounds students in this shared past while also preparing them for their futures. The liberal arts are intended to help students find fulfillment, to better themselves and their communities through meaningful self-reflection and development. But they have also always prepared students to enter the workplace by honing career skills. To say that a world history class prepares students for the workplace is simply to acknowledge what has always been true.

World History and Global Citizenship

The study of world history recognizes the integrated nature of modern life and prepares students for diverse, global workplaces. Knowing about the world will prepare you to be a global citizen, someone who may reside in only one nation but who self-identifies as part of the larger world community. Issues in need of solutions, like climate change, social justice, and human rights, are global in scale. You must know the world to be the change it needs. How do you fit in the global environment? What is your story, and how is it linked to that of others?

Features of This Textbook

This text is a great place to begin your journey into the world’s past. It has several features that will help you understand the history of world civilizations from the fifteenth century and the beginning of the early modern period until today. For the most part, it adopts a traditional chronological approach, studying events in roughly the order in which they took place. The first few chapters will explore changes that took place in particular regions of the world in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. In Exchange in East Asia and the Indian Ocean, you will learn about the civilizations that were connected through Indian and Pacific Ocean trade—India, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Japan. Early Modern Africa and the Wider World studies the civilizations of West and East Africa. The Islamic World explores two great Islamic empires, the Ottoman and the Safavid, in southwest Asia, which we commonly call the Middle East. Beginning with Foundations of the Atlantic World, the chapters cover events that integrated the world’s different regions, such as colonization, global trade, political revolutions, and wars and intellectual movements like the Enlightenment.

Primary Sources

Learning to Evaluate Documents and Images

There are two main kinds of historical sources, primary and secondary. A primary source is a gateway to the past because it is an object or document that comes directly from the time period to which it refers. Primary sources might be government documents, menus from restaurants, diaries, letters, musical instruments, photographs, portraits drawn from life, songs, and so on. If a historian is looking at Ancient Egypt, a statue of a pharaoh is a primary source for that time period, as are hieroglyphs that tell of the pharaoh’s reign. Primary sources, when we have them, are considered more valuable than other sources because they are as close in time as we can get to the events being studied. Think, for example, of a court trial: The ideal is to have the trial quickly so that witness testimony is fresher and therefore more reliable. With the passage of time, people can forget, they might subconsciously add or take away parts of a memory, and they may be influenced to interpret events differently.

Documentary Sources: Competing Narratives

Textual, or written, primary sources are considered the best possible resource for historians. They tend to offer both far more context and far more information than other types of sources, and sometimes clues about the writer’s intent. But even they must be approached with method and scrutiny. We must evaluate the author, audience, intent, and context in order to accurately interpret a primary source document. Some questions you might ask about the author include the following: Who wrote the piece and what is their background? What was important to the author? Why might the author have written what they did? In some cases, the answers will be fairly obvious. In others, a deeper inspection might reveal hidden motives.

Textual Sources: The Importance of Language

The different types of language used in a source are clues to its interpretation. Linguists call the use of language rhetoric. Rhetorical choices, decisions about the way words are used and put together, are often deliberate and intended to achieve a certain outcome. For example, think about the way you talk to a professor versus the way you talk to a friend. We must closely examine the rhetorical choices in any primary document to correctly interpret it. To practice this skill, consider the 1887 speech given by Senator George G. Vest, a Democrat from Missouri, regarding whether women in the United States should be given the right to vote in [link] and the guiding questions that follow.

Hidden in History

Historians begin their work with a research question and seek to find the sources necessary to build an authentic narrative that answers it. One challenge is that written sources are undeniably valuable but often leave out important details. For example, many speak only of the lives of elites. It is not terribly difficult to find information about kings, queens, and other rulers of the past, but what of their families? Their servants? What of the ordinary people who lived under their rule?

Causation and Interpretation in History

Levels of Causation

In their quest for the why of an event, historians look at both the immediate and the long-term circumstances of that event. Not all causes are equally significant; we need to rank them in importance. Let us begin with a thought exercise. At this moment in your history, you are reading this textbook. Why? Perhaps you would say, “Because the instructor told me to, and it will be on the test.” Certainly that is a valid reason. But if you think a bit more deeply, you might also say, “I want to do well in my education so I can be successful.” And at an even deeper level, “Society tells me that education is necessary to realize my full potential, find fulfillment, and participate in the community.”

Interpretation in History

Hand in hand with bringing causation to light is discovering what informed the choices people made in the past. What makes people act as they do? For much of history, we found the answer in the actions of elites—tsars, sultans, kings, and queens. The first historians largely concerned themselves with the study of wars and rulers, in accordance with the great man theory of history that credits leaders and heroes with triggering history’s pivotal events. Although these historians gave some attention to historical detail, there was also an equal measure of bravado, exaggeration, and political spin in their work. This seemed reasonable in a world where the king’s choice became everyone’s choice and where sources rarely spoke about anyone other than noble lords and ladies. That this type of history remained the norm for so long was also a function of who was writing it.

Exchange in East Asia and the Indian Ocean

Introduction

India and International Connections

The Mughal Empire

Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur had always dreamed of founding a great empire. His father, the ruler of a small central Asian state named Fergana in what is now Uzbekistan, was a descendant of the famous conqueror Timur. His mother came from the family of the Mongol leader Chinggis Khan. In 1494, at the age of eleven, Babur became ruler of Fergana following his father’s unexpected death, and he set himself the task of gaining control of all the lands that had once fallen to his illustrious ancestor Timur. In 1504, he made a bold move. Striking out across the Hindu Kush mountains accompanied only by his family and two hundred fighting men, he conquered the city of Kabul in Afghanistan. In 1526, using tactics he had learned from the Persians, with whom he had allied in the past, including the use of artillery, Babur defeated the much larger army of the Delhi Sultanate, a Muslim state in northern India, and established the Mughal (the Persian pronunciation of Mongol) Empire.

The Sultanate of Gujarat

Despite their power, the Mughals never controlled all of India, and several areas remained relatively free of their dominance. In the sixteenth century, one such area, the Sultanate of Gujarat on the northwestern coast of India, was an important center of Indian Ocean trade. Gujarat was located on the Arabian Sea, close to Persia and the Arabian Peninsula ([link]). From May through September monsoon winds blew, and the resulting ocean currents pushed sailing ships from East Africa and Arabia in the direction of Gujarat and other spots on the western coast of India, such as the province of Kerala to the south. In the winter months, the monsoon winds and currents reversed, helping sailors return home. In the period between these changes brought by the monsoons, foreign sailors and merchants made their home on India’s western coast, and thriving commercial hubs developed with a year-round population of both Indians and non-Indians.

The Rise of the Maratha Empire

Aurangzeb I was the last of the exceptional Mughal rulers in India. In 1658, he seized control of the Mughal throne and set about attempting to conquer rulers of states on the Deccan Plateau in southcentral India. He also led an Islamic revival in the Mughal domains. A pious man who frequently stopped in the midst of battle to perform the required daily prayers, Aurangzeb sought to eliminate all non-Islamic practices from his court. He refused to hunt, which had been a traditional pastime of Mughal rulers, and did not listen to music, although members of his court continued to do so. He eliminated the debates of scholars of different religions that his predecessors had sponsored, as well as other practices such as weighing himself against an equivalent amount of gold on the anniversaries of his birth and coronation, because he considered it an inappropriate display of excess. Aurangzeb patronized Muslim scholars and had them compile a collection of Islamic law written in the Persian language.

European Colonialism

In 1488, a Portuguese ship’s captain, Bartolomeu Dias, had sailed around the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa, but his restless crew made him turn back before he could further explore the Indian Ocean. Dias was one of many Portuguese explorers who had ventured out into the Atlantic Ocean in the fifteenth century following Portugal’s capture of the Muslim port of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast in 1415. Ceuta lay at the end of caravan routes that brought the gold of West Africa across the Sahara Desert. After he assumed the throne in 1433, King Edward of Portugal granted to his younger brother Henry (nicknamed “the Navigator” by historians in the nineteenth century) the right to authorize exploration south of Cape Bojador on the northwest coast of Morocco. Edward also gave Henry the rights to any profits derived from trade with regions that these explorers discovered.

The Malacca Sultanate

The Rise of the Malacca Sultanate

When the remnants of the Srivijaya Empire on the island of Sumatra were destroyed by the Majapahit Empire in the thirteenth century, a refugee named Sang Nila Utama, who claimed to be a descendant of Alexander the Great, founded the Kingdom of Singapura on the island of Singapore. Singapura developed into a prosperous center of trade. However, its wealth led to attacks by both the Majapahit and the Ayutthaya Kingdom in Siam (now Thailand). In 1398, Singapura too was destroyed, and Parameswara, its last king and a prince of the Srivijaya Empire, fled with his followers. He made his way to a fishing village at the mouth of the Malacca River on the Malay Peninsula that belonged to a tribe called the Orang Laut (“sea people”). The Orang Laut had already given refuge to others fleeing from Majapahit, and a mixed population of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims had taken up residence there. Parameswara, supposedly inspired by the courage of a small deer that did not fear his hunting dogs, decided this was the spot on which to build a new kingdom.

European Malacca

In 1509, a Portuguese fleet arrived in Malacca, bringing Diogo Lopes de Sequeira with orders from the king of Portugal to establish trade with Malacca, which would allow Portugal to replace Venice as the center of the spice trade in Europe. According to Tomé Pires, the apothecary to the king of Portugal who traveled to Southeast Asia in search of spices, “Whoever is Lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.” The reigning sultan Mahmud Shah and others at his court were intrigued by the possibility of becoming trading partners with the Portuguese and possibly putting Portugal’s warships to use against rival kingdoms, as some Indian rulers had done. Many Indian Muslims in Malacca, however, especially Gujaratis, were aware of Portuguese attacks on Muslim merchants in India and opposed any dealings with the Europeans. Initially, Mahmud Shah gave the Portuguese permission to establish a factory (a trading post), but then, on the advice of Indian and Javanese Muslim merchants, he sent ships to attack them in 1510. Sequeira and his ships managed to escape, but several Portuguese were taken captive.

Exchange in East Asia

Japan

In the 1400s, Japan was locked in what seemed to be unending internal strife. The Ashikaga shoguns (military overlords) who supposedly ruled the country were too weak to prevent their vassals from fighting one another or to deal with pirate bands that attacked the coasts of Japan, Korea, and China ([link]). Powerful samurai began to style themselves *daimyos* (“great lords”) and ruled their territories as if they were independent kingdoms; they imposed their own laws, collected tolls from those who entered, and recruited warriors loyal only to them, instead of to the shogun or the emperor. From this period of chaos emerged a succession of three powerful samurai who came to be known as “the three unifiers.” Beginning in the 1560s, Oda Nobunaga began to unite Japan under his rule. He was succeeded by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu. These men ended the incessant violence, united Japan under a strong central government, and defined the relationship their nation had with the West.

China’s Dynastic Exchanges

Japan was not the only nation that turned inward in the seventeenth century. China did so as well when the Hongwu emperor, the first Ming dynasty emperor, attempted to reverse the effects of foreign occupation after defeating the Mongols in 1368. To prevent the dangerous effect of outside ideas and potential challenges to his rule, Hongwu decided that Chinese contact with foreign lands would consist primarily of visits by vassals from tributary states. By limiting trade to the exchange of tribute goods, China also hoped to pressure other nations, which greatly desired its products, to accede to its demands. One of the strongest of these demands was that the Ashikaga shoguns prevent Japanese pirates from preying on China and its vassal state of Korea, which the Japanese rulers were unable to do. In 1371, all private foreign trade was forbidden. Several years later, all foreign trade officially came to an end when the Maritime Trade Intendancies’ offices in the port cities of Ningbo, Guangzhou, and Quanzhou, through which all tribute goods were to flow, were closed. Harbors were filled with rocks and wooden stakes to prevent ships from using them. Ships were destroyed or left to rot in their docks. A shore patrol was instituted to catch anyone attempting to engage in trade. Though the punishment was death, smugglers widely violated the rule.

Korea and Its Neighbors

After the fall of the Mongols in China, Koreans were divided regarding the nature of their relationship with the Ming dynasty. In the 1380s, Yi Seong-gye and his fellow general Choe Yeong won fame for themselves when they defeated Japanese pirates who were raiding Korea. When the Ming dynasty attempted to annex Korean territory, Choe Yeong declared himself in opposition to the Ming and advised an invasion of China’s Liaodong Peninsula. Yi Seong-gye was chosen to lead the army but instead took the opportunity to seize Korea’s capital and gain control of the government in 1388. In 1392, after ruling for four years through puppet kings, Yi Seong-gye proclaimed himself the head of a new dynasty, the Joseon, named for an earlier Korean dynasty. Ruling as King Taejo, he declared himself a vassal of the far more powerful Ming dynasty and established friendly relations with China.

Early Modern Africa and the Wider World

Introduction

The Roots of African Trade

Saharan Trade Routes

Camel caravans from North Africa began trekking across the Sahara Desert in antiquity (the period Before the Common Era, or BCE). The trade reached a peak during the ninth to the fifteenth centuries of the Common Era (CE), when lines of thousands of camels traveled a web-like network of trade routes that spanned the whole of North and West Africa. They moved a variety of goods, including copper, salt, ivory, enslaved people, textiles, and gold, northward from sub-Saharan West Africa to the Mediterranean coast, eastward to the Horn of Africa and Egypt, and southward into the Sahel, the semiarid region between the Sahara Desert and the Sudanian savanna to the south ([link]).

The Spread of Islam

The Arab conquests of North Africa and the gradual advance of Islam into West Africa from the eighth century did much to unify what had been largely regional trade into a truly cross-desert system of commerce. The spread and adoption of Islam by nomads, such as the Tuareg and Sanhaja of the Niger region, helped expand the networks of exchange. Shared values and rules established by Islamic tradition and law engendered a sense of mutual trust and respect among devout Muslim traders and caravanners. African traders and merchants recognized other benefits of conversion beyond the spiritual, which included guarantees afforded by contract law that was based on Islamic law and made possible by widespread Arabic literacy. They also enjoyed the extension of credit and promissory notes between multiple parties, who were all investors in a caravan, and an increasingly extensive information network in which oasis towns acted as centers of communication and exchange.

The Mali Empire

Larger political entities emerged in Sudanic West Africa, beginning with the Mali Empire in the early thirteenth century. Around 1235, Sundiata Keita, the founder of Mali, set about consolidating his control over the heartland of the Mande people, a region centered on the well-watered grasslands of the upper reaches of the Senegal and Niger Rivers. Sundiata convinced the other Malinke (also known as Mandinke) kings to surrender their title, *mansa* (which means “ruler” in the Malinke language), to him. He thus became the sole *mansa*, the religious and secular leader of all the Malinke people.

The Songhai Empire

The Rise of Imperial Songhai

The earliest dynasty of kings of the Songhai state was the Za , which tradition and later historical records suggest ruled the kingdom during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Tradition also holds that the first fourteen rulers of the Songhai state, which was initially centered on Kukiya, approximately eighty miles southeast of Gao, were *jahiliyyah* (“ignorant of God”); *jahiliyyah* is a word used by Muslims to describe the ignorance of people before gaining knowledge of Islam. Sometime in the 1000s, the dynasty converted to Islam, possibly under Za Kusay. It was also at some point during this period that the political focus of the kingdom shifted from Kukiya to Gao.

The Reign of Askia the Great

On the death of Sunni Ali in 1492, his son Sonni Baru came to the throne but reigned less than a year. Muhammad Ture, one of Sunni Ali’s generals and provincial governors, challenged Sonni Baru, and when the two met in battle in April 1493, Sonni Baru was defeated. Muhammad Ture then usurped the throne and took power as Askia Muhammad, later known as Askia the Great. His reign marked the beginning of the Askia dynasty.

The Decline of Songhai

Under Askia the Great, the Songhai Empire flourished. Religious scholars and poets flocked to cities like Timbuktu and Djenné. Islam became more widely practiced. The state embarked on an ambitious infrastructure development scheme, including the construction of canals to enhance agricultural production. Trans-Saharan trade thrived. However, as Askia grew older, his personal power declined, and he relied heavily on his palace officials to manage the affairs of the empire. This alienated his family members, who grew resentful of the power of Askia’s head chamberlain, Ali Fulan.

The Swahili Coast

The Rise of the Swahili City-States

Starting in the seventh century, settlements on the coast of East Africa began to participate in Indian Ocean trade. Geographically, the area was well suited for oceanic trade. In the summer, the prevailing winds blew sailing ships northeast toward the coast of India, and winter winds blew them in the opposite direction. A seasonal trade thus developed, and trading ports grew. The standard ship of the region, called a dhow, was a vessel made of coconut-wood planks sewn together with coconut fiber. It bore a triangular-shaped lateen sail, which was perfectly designed to enable ships to sail both with and into the wind ([link]). However, dhows were unable to ride the rougher waves near the southern tip of the African continent, and this limitation, together with the fact that the monsoon winds grew weaker the farther south they went, kept trading ports from extending the full length of the African coast.

Slavery on the Swahili Coast

Enslaved people were also traded in the markets of East Africa, especially on the island of Zanzibar. East African societies such as the Yao, the Marava, and the Makua regularly made war upon one another and seized captives for sale. People captured in the interior were marched to the Swahili coast and held there until buyers for them could be found, although starvation, exhaustion, and disease killed nearly three-quarters before they could be sold. The primary buyers were Arab Muslims who wanted laborers but were not allowed to enslave fellow Muslims. Most of the enslaved Africans were destined for the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere in the Middle East or North Africa, there to work as domestic servants or perform other types of labor. Some were sold as far away from their homes as India or China. Women and children were preferred for household service, but men might find themselves forced into service as soldiers, sailors, or agricultural workers.

The Contest for the Swahili Coast

Kilwa, located on an island off the coast of what is now Tanzania, was the most powerful of the city-states of the Swahili coast. According to legend, it was founded in the tenth century by Ali ibn al-Hassan Shirazi, the son of a Persian noble and an enslaved Ethiopian woman. Ali supposedly settled the island after purchasing it from a local Bantu king. Kilwa’s location on an island made it better suited to engaging in the Indian Ocean trade than its rival city to the north, Mogadishu in today’s Somalia, and numerous Arab and Persian merchants came to settle in it.

The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

The Role of Kanem-Bornu

In about 900 CE, an empire called Kanem arose in the Central Sudan, located to the east of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and confined initially to the northeast of Lake Chad. The accession of Humai I to the throne of Kanem in 1087 marked the beginning of the Muslim Sefuwa dynasty. Around the same time, a fixed capital was established at Njimi, east of Lake Chad. Over the course of the next century and a half, the *mais* (kings) of Kanem established their control over the region. As in Ghana, the key to establishing and exercising this power was control over the desert caravan routes ([link]).

The Arrival of Europeans

Europeans had long known that there were three ancient trade routes through the Saharan Desert. In the western Sahara, the route ran from Taghaza to Timbuktu. Farther east, a second route connected the oasis town of Ghadames with trade centers in Hausaland. Finally, there was a route connecting the major Mediterranean port city of Tripoli with Bornu in the Central African interior. Centuries of caravan trade along these routes had not, however, made them any less hazardous. Thus, those who knew the routes and the location of key cities and oases, and who appreciated the inherent risks of Saharan weather patterns, were in the best position to control and profit from trans-Saharan trade. It was therefore in the best interest of the Muslim and Arab travelers and caravanners who possessed this knowledge to monopolize it. To share it would undercut their profits. Consequently, European maps of the African interior remained sketchy; distances were mere estimates, and the locations of important cities such as Timbuktu and Kano were a matter of guesswork. Add to this the threat of raids and the possibility of a hostile merchant population, and to Europeans the undertaking of a trans-Saharan journey by themselves seemed likely to be disastrous.

The Later Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

Africa was transformed during the eighteenth century. This period witnessed the emergence of expansionist new states in West Africa, such as Dahomey and Segou, whose wars of conquest generated captives for European slavers. It also saw a sharp rise in conflict between African states and related growth in the trade in enslaved captives. Such growth came at the expense of the historical trans-Saharan trade network, which was disrupted and reoriented to prioritize the traffic in captive human cargo destined for coastal slave markets. While the overall numbers varied by location, the general trend was an increase in the number of captives being moved along the trans-Saharan corridors during the eighteenth century. This trade did more than benefit merchants; in many instances, it provided a boon to businesses and firms related to the slave trade that were located at trans-Saharan trading centers. The societies as a whole did not benefit, however, nor did the people who were enslaved. As a result of this altered state of affairs, the scope of the trans-Saharan trade in enslaved people doubled between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to an estimated 900,000 enslaved people.

The Islamic World

Introduction

A Connected Islamic World

Politics and Religion in the *Ummah*

In the sixteenth century, the *ummah* was composed of a number of large and small Islamic empires and states. Among the large empires were the Mughal Empire of India (discussed in India and International Connections), the Safavid Empire of Iran, and the Ottoman Empire of the Mediterranean. There were many more small kingdoms in places like Morocco, Indonesia, the Swahili Coast, and parts of central Asia. However, despite this political fragmentation, the various parts of the larger Islamic world maintained an element of cohesiveness derived largely from their religion. Rival Islamic kingdoms might disagree with each other on issues of official doctrine or politics, but members of the *ulama*, a class of religious clerics and scholars who act as the primary interpreters of Islamic law, engaged in scholarly debates and collaborated with each other through correspondence. Shared basic beliefs and a reverence for the teachings of Muhammad united all Muslims. Religious and political institutions tended to maintain a similar structure and function in different locations: judges oversaw legal and religious disputes, and the *ulama* advised political rulers and ordinary citizens alike on policy by issuing nonbinding legal opinions called *fatwas*. In this way, the *ulama* helped unify the increasingly diverse Islamic world.

Islamic Trade Networks

Islam had arisen in a region defined by trade and travel. Many prominent early Muslims, including Muhammad himself, were traders or members of trading families. And thanks to the institutional continuity specified under sharia, Islamic religious law, trade soon became closely regulated, the taxes levied on imported goods were systematized, and markets were inspected and administered in the same way throughout the Islamic world. By the sixteenth century, the flags of Islam flew from Spain and Morocco in the west to the gates of China in the east. However, these territories were not unified under one political leader. Instead, what brought them together into one collective *ummah* despite their political, ethnic, and linguistic differences was a network based on trade and travel, which carried Islam farther than its armies ever could.

Technology in the Islamic World

Despite the absence of centralized political authority, communication across long distances was possible in the Islamic world because Arabic, the language of the Quran, also served for most scholarly and administrative purposes as well as religious ones. Scholars were widely scattered but rarely were they isolated, and most traders carried letters across long distances as part of their cargo. Scientists were thus able to compare their observations, students learned from advisers and mentors in far-off lands, and members of the *ulama* sought counsel from colleagues they might never meet.

The Ottoman Empire

Culture and Society

The Ottoman state originated in the fertile plains of Anatolia (also known as Asia Minor, roughly modern-day Turkey), which lies between the Aegean Sea to its west, the Black Sea to its north, the Mediterranean Sea to its south, and the Zagros Mountains to its east. The lands of Anatolia were attractive to the nomadic Turkic peoples who lived in the semifertile Eurasian steppe, a band of grassland that runs from east to west between western China and Hungary. As the Turkic peoples extended their control over northern Iran in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a group of Turkic warriors established their own state, ruled by the Seljuk dynasty.

Expansion, Revolutions, and Reform

The Ottoman state’s geographic position was an important advantage from its beginning well into the height of its power in the seventeenth century. The early empire was born on the dividing line between Europe and Asia and balanced between them for nearly its entire existence. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire allowed the Ottoman sultan to rule from a capital city situated between the two continents. After establishing his new capital in Istanbul, Mehmed II issued a call for citizens of the empire to come and settle there to restore its economic vitality ([link]). This was necessary because the city had experienced steady demographic decline over the previous few centuries. At first, Mehmed offered free housing to anyone who moved there voluntarily; later, he ordered thousands of Serbs, Armenians, Greeks, Jewish people, and Turks to settle in the city. Although he would not live to see it, within a century Istanbul was by far the largest city in Europe, with nearly a half million residents, and it dominated the land and sea trade between Europe and Asia.

Science and Technology

As the Ottoman state grew in prestige and size, its sultans deliberately set out to become patrons of science and learning, following the examples set by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs and other prominent Muslim leaders. The core of all education was religious; there was no separation between what today would be considered religious philosophy or doctrinal study and the “hard sciences” such as astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, and physics. On the contrary, scientific investigation was considered an act of devotion because of its exploration and discovery of the intricacies of the divinely created universe.

The Safavid Empire

The Rise of the Safavid Empire

The Safavids began not as a political dynasty, but as the hereditary leaders of a Sufi order based in the city of Ardabil, located in today’s northwestern Iran. The order in Ardabil was founded in the thirteenth century by the Sufi master Zahed Gilani, and little is known about its beliefs and practices in its earliest stages. We do know that Zahed appointed his son-in-law and disciple Safi al-Din Ardabili to succeed him, which angered his family and some of his followers.

Establishing Shi‘ism as the State Religion

The Safavids declared Shia Islam the state religion of Iran in the early 1500s, and it remains so to this day, encompassing about 10 percent of the worldwide Muslim population. The Shia movement originated with a dispute over Muhammad’s successor after his death in 632. One faction, which became known as the Sunnis, supported the candidacy of Abu Bakr al-Sadiq, Muhammad’s father-in-law. The other faction wished the leadership to remain within Muhammad’s biological family and backed Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, whom they believed the Prophet had chosen as his successor. This group became known as the Shia.

Safavid Government and Culture

During the Safavid period, Iran was ethnically quite diverse. Safi al-Din is believed to have come from a family of Kurds who spoke Azeri. As the Safavid order developed, its members intermarried with other Turkic groups such as the Turcomen, Lar, and Bakhtiyari, and with Georgian, Armenian, and Pontic Greek Christians within their lands and bordering territories. Through his mother, Shah Ismail I was descended from the Komnenos dynasty that once ruled the Byzantine Empire. He used Persian as the language of government and composed poetry in Azeri, contributing to its development as a literary language. The Qizilbash were largely Turcoman, another Turkic group with its own language. Various groups of Persian-speaking peoples lived in the Iranian plateau and were usually described as “Tajik.”

Foundations of the Atlantic World

Introduction

The Protestant Reformation

The Origins of the Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517, but its seeds had been sown years earlier. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had grown richer, and its higher clerical offices had become dominated by people motivated more by the desire for wealth and power than by spiritual concerns. Although Europe’s peasants remained devoutly attached to their faith, critics claimed that popes acted less like Christ’s representatives on earth and more like secular princes, intervening in European political affairs and even commanding armies. Members of the clergy often lived lavishly in palatial surroundings and dressed themselves in silks and furs. Some had mistresses and illegitimate children, who were often given positions in the church. Wealthy families often purchased church offices for their members, and some men held bishoprics (areas under the authority of a bishop) in more than one place at a time by hiring other men to perform their offices. Secular rulers, kings, and princes jealous of the church’s power sometimes vied with the pope for control of the churches in their territory and welcomed opportunities to reject the church’s authority.

Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans

Efforts to silence Martin Luther were unsuccessful, and the new form of Christianity called Protestantism spread throughout the German-speaking lands. By the end of the sixteenth century, it had become entrenched throughout western and central Europe as well. Often the new religion was welcomed by rulers as a reason to reject the pope’s authority, and Luther called upon the German princes to do so.

The Catholic Reformation and the Wars of Religion

The leaders of the Catholic Church did not sit idly by as its members deserted it for new faiths. The Catholic Reformation, also called the Counter-Reformation, was the Catholic Church’s effort to address Luther’s challenges as well as to effect other necessary reforms. One means to do so was the 1545 Council of Trent. There, Europe’s bishops and other clerics affirmed that both good works and faith were required for salvation and that both scripture (as interpreted by the church) and tradition were acceptable sources of authority. The council also affirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation. Aware of very real problems within the church, the council undertook a series of reforms as well. Indulgences were retained, but their sale was forbidden. The council prohibited church officials from appointing relatives to church offices, limited bishops to holding office in only one bishopric, and took steps to improve the education of Catholic clergy and curb their luxurious habits.

Crossing the Atlantic

The Rise of Maritime Nations

Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage did not represent the first contact between European explorers and Indigenous peoples on the North American continent. Through archaeological and historical research, historians can now date that contact to nearly five hundred years before Columbus reached his first stop in the Caribbean.

The Columbian Exchange

The impact of Portuguese and Spanish exploration and settlement went far beyond the political and economic implications. The so-called Columbian Exchange began with the first contact between native peoples and Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492. This phrase refers to the back-and-forth flow of plants, animals, and diseases between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres. Far more than physical products were traded, however. Ideas, religious practices, enslaved peoples, and cultural traditions also crossed the Atlantic to reshape, blend, and sometimes destroy various civilizations in the process.

The Mercantilist Economy

The Rise of Mercantilism

Much European exploration was driven by an economic theory known as mercantilism, a name given to the theory by later historians. According to this theory, a nation’s power depended on the amount of gold and silver it held. The wealthier the nation, the larger the armies and navies it could support in its conflicts with rival powers. Amassing national wealth, in turn, depended on maintaining a favorable balance of trade, a situation in which a country exports goods of greater value than it imports. Mercantilism also assumed that the world’s wealth as measured in gold and silver was finite, so a gain for one nation was a loss for another. To surpass other nations in power, a country must possess more gold and silver than others. According to mercantilism, there could be only one victor in economic competition.

Mercantilism and the Expansion of Empire

To compete with Spain and Portugal, their rivals England, France, and the Netherlands soon founded communities in North America. England established colonies on the mainland of North America in the sixteenth century, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, they stretched from Newfoundland to Georgia ([link]). Besides tobacco, they supplied England with a variety of goods ranging from timber, furs, and salted fish from the northern colonies to rice, indigo, and deer hides from the south. The colonies attracted many landless, unemployed young European men and women, too, who traveled to North America as indentured servants, bound by a contract to work for an agreed-upon number of years. After the landowner who paid for their passage had been compensated by their years of labor, indentured servants received their freedom and typically a grant of land as well.

Mercantilism and Its Critics

Although European merchants and government ministers enthusiastically relied on mercantilist theory in the building of colonial empires, mercantilism also had many critics. Eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that as more gold circulated in a country’s economy, prices would rise, eventually becoming so high that no one would purchase goods. Furthermore, Hume maintained, if abundance reduced the value of an item, then the more gold and silver a nation acquired, the less valuable it would be, an idea that undercut the mercantilist emphasis on accumulating precious metals to build wealth.

The Atlantic Slave Trade

Slavery and the Triangular Trade

One of the largest migrations in history took place between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Europeans forcefully transported approximately twelve million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas to provide labor for Europe’s economic enterprises. Some two million people died on the voyages across the Atlantic. The survivors made possible the extraction of wealth from European colonies on which the system of mercantilism was based.

African and North American Slavery

The captives purchased by European ship captains were sold by other Africans. Europeans did not introduce slavery to Africa; it had existed there for centuries before the triangular trade began. It was different in important ways, however, from the slavery that awaited Africans on the other side of the Atlantic.

The Economics of Slavery

Those who reached their final destination faced an existence as hellish as they had experienced on the Middle Passage. The labor to which they were put was backbreaking and never ending. Most of the crops grown by enslaved Africans in the Americas were labor intensive. At that time, tobacco seeds had to be planted by hand and the seedlings transplanted in the fields. At harvest time, workers stripped tobacco leaves from the plant, hung them to dry, and packed them in large barrels that they then rolled to the coast or a riverbank to be taken on board ship and transported to Europe ([link]).

An Age of Revolution, 1750–1914

Colonization and Economic Expansion

Introduction

European Colonization in the Americas

Spain’s Encomienda System

The Spanish were the first to establish major colonies in North America after Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1492. They became the earliest Europeans to force the Indigenous population to labor for them, initially by outright enslavement, a practice that slowly evolved into systems that were more complex. By 1502, they had created the encomienda system as part of a broader search for “God, Gold, and Glory” in their vast empire. In this context, *God* refers to attempts to spread the Catholic faith, *gold* to the search for wealth, and *glory* to hopes of obtaining personal fame.

English Settlements in North America

The English began their colonization efforts in the Americas nearly a century after the Spanish, motivated by both economic and ideological goals. In 1584, Queen Elizabeth gave Sir Walter Raleigh a charter, a royal document that authorized him to establish a colony in North America. The Protestant queen wanted colonies that would act as an ideological counterweight to Spanish Catholicism in the Americas and provide a base of operations for privateering expeditions that would raid Spanish shipping.

French and Dutch Settlements

In 1609, Dutch merchants hired Henry Hudson, an English sea captain, to lead an expedition into the Atlantic Ocean. The Dutch hoped Hudson would find the long-sought Northwest Passage, a mythical water route thought to allow ships from Europe to sail west through the North American continent, cross the Pacific Ocean, and arrive in Asia. Hudson discovered a deep-water port, now known as New York harbor, and a large river, now known as the Hudson, that led inland. For a moment it appeared he had found the Northwest Passage. However, the Hudson River became too shallow for ocean-going ships near present-day Albany, New York, and the expedition turned back. Hudson did not find the Northwest Passage, but he did find a valuable port and rich river valley that he claimed for the Dutch.

The Rise of a Global Economy

The Seven Years’ War

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) was a global conflict that began as a fight for dominance between European powers, primarily Great Britain and France, but it quickly involved groups from India, Africa, and the Americas ([link]). Conflicts that overlapped with the Seven Years’ War were the French and Indian War in North America and the Third Carnatic War in India.

British Influence in India

After their victory in the Seven Years’ War, the British focused on expanding their control in India. In 1757, the forces of the British East India Company led by Robert Clive defeated the ruler of Bengal, a region in northeast India, who had favored the French. The British East India Company’s victory left it in control of territory larger than the island of Britain itself. Four years later, the capture of Pondicherry by the British effectively removed the French from contention in the competition to dominate Indian trade. After 1761, the Indigenous peoples of India provided the only significant source of resistance.

China’s Dominance in Trade

China had long been a major world power and became even stronger with the rise of the Qing (1644–1912), the last imperial dynasty. After defeating their Ming predecessors and consolidating their power, Qing rulers turned to rebuilding the Chinese economy. With a stable frontier, they were able to reduce military spending and lower tax burdens, which freed money for people to invest in businesses and for the wealthier classes to purchase luxuries. The Qing seized land from wealthy families that supported their political rivals and distributed it to other families that set up small farms. To help these new farms, the government gave the owners draft animals, tools, and seeds. Most farmers focused on growing rice in the river valleys, but the introduction of potatoes from the Americas allowed them to grow food on hilly ground that had never been widely cultivated before. Some began growing tobacco, which also came from the Americas and became a key cash crop for Chinese farmers.

Colonial Resistance and Revolution

The colonies’ role as generators of wealth for their home nations led to the exploitation of both their original inhabitants and their natural resources. As European states sought to expand their colonial dominions in order to play a greater role in the global economy, they encountered resistance from the people whose lands and labor they sought to use. Some of the earliest resistance took place in the Americas.

Capitalism and the First Industrial Revolution

From Mercantilism to Capitalism

In 1681, the French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert asked a group of French business owners led by a man named Thomas Le Gendre how the government could help them. Le Gendre reportedly told Colbert, “*Laissez nous faire*,” meaning “let us do it.” This gave rise to the concept of laissez-faire economics, which argues that market forces alone should drive the economy and that governments should refrain from direct intervention in or moderation of the economic system. The idea of laissez-faire economics was consistent with the logistical realities of global empires. It was effectively impossible for leaders in Europe to micromanage economic operations that were on the other side of an ocean. Therefore the evolution to a laissez-faire economic model might have been as much a practical necessity as an ideological shift.

Mechanization

In the late 1700s, western European nations began to adopt mechanization, the use of machines to replace the labor of animals and humans. Mechanization set the stage for the Industrial Revolution, a transition away from societies focused on agriculture and handicraft production to socioeconomic systems dominated by the manufacture of goods, primarily with machines.

Marxism

Karl Marx was a highly controversial intellectual and revolutionary. Born in 1818 in Trier, in what is now Germany, he grew up as the son of a successful lawyer and was baptized into the Evangelical Church when he was six years old. As a young man, he studied law at the University of Berlin, where a professor introduced him to the philosophy of Georg Hegel. Marx quickly embraced Hegel’s idealistic universal history, which suggested the world is progressing through conflicts toward greater freedom. After completing his education, he worked as a journalist and writer.

Revolutions in Europe and North America

Introduction

The Enlightenment

The Authority of Reason

We cannot reduce the Enlightenment to a single unifying philosophy or body of thought. But Enlightenment thinkers in intellectual circles in Asia, Europe, and the Americas were inspired by the seventeenth century’s emphasis on using reason to grapple with questions about human nature, the complexities of political power and the social order, and the principles of logic and scientific thinking.

Natural Rights

The topic of natural rights, rights possessed by all human beings, such as the right to life and liberty, formed the focus of many philosophical treatises and conversations in the eighteenth century. Based on the premise that all people have fundamental and inalienable rights, rights that cannot be revoked or rescinded by human laws, the concept of natural rights originated not in the Enlightenment but in far older traditions of justice and natural law. In the ancient Persian tradition of Zoroastrianism, for example, the concept of *asha*, meaning “God’s will,” connoted the unchangeable law that emanates from the divine and governs the universe. Although many ancient religious and philosophical traditions developed interpretations of natural law, European Enlightenment thinkers transformed such ideas into a political system, which was novel at the time. The growing emphasis on reason and the desire to improve human life in the eighteenth century led Enlightenment philosophers to envision political systems based on natural rights, rather than the divine right of kings or traditional Christian social hierarchies.

Social Contract Theory

At the core of Enlightenment debate about the relationship between state authority and natural rights was the fundamental character of the social contract. This implicit agreement, or “contract,” compels those living in a society to abide by its rules and regulations or suffer punishments for violating them. In essence, those who enter into the social contract implicitly surrender their natural rights to the state, which is then charged with the task of maintaining and protecting those rights. However, according to many social contract theorists like Rousseau, when a state fails to maintain the general will or protect natural rights, citizens may in turn withdraw their social and moral obligations to the state.

The Exchange of Ideas in the Public Sphere

Public Debate and Dissent

In the medieval period in Europe, opportunities for social encounters and the exchange of ideas had generally been limited to the domestic sphere of private households, or to spaces in which monarchical or church authority could quash dissent or criticism. Over the course of Europe’s seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public spaces became a pervasive feature of its intellectual culture for the first time.

The Republic of Letters

Conversation and debate in the public sphere were inseparable from the flourishing print culture of the Enlightenment era. Literacy rates, which hovered around 30 percent for men and 14 percent for women in late-seventeenth-century French cities, had increased to 48 percent for men and 27 percent for women by the mid-eighteenth century. These rising rates led to an explosion of books, pamphlets, newspapers, and political cartoons. The spread of printed materials not only standardized spelling and systems of knowledge, but it also enabled news, opinion, poetry, political philosophy, scientific texts, and information of all kinds to reach a much wider audience than the spoken word alone. The Republic of Letters was a long-distance community of writers who corresponded with each other across Europe and the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sending handwritten letters and published materials of every kind that provided a crucial international exchange and transmission of ideas. The Republic of Letters was a society whose citizens, rather than living in the same geographic area, like the citizens of a political republic, were united by ideas spread through print. No matter where in Europe or the Atlantic world they lived, all literate people could belong to the Republic of Letters. They engaged with one another on terms of intellectual equality and freely exchanged ideas, just like citizens of a political republic who were, theoretically, free and equal.

Academies, Universities, and Intellectuals

The salons, print shops, and coffeehouses of the public sphere existed alongside more formal educational institutions and academies that also contributed to the intellectual culture of the era. Universities and scientific societies played significant roles in advancing experimental science and philosophy, but they were far less accessible to the reading public than coffeehouses and even salons. Women, for example, attended salons, but they did not attend universities and generally did not belong to scientific societies. Likewise, working-class men, who could sometimes be found frequenting coffeehouses, had no access to universities or scientific societies. These institutions also tended to be somewhat conservative in outlook, given their religious foundations and traditional emphasis on a theologically based curriculum. Even as the curriculum of universities became less based on religion in the eighteenth century, they still largely fell under the wing of state and royal authorities rather than being autonomous.

Revolutions: America, France, and Haiti

The American Revolution

As colonial societies warmed to the idea that political power should be based on the consent of the people, a growing dissatisfaction with the British Crown’s arbitrary rules and taxes propelled the colonies in North America toward revolution. Britain’s Proclamation Line of 1763 declared the Appalachian Mountains the western settlement boundary for the thirteen North American colonies ([link]). Its goals were to prevent further conflict with the French and Native Americans there, and to avoid the costs of defending the frontier when Britain was already struggling with debt from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The colonists, some of whom had already received land grants west of the Appalachians, viewed the edict as equivalent to tyranny and disregarded it.

The French Revolution

Inspired by the success of their North American counterparts, critics of absolute monarchical power and entrenched aristocratic privilege in France began agitating for change. They found themselves in the midst of a significant economic crisis brought on by a combination of the king’s extravagant spending and (ironically) France’s support of the American Revolutionary War.

The Haitian Revolution

Like the leaders of revolution in the North American colonies and France, the leaders of Haiti’s Revolution sought to reject tyranny and dismantle long-standing inequities. Unlike the British colonists, however, the Haitian revolutionaries made addressing racial discrimination and injustice their primary aim. The Haitian Revolution was the first uprising of enslaved people in history that not only toppled a colonial regime but also established national independence ([link]). Independence came at a tremendous cost, however, since France forced the new republic to pay steep indemnities to compensate French citizens for their property losses for many years, impoverishing the new nation. Nevertheless, the revolution represented one of the most significant challenges to colonialism raised in the Western Hemisphere.

Nationalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Political Order

Nationalism

The turbulence of the revolutionary era started to wane, and a sense of shared goals and values grew to shape people’s perceptions of national identity. As a consequence of the French Revolution and the revolutionaries’ subsequent wars against neighboring monarchies they saw as hostile to their new republic, the novel idea of a nation began to provide a sense of belonging and community. It replaced the older ideas of dynasty and city-state and became the primary focus of individuals’ political allegiance. By using fear of foreign attacks as a means to gather support for the government and raise an army that represented the interests of the people rather than the monarch, French revolutionaries had inspired loyalty to the state, which also represented the people. In some cases, Great Britain, for example, the nation coexisted with a traditional monarchy. In others, like Haiti, France, and the United States, the old order was completely replaced, and a brand-new political system and cultural landscape emerged in its stead.

Liberalism

Like nationalism, the political philosophy of liberalism is rooted in Enlightenment principles and born of the revolutionary struggles of the eighteenth century. Its underlying goal is freedom from restraint, more specifically freedom of expression, popular sovereignty, representative government, and the protection of private property and civil rights. The liberalism of the nineteenth century is different from the liberalism of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however. The meaning of the term has changed over time, and, although people who are regarded as liberals in the twenty-first century United States generally advocate for government assistance for the poor and government intervention to ensure equality, nineteenth-century liberals opposed government intervention. Liberalism and nationalism are not mutually exclusive; nationalist leaders like Mazzini, for instance, also adopted many liberal principles. Nevertheless, a distinction between political and economic liberalism evolved from the work of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith.

Conservatism

While liberalism and nationalism represented the continuation of Enlightenment ideals of natural rights and liberty, the rise of conservatism was a reaction against the ideological changes and increased freedoms associated with the revolutions of the eighteenth century. Realizing they could not return to the prerevolutionary era, proponents of conservatism instead sought to suppress the forces of nationalism and liberalism as a means of reining in newfound principles of democracy and republicanism. Based on the belief that sudden change in the form of revolution was illegitimate, conservatism advocated submitting to government authority and allowing religious doctrine to play a central role in maintaining social order and stability. Conservative theorists like Edmund Burke, moreover, asserted that individual rights were secondary to the rights of the community, and that the only acceptable way to generate political change was slowly and gradually rather than through revolution.

Revolutions in Latin America

Introduction

Revolution for Whom?

Social Hierarchy and Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America

By the end of the eighteenth century, Latin American societies had become rigidly stratified. Status was dependent on a number of social markers including education, family and professional ties, race, religion, and wealth. Color was the most obvious and most complicated noneconomic factor that affected social position. Whiteness was more than a mark of economic superiority. It indicated European ancestry, which in turn denoted status as a Christian and thus a degree of presumed social and moral superiority. Furthermore, European males born in the Iberian Peninsula (the peninsula on which Spain and Portugal are located), called *peninsulares* in Spanish America and *reinóis* in Portuguese America, considered themselves superior to males of European descent born in the Americas, who were called creoles in Spanish America. In the first centuries of colonization, those born in Europe tended to monopolize the highest positions in church and state as well as the means of production, whereas most of the landed elite (miners, plantation owners) were creoles.

The Napoleonic Era

The U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 and France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen stressed that all men were created equal. However, both these documents were intended to apply primarily to White males of European descent, and in both Europe and the United States, women and the enslaved were generally excluded from consideration. The rights that “all men” were said to possess were those of interest to free White men—property rights, freedom of expression, and the right to participate in government. Only the most radical of people in the United States and France interpreted these documents to mean that women should have the same rights as men, or that people of different races should be considered the equal of White people in terms of rights and social status. Nevertheless, these documents partially inspired a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue that proved to be one of the French Revolution’s most significant effects in the Americas.

The Peninsular War and the American Question

When Napoléon occupied Spain in 1807 and made its ruling royalty captive, he inadvertently sparked a crisis in Spain’s American empire. As insurgents in Spain established regional governing and deliberative councils called *juntas* to deal with the crisis, so too did creole elites. In key economic and political centers such as Mexico City, Caracas, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Bogotá, the Spanish authorities surrendered control to these local *juntas*. For the first time in Spanish America, local government bodies enjoyed self-rule, and each of the *juntas* considered how it might turn this dramatic turn of events to its own advantage. That is, the solution to the political crisis in Spain breathed new life into a desire for independence throughout the main four colonial divisions.

Spanish North America

The Mexican War of Independence

Napoléon’s assault on the Bourbons in the Napoleonic Wars immediately transformed European politics, but it had a delayed effect on the Spanish colonies. Spanish American colonial elites took their time weighing the risks, and the majority of their *junta* members, both in Spain and in the Americas, first swore their loyalty to the absent Spanish king. In 1808, initial meetings with the viceroy of New Spain led to the establishment of an autonomous conservative *junta* in Mexico City, formed by creoles and *peninsulares*, who favored maintaining their loyalty to Spain at all costs. Representatives of New Spain, by far the richest Spanish colony, seemed to adapt to the *junta* system. However, in 1810, when *peninsular* judges deposed the viceroy and installed their own leader in the position, creole royalists were inspired to take full control of the government.

Iturbide and the Plan de Iguala

In 1820, Spanish liberals succeeded in forcing Fernando VII to reinstate the liberal Cádiz Constitution of 1812. In New Spain, liberal creoles welcomed the implementation of this constitution because it reopened possibilities for their participation in government. However, the conservative creole elite could not accept the measures attacking the privileges of the Catholic Church and the military, in which many of them held positions. The Spanish king again proved his inefficiency in controlling the Spanish colonies, laying the ground for a second independence movement. This one was led by creoles with the goal of improving their status and power. Rather than making colonial society egalitarian, which had been the goal of Hidalgo and Morelos, the creole elite simply wanted to rule Mexico for themselves.

Spanish South America

The Northern Liberation Movement

Between 1807 and 1810 in the judicial district of Caracas, Venezuela (in the Viceroyalty of New Granada), royalists and patriot creoles from the upper-class elite struggled to create a self-governing body. Then, on April 19, 1810, the creoles of Caracas deposed the Spanish administrative officers and created a *junta* to govern in the name of Fernando VII. The *junta*, whose authority was recognized by other cities in the Viceroyalty of New Granada, then called for the creation of a congress, which met for the first time in March 1811.

The Southern Liberation Movement

Like the port town of Caracas in the north, the port of Buenos Aires in the south reaped significant benefits from the eighteenth-century reforms aimed at developing the Spanish Empire’s outskirts. Formerly subject to the authority of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1776 Buenos Aires became the seat of the newly created Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (modern-day Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay). The port was the principal outlet from which silver from Bolivia and animal hides and tallow from the vast plains of Argentina and Uruguay reached markets abroad. The town’s residents, known as *Porteños*, also enjoyed abundant opportunities for trading in contraband with the British and Portuguese.

The Guayaquil Conference

The northern and southern forces of the South American independence movements converged in the firmly royalist Viceroyalty of Peru and made Lima, the capital city, their target. From the north, one stream of revolutionary armies led by Bolívar flowed from the Viceroyalty of New Granada, and from the south, another led by San Martín swept up from the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and the newly independent Republic of Chile.

Portuguese South America

The Establishment of the Kingdom of Brazil

In 1807, when Napoléon instituted his Continental System aimed at isolating Britain and economically destroying it, Portugal, notable for its long-standing alliance with Britain, was not able to comply. To punish Portugal’s breaking of his naval blockade, Napoléon obtained the Spanish Crown’s permission to invade Portugal by land (since the French navy was not capable of facing the British at sea). French troops commanded by General Jean-Andoche Junot swept across the Iberian Peninsula to storm into Lisbon.

Pedro I and Brazilian Independence

João left his son and heir Pedro I as prince regent in Rio de Janeiro, with instructions to preserve the family’s lineage and power. The talented twenty-three-year-old prince enthusiastically took to his duties. The Cortes wanted to reduce Brazil to its former colonial status and ordered the dismantling of Rio’s central government structure. In January 1822, it commanded the prince to return, but Pedro sided with the Brazilians when they asked him to stay. (This event became known as *O Fico*, from the Portuguese *ficar*, to remain.)

Nineteenth-Century Eyes on Latin America

Latin American movements for independence sought to throw off the rule of mercantilist parent countries and an economic model that hindered the development of rapidly growing colonial states. The successful movements, led by well-educated elites, many times faced resistance from a majority race-mixed population that sided with the homeland. The lack of popular support forced the exploitive White creole minority, who feared the oppressed mixed-race majorities, to negotiate their successes at each step. Liberators like Bolívar, San Martín, Pedro I, and Iturbide received no significant assistance from outside sources and many times lacked a unified direction or strategy. They encountered problems of vast geographic distances and natural obstacles, as well as the economic and cultural isolation of the various regions they were trying to unite.

Expansion in the Industrial Age

Introduction

The Second Industrial Revolution

The Expansion and Transformation of Technology

Many developments of the Second Industrial Revolution built on or improved earlier technology. Mass production of steel, for example, had begun with the development of the Bessemer process in the 1850s. This innovation removed impurities from molten pig iron, producing stronger steel better suited to building rail lines and machines. Later engineers further improved the process. The open-hearth Siemens-Martin process, first developed in Germany in the 1860s, was slower than the Bessemer process, but it produced higher-quality steel that was less brittle. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Siemens-Martin process had become the most common way of manufacturing steel. The mass production of steel made possible the great engineering feats of the Second Industrial Revolution, such as the first skyscrapers and the expansion of railroads ([link]).

Industrial Frontiers

Until the mid-nineteenth century, industrialization had taken place only in Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and Belgium. By the middle of the century, other countries like Canada, Italy, and Russia had also begun to industrialize.

Obstacles to Industrialization

As the United States and European nations industrialized, African, Latin American, and Asian nations, with the exception of Japan, did not. This left them at an economic, technological, and military disadvantage compared to the countries of the industrialized world. Historians disagree about the reasons for this Great Divergence. Some point to the fact that these nations lacked natural resources, such as abundant coal, that European nations possessed. Many note that establishing colonies in the Americas and Asia helped nations like Britain and France acquire capital, resources, and markets that assisted their industrial development. Thus Africa, Asia, and Latin America became parties to unequal treaties forced on them by Europeans bearing deadlier weapons.

Motives and Means of Imperialism

Raw Materials and Markets

By the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, new inventions and industrial processes demanded new raw materials, such as petroleum to fuel engines, natural rubber for valves and tires, palm oil for lubricating machinery, copper to conduct heat and electricity, silver for medicine and photography, and lead for pipes. Coal was in demand to transform iron into steel, to produce the gas that heated homes, and to generate the electricity that powered machines and lit streets and buildings. Not all the industrialized nations could produce enough to supply their increased needs.

The Civilizing Mission

On the heels of the soldiers who first opened countries in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific to agents of businesses came others seeking to bring what industrializing countries thought was valuable. Many from the United States and Europe considered it the duty of citizens from the industrialized—or as they phrased it, the “civilized”—world to bring the benefits of western culture to the conquered. According to social Darwinism, a theory then popular in Europe and the United States, some groups of people become stronger and more powerful because they are naturally superior. In this view, those of European ancestry could impose their will on others because they were innately “better” and their societies more advanced. Jules Ferry, the prime minister of France in the early 1880s, stressed that such domination was not only the duty of “superior” peoples but also their right. The “benefits” brought to the colonized typically consisted of religion, education, western clothing, and “character-building” sports like soccer. The British also introduced cricket to colonies in Africa and Asia, and baseball came to the Caribbean from the United States. The introduction of these sports was thought to teach people supposedly western values like fair play, teamwork, and competitiveness. The French called this aspect of imperialism “the civilizing mission.” Colonizers also typically erected an infrastructure in the lands they controlled, building roads and railroads and establishing secure water systems and telegraph lines.

The Means of Imperialism

Before either the economic or the cultural goals of the imperialists could be achieved, the desired regions had first to be conquered. One of the first hurdles was the physical difficulty of penetrating the interiors of Africa and Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa was a hot and humid home to microbes unknown to Europeans that sickened both them and their draft animals. Malaria laid low many Europeans who attempted to explore the continent’s interior.

Colonial Empires

Africa

The industrialized nations of Europe saw Africa, with its rich natural resources, as the great prize, and they moved quickly to seize it. At the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution, Europeans controlled about 10 percent of the African continent. By the end of the century, after the “Scramble for Africa”—the competition among European countries to establish African colonies—they controlled 90 percent, with the largest portions ruled by Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany. Portugal and Spain still claimed colonies acquired in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ([link]).

European Powers in Conflict

Although Italy’s expansion in Africa was halted, the other great powers continued to extend their influence, sometimes through their private citizens. Entering South Africa’s diamond trade as a young man, for example, Cecil Rhodes of Britain established a company called De Beers in 1888 that soon monopolized the diamond market. In 1890, Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape Colony.

Asia

Despite Britain’s expansion into Africa, India remained its most important overseas territory. India had been a possession of the British East India Company, which directly ruled approximately half of India. In 1857, however, Muslim and Hindu soldiers in the company’s employ, known as sepoys, rose in revolt. In 1858, following the British army’s suppression of the revolt, Parliament disbanded the British East India Company and took control of the territory it had ruled. Local rulers whose authority the East India Company acknowledged and who had remained loyal were left in nominal control of their kingdoms, but in reality, they became subservient to Britain. Queen Victoria was officially proclaimed empress of India in 1876, and the last Mughal emperor, who had not been active in the revolt, was sent into exile. This transfer of power began the period of direct British rule called the British Raj.

The Pacific

Colonization of the Pacific by Europeans had begun as early as the sixteenth century when Spain claimed the Philippines. Over the course of the eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, France and Britain had also laid claim to the islands of the Pacific. Britain established a colony in Australia in 1788 and colonized New Zealand in 1840. France made Tahiti a protectorate in 1842. In the second half of the nineteenth century, those islands that did not already belong to a great power were quickly absorbed into larger colonial empires.

Exploitation and Resistance

Brutality and Exploitation

While all the great powers were capable of brutality and people were exploited in all the colonies, King Leopold II’s subjects in the Congo Free State suffered in ways that have become infamous. Despite his claims that his interest in Africa lay solely in a desire to improve people’s lives, in reality, Leopold was a cruel master. The Congo Free State was considered his personal possession and thus immune from intervention by the Belgian government. Leopold extracted wealth from it by leasing portions to private companies and individuals. Without adopting even a veneer of benevolence, these intermediaries brutalized the peoples of the Congo from the moment they arrived.

Resistance and Revolution

Resistance movements and outright revolts sprang up wherever colonizers went. The revolt by Egyptians unwilling to submit to European control, the war waged by the Mahdi’s army, and Ethiopia’s war with Italy were all examples of African acts of resistance. Elsewhere in Africa, more limited revolts took place, such as the Zulu and Matabele (Ndebele) tribes’ resistance of British or Dutch control in the south.

Life and Labor in the Industrial World

Introduction

Inventions, Innovations, and Mechanization

The Industrial Workplace

Some of the most profound changes brought by industrialization were those that affected the workplace, bringing new challenges while also transforming the nature of labor. During the Second Industrial Revolution, new forms of energy were harnessed, transportation and communication became faster, and industrialized nations mass-produced not only steel and industrial machinery, which had been the focus of prior industrial efforts, but also consumer goods such as clothing, furniture, shoes, and packaged foods.

The Industrial Home

Industrialization brought profound changes to countries like Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. In the latter nineteenth century, western nations like these, already skilled in the production of textiles and iron rails, applied machine technology to the mass-production of consumer goods, the new availability of which changed people’s lives.

The Family in the Industrial Age

As people moved from small farms and country villages to cities and factory towns, their lives changed in ways both small and profound. On farms and in artisans’ workshops, women and children had labored alongside husbands and fathers and contributed to the family’s income. They did not always have similar opportunities in the industrial city.

Life in the Industrial City

The Benefits of Life in the Industrial City

In the nineteenth century, people came to industrial cities largely to find work. Some were also attracted by the excitement of city life. There were many drawbacks to living in nineteenth-century cities, but there were benefits too.

The Challenges of Life in the Industrial City

Although city life brought many benefits, it also posed challenges for people of all classes. The first was finding a place to live. Urban populations grew quickly in the second half of the nineteenth century as people flocked to the industrial city from the countryside and abroad. By the middle of the century, more British people lived in cities and towns than in rural areas. Housing construction did not keep up, and cities and living spaces were often cramped and crowded.

Cultural Movements of the Second Industrial Revolution

The industrial city was more than a place for people to live, work, and entertain themselves. It was also the subject of late nineteenth-century art and literature. Industrialization influenced the cultural creations of the time just as much as it did the methods of production and transportation.

Coerced and Semicoerced Labor

Slavery and Serfdom

By the end of the nineteenth century, chattel slavery, in which one human being is owned by another and can be bought or sold, lingered in only a few places on the globe. Some nations had already abolished slavery before the Second Industrial Revolution began. Japan officially did so in the sixteenth century. Britain abolished the slave trade and ended slavery completely in 1834. France banned slavery in 1848, freeing nearly all enslaved people in the Caribbean. In India, the Penal Code of 1861 punished those who attempted to enslave others. The Netherlands and the United States were among the last industrialized nations to end the practice, with the Dutch freeing enslaved people in the South American colony of Suriname in 1863 and the United States abolishing slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to its Constitution in 1865.

Contract Labor and Debt Bondage

While slavery and serfdom disappeared from the industrialized world in the nineteenth century, other means remained for securing a long-term or permanent labor force for both agricultural and industrial production. Two such systems are contract labor and debt bondage. Contract labor, a system in which people sign contracts promising to perform work in exchange for a fee, still exists today. Indentured servitude is a form of contract labor in which people pledge to work for an agreed period of time for an agreed form of compensation. Although indentured servants are not enslaved, while their contract is in force, their employers have nearly total control over them, and they are not allowed to leave their service. Debt bondage is a system in which a person who owes money works (or provides someone else to work) for the creditor until the debt has been repaid through labor. Indentured servitude and debt bondage are similar and were common in the later nineteenth century; they differ from slavery in that, theoretically, at a point in time the bondage will end.

Penal Labor

Forced labor assigned as punishment to those convicted of crimes, known as penal labor, was also employed in the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1788 to 1868, British convicts, most of whom had been found guilty of nonviolent crimes, were given the choice of languishing in a cell or being transported to the colony of Australia. If they chose Australia, after an ocean journey that might last eight months, they had to endure seven to ten years of labor. The unlucky might be assigned to work gangs, building roads or constructing government buildings. Others went to work for farmers or merchants. After they had served their sentences, they were free to remain in Australia as settlers or return to England.

Communities in Diaspora

European Immigration

Over the course of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, approximately sixty million Europeans sought better economic opportunities on other continents. Most came from relatively nonindustrialized or agricultural regions, such as southern Italy and Sicily. Approximately twenty-eight million Europeans and Canadians immigrated to the United States during this time, the majority between 1890 and 1914. Most were peasant farmers from southern and eastern Europe. Many also continued to arrive from Germany and Ireland, the countries that had been responsible for the greatest influx of immigrants in the first half of the nineteenth century. Along with those fleeing poverty came victims of religious persecution, especially Jewish people of the Russian empire. They had faced discrimination and anti-Semitism, which often culminated in waves of violence called pogroms that left people dead and their property destroyed. Political dissidents and craftspeople displaced by industrialization made up the rest.

Asian Exodus

In the nineteenth century, many people of East Asia and India left home to seek work abroad, just as many Europeans did. Most who left China were escaping poverty. Primarily men, they came largely from the southern provinces, especially Fujian, where the quality of the land had always made agriculture difficult, and Guangdong. In the middle of the nineteenth century, many Chinese people fled hardships occasioned by the deadliest civil war in the history of the world. From 1850 to 1864, more than twenty million Chinese people died in the Taiping Rebellion, an uprising led by Hong Xiuquan, who believed himself to be “God’s Chinese son” and sought to impose a new moral order on society. The war’s destruction of towns, farms, livestock, and crops left millions dead or dying from famine.

Regulation, Reform, and Revolutionary Ideologies

Regulation and Reform

The challenges of the industrial age must have seemed overwhelming to observers of the time, and the difficulties insurmountable. Nevertheless, governments attempted to solve some of the most important problems. Their motives varied. Many officials were sensitive to the criticisms of social activists and reformers, and some politicians came from their ranks. They genuinely wished to improve the lives of city dwellers and the working class.

Revolutionary Ideologies

In Britain and the United States, the organization of unions developed independent of politics. In places such as Germany, France, and Russia, however, political ideology spurred the development of unions. The predominant political ideology that influenced their growth was socialism. Today, socialism is a political theory that advocates the ownership of the means of production by the government. Socialism in the nineteenth century was somewhat different and took many forms. The only unifying features were a dislike of laissez-faire capitalism, a desire to improve the lives of the poor, and a belief that the government should be responsible for solving problems caused by capitalism and industrialization.

The Modern World, 1914–Present

The War to End All Wars

Introduction

Alliances, Expansion, and Conflict

The Long Peace

The decades before the world erupted into the Great War, as World War I was known, were generally marked by great stability. The work done in 1815 to create a balance of power among European nations in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars had been quite successful. The Concert of Europe—an informal agreement to maintain the status quo—had been able to absorb some internal conflicts and the growth of more liberal political thoughts without incurring political or territorial instability. There were occasionally military conflicts, but these were usually of short duration and limited in scale.

Treaties and Alliances

Since he first rose to power in 1862, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had pursued conservative policies that strengthened first Prussia and then Germany itself. In particular, Bismarck hoped to check the power of Russia and France by developing a series of alliances that would keep them from growing more dominant and presenting a threat to German leadership in the region. A military alliance with Austria-Hungary was created to stand up to Russia. This alliance later grew to include Italy and became formalized as the Triple Alliance. In 1894, Russia and France signed a treaty pledging military support for one another if attacked and requiring each to mobilize its armies if the other did so. In 1907, the Triple Entente was created between Russia, France, and Britain, growing out of a shared distrust of German aims.

Colonies and Conflict

The view that imperial strength should be devoted to colony building was still very much in place in the late 1800s. Still industrializing, and having unified as a country only in 1871, Germany soon felt the pressure to build an overseas empire, just as the other industrializing nations of the world—Britain, France, Belgium, the United States, Russia, and Japan—did. But there were limited locales it could target.

The Growth of Militaries

Naval power assumed a greater role in world affairs in the late nineteenth century. As more of the industrialized nations embarked on empire building, and as reaching international markets became an expected part of their strategy, the value of having strong navies to protect commercial trade only grew. Maintaining supply and fueling stations around the world to service these navies and fleets of merchant ships became a key argument in favor of developing more colonies.

The Collapse of the Ottomans and the Coming of War

The “Sick Man of Europe”

The Ottoman Empire had always been predicated on expansion. It drew its strength from its territorial gains and the exploitation of the best and brightest from these new territories to serve the leader of the empire, the sultan. The strategy had worked for a number of centuries, even delivering an Ottoman army as far as the gates of Vienna in 1683 before it was pushed back. At its height, the empire encompassed areas of the Middle East, northern Africa, and significant swaths of southeastern Europe ([link]).

The Spark That Lit the Powder Keg

Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary had no surviving son in the 1900s, so upon his death, a nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was set to inherit control of the empire. The archduke was not particularly well-liked by his uncle. For one thing, he had new ideas that actually supported more autonomy for the Balkan region within the empire. He was scheduled to travel to the Balkans in the summer of 1914 for a review of troops and survey of the region of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A tour of the city of Sarajevo was planned for June 28, an important date for the Serbian people. It was a day of mourning for the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, which the Serbian people had lost to the encroaching Ottoman Empire but which also marked the birth of Serbian unity. A visit on such a day by Franz Ferdinand, the symbol of another encroaching empire, was seen as a slap in the face ([link]).

The World at War

Some German units never made it out of Belgium, and fierce fighting there continued for the duration of the war. Other units swept south and continued their advance through northern France. French troops moved swiftly to block them. The Battle of the Marne in September 1914 created front lines where a stalemate lasted several years as both sides dug a trench system from which to fight. German armies were moving toward Paris when the French were able to exploit a gap between two of the divisions. A series of flanking maneuvers ensued as the French and Germans both raced to the sea. Additional French troops were called up, and at one point the French reserves even commandeered the taxicabs of Paris to ferry themselves to the front. The Battle of the Marne went on for a week before the German advance was stopped. The battle was fought so close to Paris that civilians could hear the sounds of the fighting. Given an information blackout due to government censors, rumors about the threat to Paris were rampant. Approximately 800,000 people left the city, anticipating a German invasion.

Total War

The Unending Horror of War

Military technology had changed greatly by the beginning of the twentieth century, and these changes were not often understood or appreciated by either soldiers or commanders when the war broke out. The recent spread of industrialization meant that more weapons with greater firepower could now be turned out of factories. Just as the guns of the naval arms race had quickly increased in scope and power, the introduction of machine guns, long-range artillery guns, aircraft, and submarines revolutionized warfare in World War I.

The United States Enters the War

Further exacerbating tensions between Germany and the United States was the publication on March 1, 1917, of the Zimmermann Telegram. This message had been sent to Mexico by Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, offering a deal. In 1916, there had been numerous disturbances along the border between the United States and Mexico due to the exploits of Francisco “Pancho” Villa as he attacked U.S. towns. The U.S. Army had responded by sending thousands of troops to track Villa down. Germany wanted the Mexican government, in the event of war with the United States, to actively cause more disturbances along the border, keeping even more U.S. troops there and thus unavailable for deployment to Europe. In return for Mexico’s cooperation, upon its victory, Germany would grant it the region of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, territory it had lost in 1848 as a result of war with the United States.

Life in the Trenches, the Mountains, and the Desert

The trenches of the western front, born of the stalemate in which the Allies and Central powers found themselves in the fall of 1914, became synonymous with the war. The horror of unrelenting artillery fire coupled with unending mud made this arena of fighting unique. Troops literally dug in for protection from enemy artillery barrages and then found themselves stranded in these locations. From the beginning, the German troops dug deeper and more elaborate trenches, as if planning to stay for a long time. The early Allied trenches were more rudimentary but became more highly developed over the years.

Colonies, Race, and the War

As the imperial powers went to war with one another, so too did their colonies in multiple ways. In some cases, colonial troops came to Europe to fight, such as those the French brought from Senegal or the British brought from India. In other cases, such as in Africa, fighting took place in the colonies themselves.

War on the Homefront

Nations Remade for War

The length and all-encompassing nature of the war forced each combatant’s home front to adapt. In the Allied countries of Britain and France, volunteer enthusiasm and conscription meant that many skilled laborers were now serving in the military, leaving manufacturing and production in need of new workers whose training took time. For other countries, such as Germany, the shortage of raw materials due to the Allied blockade forced a search for new sources.

Women’s Work

As the war progressed and more men set off to fight, women in many countries found job opportunities in traditionally male-oriented fields, most notably the defense industries and munitions plants. In Britain, women made up a significant percentage of war workers ([link]). They were sometimes called “canaries” because of the yellow hue cast on their skin and clothes from the TNT they worked with daily. Women in France were also disproportionately engaged in the manufacture of arms and armaments. In Germany, this pattern continued. While some women had worked in factories before the war, the need for more labor drew those who had worked in domestic service and other capacities, and they often earned more in the factories than in their old jobs.

The Civilian Response

While many civilians fully supported the war effort, others voiced opposition to and criticism of the war itself and the reasons behind it. This disapproval became stronger as the war and the shortages went on and morale on the home front suffered.

The Easter Rising

Tensions between Ireland and Britain can be traced to the twelfth century when the English seized Ireland. The political issue of home rule for Ireland was the most contentious one between the two in the early twentieth century. If approved, home rule would offer Ireland its own parliament and rights to deal with domestic issues rather than having to listen to the dictates of London. Support for it had grown significantly, and it had even been partially approved at the time of the war. But Protestant Unionists in the north of Ireland, who approved of the union with Britain and feared a Catholic-dominated Irish government, worried they would be discriminated against if home rule were enacted. The question was tabled while the British government focused on the war effort.

The War Ends

The 1905 Revolution

Long-standing problems in Russia such as a stagnant bureaucracy became exacerbated by the war. The Romanov tsars, in control since the 1600s, saw themselves as absolute rulers who governed without being questioned, but more liberal ideologies emerging in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s reached parts of Russian society, inspiring a desire for reform and reducing public tolerance for those in power. Socialist and Marxist ideologies, in particular, took hold among many young Russians, who felt the time had come to overthrow the tsarist state. In the early 1900s, a political faction known as the Bolsheviks appeared that followed these ideologies. Its members believed that violent revolution was necessary to oust the tsar and that the revolution needed a strong leader who could control the working class. Their push for reform and its accompanying violence eventually caused Russia to withdraw from the war.

Peace, Land, and Bread

Russia had significant difficulty achieving victories in World War I. Its armies were massive but also suffered enormous casualties, and millions were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, sometimes thanks to incompetent commanders and lack of supplies. Morale was low, and soldiers were aware that food shortages had caused long lines and even riots in the cities and towns they had left behind. Shortages of guns and other munitions further compromised the effectiveness of the military. The tsarist government did not seem up to the challenge of fighting the war.

The Final Year

The final year of the war started auspiciously for Germany. In March, its troops began an offensive against the British and quickly took the advantage. Poor weather and fog created confusion, and the British may have retreated farther than they needed to. The Germans again moved toward Paris and resumed bombarding the city as they had in the early weeks of the war. Germany also worked out treaties with Russia and Romania, which exited the war and ceded territory in the process. By the summer of 1918, these successes meant that Germany held more territory than at any time in the past.

The Interwar Period

Introduction

Recovering from World War I

The Aftermath

As World War I ended in 1918, the world moved to cope with the destruction it had wrought. Military casualties stood between nine and ten million, civilian deaths at approximately ten million, and the number of wounded above twenty-one million. Veterans had both physical and emotional wounds; some needed physical therapy, prosthetics, or vocational training for their postwar lives. The civilian toll meant families had lost not only sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers but daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers. The war also brought into question the notions of superiority that had permeated Western civilization. People wondered whether the West was declining and could no longer consider itself a moral leader in the world.

The Treaty of Versailles

In January 1919, the leaders of the major Allied powers (except Russia) met outside Paris at Versailles to negotiate the treaty formally ending the war ([link]). Committees were assigned to resolve the many issues concerning not only Europe but also the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The conference lasted about a year. In its finished form, the Treaty of Versailles was actually a series of treaties, a “massive document that ran to 436 pages containing 433 articles organized into fifteen parts.”

Postwar Recession and Prosperity

World War I devastated the world’s economies. Four long years of conflict and losses had disrupted the labor force across Europe, not to mention governments’ budgetary predictions. The reparations owed by Germany were the means by which Britain and France planned to deal with their own debt, but they also created an economic house of cards that could easily tumble down. Africa, Asia, and Latin America also felt the economic effects of the war. Before the war, African nations had traded extensively with Europe, especially Germany, which had accounted for the majority of European trade with sub-Saharan Africa. When the war began, the difficulty of trading with the combatant nations meant that many European goods became more expensive, and many Africans could no longer afford them.

Germany and Reparations

John Maynard Keynes, the creator of Keynesian economics, was a British economist at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was so unsettled by the potential financial repercussions of the treaty’s terms that he wrote a book contending the large reparations would mean economic ruin for Germany, endangering the entire European economy. His predictions were soon borne out.

Disarmament and the Commitment to Peace

Still reeling from World War I in the 1920s, the governments of the major powers generally supported disarmament and limited military buildup. There was great hope that the next decades would be peaceful, and many agreements reached in the 1920s reflected this commitment to goodwill among nations. In 1921, the Washington Naval Conference opened to address the issue of the naval arms race that had taken place before and during World War I. U.S. secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes proposed that the three major naval powers—Britain, the United States, and Japan—each scuttle a number of ships and restrict future construction. The Five-Power Treaty that emerged limited the construction of warships and the size of aircraft carriers, then a new style of vessel in the world’s navies. It established ratios for warships whereby Britain and the United States could have the same number, and for every five ships they had, Japan could have three and France and Italy 1.75 each. Britain and the United States were allowed more ships because they maintained fleets in both the Atlantic and the Pacific to protect their colonies.

The Formation of the Soviet Union

The Birth of the Soviet Union and the Rise of Stalin

After the Bolshevik seizure of the government and Russia’s hasty departure from World War I, Lenin moved to consolidate power in Russia. Civil war raged from 1918 to 1921 between the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and the White Army representing all the groups that opposed them, including the Russian upper classes, forces loyal to the monarchy, and Lenin’s enemies within the Russian Social Democrats, such as the Menshevik faction. Members of the White Army disagreed on whether they sought an anti-Bolshevik communist government or the return of a tsarist government. The Red Army, though smaller, had a focused goal and was better organized.

The First Five-Year Plan

Stalin’s domestic agenda was codified in the form of Five-Year Plans outlining economic achievements the Soviet Union was to have made by each plan’s conclusion. The timeline was ambitious, if not impossible. Yet officials tried to achieve the goals; they risked losing their jobs or even their lives for not meeting production quotas.

Engineers of Human Souls

Despite the clear problems with Stalinist rule, many people living in the Soviet Union, about 80 percent of whom were peasants, were still optimistic about the promised equality they believed communism could bring to their lives. The school of socialist realism that dominated art in the Soviet Union glorified peasants and industrial workers, depicting heroic, muscular steelworkers and smiling farmers wielding agricultural implements. Paintings and drawings of male and female workers in the 1930s were about patriotism as much as artistic expression.

The Great Depression

Economic Collapse

When the economic collapse that came to be known as the Great Depression began in the United States in 1929, it ended the postwar boom and sent the entire world’s economy reeling. No economic depression is caused by one element alone. One contributing factor, however, was economic instability that the rising stock market in the United States had camouflaged.

Worldwide Woe

When the Great Depression occurred, ordinary people bore the brunt of it. Workers lost their jobs and were unable to find new ones as businesses laid off employees. Without the means to pay rent or a mortgage, families were evicted and became homeless. Hunger was a significant problem, particularly in urban areas where there was little chance of having a garden or finding other available foodstuffs. Families coped however they could, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles in the hope that jobs would be available somewhere. Homeless camps and shantytowns sprang up, but life in such a place was precarious because city officials might force the residents to leave ([link]).

Communism and Authoritarianism

With economic depression dominating the world’s nations, frustration built among people who felt their governments were not actively combating the problems. In countries with capitalist systems, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” was particularly stark in the 1930s. Many of the rich went on with their lives with little change, while other people lost jobs and homes. The appeal of communist ideology grew among some who felt abandoned by the capitalist system, and the prospect of economic equality was its most attractive feature. In other countries, the economic crisis became an opportunity for increased authoritarianism.

Old Empires and New Colonies

To the Victors Go the Spoils

Already beset by internal problems and increasing difficulty controlling its holdings throughout Arabia and the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire had signed the Armistice of Mudros on October 30, 1918, bringing its participation in World War I to an end. During the war, a number of proposals for dismembering the empire had been considered. In 1919, Allied forces seized areas in the former Ottoman Empire, Greece captured Western Anatolia, and other Allied forces moved into Istanbul. The Turkish National Movement that resisted these occupations was led by Mustafa Kemal, later renamed Atatürk (“father of the Turks”) and already a Turkish hero for his performance at the Battle of Gallipoli.

The Fight for Self-Determination in Africa

Most Africans were not considered citizens of the empires of which they were part. Imperial powers exploited the colonies for their mineral wealth and other resources. They did little to better the lives of Africans, and the rhetoric of “civilizing” the continent was based on ingrained assumptions of White superiority. However, participation in World War I changed things for many Africans. More than one million Africans had fought in the war. The sense that their contribution should be rewarded with new political power was one result. Another was their exposure to international issues and the recognition that the principle of self-determination applied directly to themselves.

An Independent India

The significant role their troops in the British Army had played in World War I offered Indians some hope that Britain might now extend them more rights than before. Indians were also anxious to have the British government’s restrictive wartime measures lifted. However, it soon became clear that Britain had no plans for change. So, as in many other countries, in India a growing nationalist movement now advocated independence from colonial rule. The clash between Indian Nationalists and British rulers began almost immediately after the end of World War I.

Resistance, Civil Rights, and Democracy

The Expansion of Democracy

When the war ended, the suffrage movement had been going on for several decades in the United States and Britain. Those who protested in support of women’s right to vote, called a suffragist, had sometimes taken radical action to highlight their cause, such as Emily Davison who threw herself in front of the King of England’s horse at a derby in 1913 and was killed. Suffragist leaders in both countries were often arrested, and many went on hunger strikes while in jail, enduring forced feedings to draw more attention to the cause.

Democratic Yearnings

The dismantling of empires at the end of the war was clearly a boon for democracy, but it was not always easy for fledgling countries to adopt new political systems. The tense situation in Ireland of the 1920s was just one example.

A New Culture for the Masses

Alongside the expansion of democracy, the 1920s also shepherded in a new world of mass culture and mass media. Technological innovations let people connect nearly instantaneously and have shared experiences without being in the same place. Where the infrastructure existed, it was radio and the movies that made this possible.

The Causes and Consequences of World War II

Introduction

An Unstable Peace

Asia for Asians

The fight between Japan and China in the 1930s lit the fuse that made World War II a global conflict. The spark may have been Japan’s long-standing perception of Western racism, dating back to the nineteenth century and shown more recently in the rejection of Japan’s proposed racial equality amendment to the Treaty of Versailles. This had been done at the insistence of Australia and the British delegation. Part of Japan’s underlying thinking was to rid Asia of Western colonial influences, although it also clearly saw itself as the new leader of the region.

Peace in Our Time

In furtherance of his promise to revive Italian glory, Benito Mussolini (popularly known as *Il Duce*, “the leader”) sought to expand the Italian protectorate of Somali in East Africa. A border dispute with Ethiopia, which Italy had long sought to colonize, arose in November 1934, and the Ethiopians took the matter to the League of Nations on January 5, 1935. When a full-scale Italian invasion of Ethiopia began on October 3 of that year, the League Council immediately declared Italy the aggressor, and fifty-one member nations approved sanctions against Italy. Unwilling to defy Mussolini, however, the British and French undermined the League in a secret agreement permitting Italy to absorb Ethiopia into a special economic zone. In May 1936, Italian forces took the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, and shortly thereafter, Italy formally annexed the country. In Italy, Mussolini’s popularity grew, especially among Italian youth.

Sleeping Giants

Hitler planned to finish off Britain with a cross-channel invasion using air and submarine bases in both Norway, which had surrendered in June 1940, and northern France. Through the late summer and into the fall of 1940, the Battle of Britain raged in the skies over Britain as a duel between the German Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force (RAF). The Germans initially focused their attacks on shipping in the English Channel and then began to bomb weapons-production facilities. The British gradually built up the RAF with new recruits of non-British volunteers, including a few U.S. pilots. Aided in part by the innovation of radar, which gave some advance warning of German onslaughts, the RAF prevailed. By October 1940, having lost approximately 40 percent of its planes of all types, the Luftwaffe had failed to achieve the air superiority needed to capture Britain. When the Luftwaffe shifted its focus from military to civilian targets, particularly the bombing of London, it inadvertently gave the British the opportunity to rebuild their airfields and defense plants and assemble more planes.

The Attack on Pearl Harbor

Trying to pressure the Japanese into ceasing their aggression, in August 1941 the United States imposed sanctions including an embargo on oil and gas sales to Japan. This action further reinforced Japan’s plan to turn to the South Pacific to absorb the natural resources of the crumbling European imperial regimes and the Philippines, a U.S. colony. Seeing the United States as a soft enemy unwilling to make the sacrifices needed to win a war, Japan planned a surprise assault on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, while last-ditch efforts at a diplomatic settlement between Tokyo and Washington were taking place. The United States wanted Japan to ultimately withdraw from China, to which it would not agree, and Japan felt the United States would not be open to further negotiations. Its leaders decided they had to move against the United States while they still could.

Theaters of War

Europe and Africa

Beginning in 1938 and through the spring of 1941, U.S. military leaders produced several plans of action in the event of war with the Axis powers. Immediately after winning an unprecedented third term in 1940, Roosevelt was briefed by his chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, who advised him that the best military strategy was “Plan D”—a Europe First plan. This focused the United States and Britain on defeating Germany and Italy first and adopting a defensive posture against Japan if it entered the war.

East Asia and the Pacific

When the Japanese invaded the Philippines beginning in December 1941, the limited U.S. and Filipino forces put up stiff resistance in jungle fighting. Outnumbered, however, they surrendered their positions on the Bataan Peninsula on April 9, 1942. The command headquarters surrendered at Corregidor Island nearly a month later. The resulting sixty-mile forced march to an internment camp led to the deaths of more than a quarter of the estimated eighty thousand Allied prisoners and became known as the Bataan Death March. Over the course of the war, the Japanese held approximately 140,000 Allied troops under severe conditions at various camps in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and on the Japanese home islands. By the end of the war, as many as thirty thousand had perished there.

South and Southeast Asia

As Japan moved through Southeast Asia, it promised the inhabitants that it ultimately supported independent governments there. In fact, new governments were established in Vietnam, Burma, and other places, and though they were always clearly under the thumb of the Japanese military, there was some optimism that “Asia for Asians” might prove to truly work ([link]).

The Holocaust

Jewish people had been deeply assimilated into German society and culture since the Enlightenment. But anti-Semitism had been an undercurrent in European history for centuries, and anti-Jewish propaganda and scapegoating began to surface after Germany’s defeat in World War I. It continued through the encouragement of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. Joseph Goebbels was the master of Nazi propaganda, charged with convincing Germans that Jewish people were an existential threat. A constant drumbeat in all forms of media began, persuading Germans to accept three propositions meant to morally justify anti-Jewish actions. First, Jewish people were a problem. Second, they were like vermin (a tactic of dehumanization). Third, eliminating them would make for a better Germany and a better world.

Keeping the Home Fires Burning

Life on the Home Fronts

For European countries in World War II, the distance between the battlefield and the home front was often very short or nonexistent. Total war, fought using all available resources with no restrictions on weapons or their targets, took the conflict to millions. The occupation of territory and the resulting resistance movements meant that homes, farms, and factories became minor battlefields. Places farther from actual combat, in Africa and the Americas, were more traditional home fronts.

Women Mobilized for War

The status and roles of women underwent seismic shifts around the world because of the war. In belligerent nations, with so many men sent to the far-flung fronts, women represented a large available pool of labor that could be tapped, and they increased their participation in their nation’s economies significantly.

Scientists at War

World War II, like World War I, brought about scientific and technological developments that soon became matters of life and death. The nature of total war itself prompted a transformation in the relationship between states and scientists. Governments invested in the development of lethal and nonlethal technologies that ultimately became essential to the war and national security. In the fall of 1939, the British scientific community rapidly shifted its focus from matters of pure research to work aiding the war effort.

Out of the Ashes

Victory in Europe and Plans for Peace

For more than five years after they met in Newfoundland and produced the Atlantic Charter’s plan for the end of the conflict, Roosevelt and Churchill exchanged more than 1,700 letters and messages and held many high-level meetings to closely coordinate their efforts at every level. At a specialized conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, representatives of forty-four Allied countries together hammered out the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund, both intended to secure economic security and stability after the war.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Early in 1945, the Japanese army and navy agreed to adopt the first joint operational plan in their histories. Operation *Ten-go* (“heaven”) called for suicide attacks by land and air units for defense in the Pacific, and a month later these attacks were combined with the *shukketsu* (“bleeding”) strategy in the Battle of Iwo Jima.

The Human Toll

The end of the war saw the world grapple with the conflict’s astronomical human toll. Germany had suffered 5.5 million military deaths and lost as many as three million civilians. Japan lost 2.1 million military and another million civilians. China’s military deaths can only be approximated but may have been as high as four million, with another sixteen million civilians. The United States and the United Kingdom emerged less battered, with 416,000 American and 384,000 British deaths. However, their ally the Soviet Union arguably suffered more than any other single country. Soviet military deaths were estimated at 8.8 to 10.7 million, and more than thirteen million civilian deaths were attributed to the war. Some of these deaths were the result of military actions; other Soviet civilians died of starvation or disease caused by wartime conditions. The German and Japanese surrenders ended the combat phase of the war. However, much work was needed to rebuild the world as the victors thought it should be.

Cold War Conflicts

Introduction

The Cold War Begins

The Superpowers Divided

In the summer of 1945, the world looked much different from the way it had five years before. Of all the great powers, only the United States had been relatively unaffected by World War II. Its territory and national infrastructure remained intact, its economy was strong, and its civilian population had gone unharmed. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), while badly bloodied, had also emerged relatively whole; its immense size and population had spared it the scale of destruction suffered by the rest of Europe. Britain, though pounded by German air raids, had escaped invasion, but it had been severely weakened by the war and could no longer be the world leader it had been. It was about to be superseded by the United States and the Soviet Union, whose ideological differences shaped the postwar world.

Western and Eastern Blocs

The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union that had built up slowly through the later 1940s came to a head in 1948. Believing a strong Germany was vital to Europe’s economic recovery and a necessary bulwark against the spread of communism, the United States, Britain, and France planned to reunify the three zones of Germany they had occupied since the end of World War II. United, these zones would dwarf the Soviet zone in size, population, and wealth and, by sharing a single currency, play a major role in Europe’s postwar economy.

Cold War Strategies

The Cold War between West and East was fought on many fronts with many strategies. Both sides provided aid and technical assistance to countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, many of which had been European colonies until the end of World War II. Through such aid, the United States hoped to contain the spread of communism by depriving countries of an economic reason for aligning themselves with the Soviet Union. Communism was attractive to many poor people. It promised that a nation’s wealth would be used to provide for all its citizens, and under the Soviet system, people were provided with jobs, housing, education, health care, and public transportation. Although the standard of living was lower than in the West, for poor people who lived with the constant threat of hunger and homelessness and saw no chance of improving their situation, communism was an attractive alternative.

The Spread of Communism

Chinese Revolution

Since the 1920s, two groups had contested for control of China: the Guomindang (GMD) or Nationalist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). During World War II, the GMD, led by Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) had attempted to fight the Japanese from their wartime capital in Chongqing, while the CCP led by Mao Zedong had watched from their base in Yan’an, a town in northern Shaanxi Province.[footnote] With the exception of a brief period of truce between the two parties, the CCP and the GMD fought with one another as well.

When Chinese words are written using the English-language alphabet, one of two systems is typically used: pinyin or Wade-Giles. The pinyin system is the one preferred by the People’s Republic of China, and most Chinese names in this textbook are written in pinyin. An exception has been made, however, in the case of Chiang Kai-shek. The decision was made by the textbook’s editors to spell his name according to the Wade-Giles system, because this is how his name appears in most other history textbooks. Jiang Jieshi is how his name would be written in pinyin.

The Two Koreas

On August 15, 1945, the nation of Korea, which had been occupied by Japan during World War II and had been a Japanese colony for many years before that, was divided in half at the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude. The United States assumed responsibility for disarming the southern part of the Korean peninsula, and the Soviet Union took on the task of disarming the northern half. At the Moscow Conference held in December 1945, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union agreed that they and China would jointly govern Korea for a period of five years, after which it would be reunified and given its independence. The Korean people’s opposition to the division of their nation and its subjection to foreign rule was ignored.

Southeast Asia

The lessons of Korea also strengthened the U.S. commitment to oppose the spread of communism in Vietnam. Following the end of World War II, France wished to reclaim control of Vietnam, which had been its colony before being seized by Japan in 1940. However, the Vietnamese nationalist group the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, wished to seize the opportunity of Japan’s surrender to proclaim their country’s independence. The Viet Minh had fought the Japanese during World War II and had often assisted the U.S. military. Ho Chi Minh fully expected that the United States would support them.

The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution

Mao Zedong wanted China to chart the direction that communism took in Asia, just as the Soviet Union determined its direction in Europe. To do so, however, China needed to be much more powerful than it was in 1949, when the CCP declared the foundation of the People’s Republic and the Nationalists fled. In imitation of the Soviet model, Mao instituted a Five-Year Plan in China in 1953 and embarked on nearly seven hundred industrial projects, more than one hundred with the assistance of the Soviet Union. He also began the collectivization of agriculture by forcing peasants to labor together on state-owned farms instead of tending to farms worked by individual families. The plan was largely successful in terms of industrial development, and China’s steelmaking, coal mining, and machine- and cement-producing capacity all increased.

The Non-Aligned Movement

Yugoslavia

In the aftermath of World War II, the nations of Europe speedily aligned themselves with either the Western or the Eastern Bloc, with one exception: Yugoslavia. In 1942, communist partisans who had fought the Axis powers on behalf of the People’s Liberation Front formed a government, the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ). When Italian forces evacuated Yugoslavia in 1943, AVNOJ assumed control of the territory and established the state of Democratic Federal Yugoslavia. The partisans’ leader, Josip Broz Tito, was named prime minister. In 1945, Yugoslavia’s monarchy was abolished, and Tito was recognized as the leader of the country. This result was confirmed by a nationwide election held shortly thereafter.

The Bandung Conference and Indonesia

Among European nations, Yugoslavia’s refusal to become a member of either the Western or the Eastern Bloc made it an exception. But a desire to plot a middle path between the superpowers was common in former colonies or protectorates of European powers, especially in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

India

Like Indonesia, India sought to plot its own path and remain free of the entangling alliances of the Cold War, and it was also one of the initiators of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1947, the United Kingdom granted India its independence. Anti-British protests had rocked India throughout 1946, and, exhausted from fighting World War II, Britain could no longer afford to maintain control over its colony. In addition, although the United Kingdom had sufficient troops there, the majority were Indian, and it was uncertain where their loyalties lay. Indeed, in 1946 Indians in the British Navy had mutinied throughout the country. Finally, the United Kingdom’s greatest ally and creditor, the United States, pressured the nation to grant India its independence, as the United States had given independence to the Philippines following the war.

Egypt and the Middle East

Before World War II, the United States had demonstrated relatively little concern for the Middle East, which fell largely under British control. Following the war, however, problems in the region, some of which stemmed from British policies and actions, threatened to move Arab and Iranian leaders closer to the Soviet Union. This possibility alarmed the United States and led to attempts to forge relationships with Middle Eastern governments. The nations that proved of greatest interest were Iran, Egypt, and the newly formed state of Israel.

Global Tensions and Decolonization

Tensions in Europe

Joseph Stalin died in 1953. He was replaced as leader of the Soviet Union, briefly by Georgy Malenkov and then by Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev was as ardent an opponent of the Western Bloc as Stalin had ever been, bragging at one meeting that communism would “bury” capitalism, but he also favored a new attitude toward the United States and a new direction for the Soviet Union. In February 1956, at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev denounced the late Stalin and accused him of crimes against the Soviet people. He then embarked on an aggressive process of de-Stalinization, changing Stalin-era policies such as censorship of the arts, releasing many whom Stalin had jailed for political reasons, dissolving the special tribunals that had convicted them, removing Stalin’s name from public buildings, and taking monuments to him down.

Tensions in Latin America

In the 1930s and 1940s, the United States had exercised a “Good Neighbor Policy” toward other nations of the Western Hemisphere, refraining from intervening in their affairs. The desire to contain communist expansion, however, led Washington to take a much more interventionist approach in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1944, an uprising in Guatemala ousted the military dictator Jorge Ubico, who had held power since 1931. Philosophy professor Juan José Arévalo became the country’s first democratically elected president in 1945. He was succeeded in office in 1951 by Jacobo Árbenz, who began a program of land reform in the desperately poor country. Árbenz also legalized the Guatemalan Party of Labor, a communist labor union. In the eyes of the United States, Guatemala seemed to be drifting toward communism ([link]).

Tensions in Asia

Though its interventions in Latin America were confounded by Castro’s Cuba and popular support for communist parties in other Central and South American countries, the United States continued to try to prevent the spread of communism, notably in Southeast Asia.

Decolonization in Africa in the Shadow of the Cold War

Like the Vietnamese, the peoples of Africa also wished to shake off Western control following World War II. The Atlantic Charter, a 1941 agreement by the United Kingdom and the United States regarding their shared goals for the postwar world, had promised self-determination for all, and African countries wanted to make this a reality. In October 1945, the Fifth Pan-African Congress assembled in Manchester, England. Delegates from Europe’s African colonies as well as from the Caribbean, the United States, India, Sri Lanka, and Central America called for an end to colonialism.

A New World Order

The Collapse of Communism: The Eastern Bloc

The Cold War had begun in Greece, an unlikely place. Its last shot was also fired in an unlikely place—Afghanistan, the site of the final proxy war waged between the allies of the Soviet Union and those of the United States.

The Retreat of Communism: China

The excesses of the Cultural Revolution in China spelled the end of both Mao Zedong’s power and, ironically, the Chinese Revolution. By the time of Lin Biao’s death in 1971, China had suffered badly. The economy was in shambles. The government had difficulty fulfilling basic functions. As Mao retreated into depression and ill health, his role was increasingly taken over by “The Gang of Four,” consisting of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, his chosen successor Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan. However, they were primarily concerned with ensuring ideological purity and the continuation of “revolutionary” political thought. Crucial matters such as the economy were left in the hands of Premier Zhou Enlai.

The Contemporary World and Ongoing Challenges

Introduction

A Global Economy

Global Trade

Even during the Cold War and decolonization, economic development and industrialization continued around the world. Japan and West Germany, destroyed and defeated in the 1940s, were striking examples. Each dove headlong into postwar rebuilding efforts that paid huge dividends. They invested heavily in their economies and saw industrial production and economic growth skyrocket over the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970, both had become economic powerhouses in their regions.

Multinationals and the Push to Privatize

The growing global economic integration represented by the rise of the WTO and regional trading blocs opened new opportunities for multinational corporations to extend their reach and influence around the world. A multinational corporation, or MNC, is a corporate business entity that controls the production of goods and services in multiple countries. MNCs are not new. Some, like the British East India Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, exerted great influence during Europe’s imperial expansion in the early modern and modern periods. But with globalization and improvements in transportation and communication technology, MNCs have thrived, especially since the 1950s. They have used their growing wealth to lobby governments to create conditions favorable to their operation, enabling them to become even more powerful.

Exporting Culture

Besides promoting controversial ideas like privatization, MNCs, many of which are headquartered in the United States, also are responsible for exporting elements of western culture, especially popular culture. Although many people around the world enjoy such things as western fashions, movies and television shows, popular music, and fast food, other people fear that such influences harm local cultures and contribute to the Americanization (and homogenization) of the world.

Winners and Losers in a Globalizing World

While it is tempting to see globalization and the rise of MNCs as generally benefiting the people of developed countries, the reality is more complex. Improvements in transportation and MNCs’ use of labor resources in countries around the world have sometimes harmed workers in developed countries like the United States. Supporters of NAFTA, for example, argued that the United States would benefit from reduced trade barriers, lower prices for agricultural goods from Mexico, and newly available jobs for lower-wage workers. Opponents, however, recognized that the groups hardest hit by transformations in the labor market would be those least able to withstand the damage, mainly working-class manufacturing workers in the United States and Canada. Both sets of predictions proved accurate.

Debates about the Environment

The Rise of Environmentalism

In the post–World War II period, as the United States and Europe experienced unprecedented economic growth and a rapidly rising standard of living, anxiety regarding the condition of the environment rose to the surface and gained political significance. In the developed West, members of the generation reaching maturity in the 1960s occasionally struggled with their affluence and the recognition that it came with disastrous environmental consequences. These consequences were not limited to the developed world. In the 1950s and 1960s, as part of the Green Revolution, agricultural scientists developed new high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat and synthetic fertilizers and pesticides that increased food production in both the developed and the developing world. The result was that millions were saved from hunger, and infant mortality in developing nations decreased. Scientist Norman Borlaug, who was considered largely responsible for the Green Revolution, received a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work. Such benefits, however, came with a heavy price tag, in many ways. Small farmers had to borrow money to purchase the new high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, and many found themselves deeply in debt. Reliance on the new varieties of crops reduced biodiversity, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides polluted the soil and water.

Environmentalism Today

Many of the most outspoken proponents of environmentalism and policies to curb fossil-fuel use have come from the United States and developed countries in Europe. Some of their anxieties about the state of the environment are a product of their own affluence and the sense that it is unsustainable. Yet frequently their environmental concerns have clashed with the interests of developing countries, which are largely geared toward growth. Concerns about the Amazon rainforest is one example of this dynamic.

The Global Response to Climate Change

Countries from around the world have regularly tried to address environmental problems together. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 was a global agreement to ban and phase out specific chemicals in industrial and consumer products in the expectation that natural processes would restore the Earth’s ozone layer. The accord went into effect almost immediately, and the ozone layer has been steadily recovering ever since. Scientists anticipate that it will be fully healed by 2070, if not earlier.

Science and Technology for Today’s World

The Digital Computer Revolution

Many of the technological advancements of the 1940s and 1950s came in the form of increasingly powerful analog computers, which analyze a continuous stream of information, much like that recorded on vinyl records. Analog computers worked well for solving big mathematical problems, such as the calculations related to electrical power delivery systems or the study of nuclear physics. However, one of their weaknesses was that they were inefficient at managing large amounts of data. Digital computers, or those that translate information into a complex series of ones and zeros, were far more capable of managing bulk data. Just a few years after the war, digital computing received a huge boost with the invention of the transistor, a device with far more computing potential than its predecessor the vacuum tube. Scientists could amplify this enlarged computing capacity even further by wiring multiple transistors together in increasingly complex ways.

The Internet and Social Media

The process of globalization has been accelerated by the rise of the internet and the various social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter that exist there. Many people were introduced to the potential of computer networks for sharing information and creating small social networks in the 1980s, when individual users became able to connect their computers to others by using modems and telephone networks. This connectivity gave rise to regional bulletin board systems (BBSs), in which one person’s computer served as a host for those of other users ([link]). BBSs functioned much like websites today. Though they ran far more slowly and had limited capabilities, they allowed users to share computer files like games and images, post messages for others to read, participate in virtual discussions and debates, and play text-based online games. BBSs used phone networks to communicate, and long-distance calls were then expensive, so their users tended to be local.

Medical Miracles and Ongoing Health Challenges

Advances in computer technology were not the only technological success stories of the post–World War II world. In 1947, scientists perfected an artificial kidney, and just five years later, the first successful kidney transplant was performed. In the 1950s, antipsychotic drugs were developed and used to treat neurological disorders that once consigned patients to a lifetime of difficult treatment in a psychiatric hospital. In the 1950s, geneticists discovered the double-helix structure of DNA, information that was crucial for later advancements such as the ability to use DNA to diagnose and treat genetic diseases. In 1962, a surgical team successfully reattached a severed limb for the first time, and in 1967, the first human heart transplant took place. Over the next decade and a half, medical advances made it possible to conduct telemedicine, view and monitor internal organs without performing surgery, and monitor the heartbeat of a fetus during pregnancy.

Ongoing Problems and Solutions

Instability in the Post–Cold War World

When the Soviet Union dissolved on December 31, 1991, most in the West celebrated the end of the Cold War, believing that a new world that would uniformly embrace liberal democracy and capitalism was in the process of being born. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama even published a book on the idea in 1992 called *The End of History and the Last Man*. The argument presented in the book was that the world had been marching toward a Western liberal democratic future for centuries, and with the Soviet Union gone, it had reached the inevitable end of its “ideological evolution.” With the United States as the only remaining superpower, many also assumed the Cold War’s bipolar world would soon evolve into a mostly unipolar one based on U.S. military, cultural, and economic dominance.

Radicalism, Refugees, and Resistance

In 2011, the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq was completed, eight long years after the invasion. Hopes that peace in Iraq would last were dashed, however, with the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a fundamentalist and militant Islamic group also referred to as the Islamic State. Formed in 1999, ISIL had fought against the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq in 2003. In 2014, it attacked Iraqi security forces and drove them from a number of cities, including Ramadi, Fallujah, and Mosul, and it killed thousands of members of the Yazidi minority group in Iraq’s Sinjar district.

State Instability and Human Rights Abuses

Many of the migrants arriving at the southern border of the United States are fleeing economic and political disorder in their home countries. This pattern goes back many decades. For example, many thousands of Salvadoran migrants have entered the United States each year, especially during and after the El Salvador Civil War ([link]). That war began in 1979 with a military coup supported by the United States, which feared that radical leftist elements in El Salvador were destabilizing the country and leading it in a direction contrary to U.S. Cold War interests.

Global North and Global South

The reality for many people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is a stark reminder of the wide gulf between what some refer to as the Global North and the Global South. These labels describe the rough geographic pattern evident in the global distribution of the world’s richest and poorest countries. Most of the richest countries, such as the United States, Canada, and the EU countries, are in the north, while poorer countries predominate in the south ([link]). However, there are also wealthy countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore in the southern hemisphere, so the terms actually reflect economic realities and not geography. Furthermore, while not all people living in Global South countries are poor, those that are earn only a fraction of what the average person in a Global North country earns. The world is complicated, and complexity resists simple categorizations.

Glossary

Maps and Timelines in the Book

Chapter 1: Understanding the Past

Chapter 2: Exchange in East Asia and the Indian Ocean

Chapter 3: Early Modern Africa and the Wider World

Chapter 4: The Islamic World

Chapter 5: Foundations of the Atlantic World

Chapter 6: Colonization and Economic Expansion

Chapter 7: Revolutions in Europe and North America

Chapter 8: Revolutions in Latin America

Chapter 9: Expansion in the Industrial Age

Chapter 11:The War to End All Wars

Chapter 12: The Interwar Period

Chapter 13: The Causes and Consequences of World War II

Chapter 14: Cold War Conflicts

Chapter 15: The Contemporary World and Ongoing Challenges

Timelines in Volume 2, from 1400

Maps

Recommended Student Resources for the Students of World History

How to Study World History

World History Sources includes various strategies for analyzing historical documents.

Resources for Primary Sources

World History Encyclopedia includes timelines and primary sources.

Resources for Maps

Geology.com Maps includes many different maps.

Resources for Videos

CrashCourse World History includes brief educational videos on a variety of world history topics.

Website Collections

World History Matters is a collection of various historical websites.

Resources for Art History

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History includes collections from various periods of world history.

Magazine Articles

BBC’s History Extra

Podcasts

The Almost Forgotten

3D Tours

Virtual Rome: What Did Ancient Rome Look Like?

Virtual Museum Content

Natural History Museum