Final Oral Projects: Daily Life of Ancient Egyptians

Chapter 24: Accelerating Global Interaction

Accelerating Global Interaction:

Throughout the twentieth century, a dense web of political relationships, economic transactions, and cultural influences increasingly bound the world together.

         Economic globalization accompanied, and maybe helped generate, the greatest economic growth spurt in world history; immense creation of wealth. Massive chasm has developed between rich industrialized countries and everyone else. Growing economic inequality within individual states and growing popular movement against globalization emerged in the 1990s.

         The “woman question” became a global issue in the twentieth century. At that time, sharp divisions happened within global feminism. Global backlash viewed feminism as undermining family life.

Fundamentalism is a major reaction against modernization and globalization. Many features of the modern world appear threatening to established religion. So, fundamentalists have responded with selective rejection of modernity. Another fundamentalism, called Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism developed in India in the 1980s.Islamic fundamentalism is the most prominent fundamentalism of the late twentieth century. 

Chapter 23: Independence and Development in the Global South

            India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel won independence in the late 1940s. African independence came between mid-1950s and mid-1970s. Imperial breakup wasn’t new; the novelty was mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology and creation of a large number of new nation-states. World War I and World War II ended with the collapse of Austrian, Russian, German and Japanese empires.

            India ended British rule before 1900. Few people of the Indian subcontinent thought of themselves as “Indians”, but British rule promoted a growing sense of Indian identity. In1885, the Indian National Congress INC was established. Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) had studied law in England and wasn’t a very successful lawyer, but he became a leader of the INC. He attacked not just colonial rule but also mistreatment of India’s untouchables and the evils of modernization. Not everyone agreed with Gandhi, and in1948 a Hindu extremist assassinated him.

            The relationship between Western-style modernity and tradition has been an issue across the developing world, the case of Islam: Turkey and Iran approached the issue of how Islam and modernity should relate to each other very differently. Turkey emerged in the wake of World War I, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk 1881–1938, as a secular nation, whereas Iran became the center of Islamic Shia’a revival in 1970s.

Chapter twenty-two: The Rise and Fall of World Communism

Global Communism had its roots in nineteenth-century socialism, inspired by Karl Marx. In the 1970s Global communism’s height, almost one-third of the world’s population was governed by communist regimes. The ideology based on Marxism, inspired the 1917 Russian Revolution. The 1917 Russia’s revolution was sudden, and explosive. Deep-seated social revolution soon showed the inadequacy of the provisional Government, Bolsheviks seized power in a coup (October 1917), for 25 years, the new USSR was the only communist country. Chinese Communist Party was founded 1921. It had a formidable enemy in the Nationalist Party, which ruled China after 1928. The Chinese Communist was driven from the cities, but it developed a new strategy that addressed both foreign imperialism and peasant exploitation under Mao Zedong.  Finally, In 1949 Communism won in China after a long struggle.

Joseph Stalin built a socialist society in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s; Mao Zedong did the same in China in the 1950s and 1960s. Communist countries pioneered “women’s liberation” 1919: USSR’s Communist Party set up Zhenotdel (Women’s Department), moreover communist China also worked for women’s equality, and there was a limitations on communist women’s liberation.

By 2000, the communist world had shrunk considerably. First, communism had lost its dominance completely in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Second, China had mostly abandoned communist economic policies. Third, Vietnam and Laos remained officially communist but pursued Chinese-style reforms. Fourth, Cuba: economic crisis in the 1990s, began to allow small businesses and private food markets. Fifth, North Korea is the most unreformed and Stalinist communist state left, sixth, international tensions remain only in East Asia and the Caribbean.

Chapter 21: The Collapse and Recovery of Europe

The Collapse and Recovery of Europe

            The Great War, WW I, is considered the beginning of a new phase of world history. It was followed by the economic meltdown of the Great Depression, by the rise of Nazi Germany and the horror of the Holocaust and the WW II.

            European nations rise as global powers did not mean that they had peace in Europe; quite the opposite. The most obvious division was among its competing states. Those historical rivalries further sharpened as both Italy and Germany joined as major forces.

Since the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, a fragile and fluctuating balance of power had generally maintained the peace in Europe. That balance of power was expressed in two rival alliances, the triple alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy and the Triple Entete of Russia, France and England. It was those commitments that transformed minor incident in the Balkans into a conflagration that consumed all of Europe. The incident was the assassination of the heir of the Austrian throne. Thus, a system of alliances intended to keep peace created an obligation for war.

Competition on colonies and industrialized militarism contributed to initiate the war and Europe’s imperial reach around the world shaped the scope and conduct of war.   

            The Great War was a conflict that shattered every expectation. Most Europeans believed that the war will end soon, but it took four years and ended with the German defeat in 1918. The war resulted in enormous causalities and some nations’ population were mobilized, increasing the authority of the government. Europeans could believe that their cultural advancement could not prevent such tragic and bloody war.

The treaty of Versaills, which formally ended the war in 1919, proved in retrospect to have established the conditions for the generated the second world war only twenty years later. In the treaty, Germany lost its colonial empire and 15% of its European territories, was required to pay heavy reparations to the winners, had its military forces severally restricted, and had to accept sole responsibility for the war.

            The aftermath of the war brought substantial social and cultural changes to the European and American victors of the war. Integrating millions of returning veterans into ordinary civilian life was not easy and governments took many actions to ease the integration.

The most influential change of the postwar decades lay in the Great Depression. If World War I represented the political collapse of Europe, this economic downturn suggested that its economic system was also failing. It spread from America to Europe and beyond and lasted for a decade.

The Great Depression sharply challenged the believer in capitalism and many turned to the Soviet Union to find answers. The US response to the depression came in the form of Roosevelt’s New Deal program which many historian blame for lingering the depression.

           

            Between 1919 and 1945, a new political ideology, known as Fascism, found expressions across much of Europe. Fascism was intensely nationalistic, seeking to mobilize the nation to a grand task. Its spokesmen condoned violence against enemies and exalted action rather than thought and reflection. Fascist condemned individualism, liberalism, feminism and democracy and communism.  The fascist alternative took shape first in Italy.   

            The German expression of the European fascism took shape as the Nazi party under Adolf Hitker (1889-1945). In many respects, it was similar to its Italian counterparts. This movement grew in the aftermath of the humiliating loss of WW I. The German economy was severally hit in 1930s and the unemployment was very high, everyone demanded decisive government action. It is in this atmosphere that the Nazi movement, led by Hitler, gained support.  By the late 1930s, Hitler had the support of the majority of the population given the economic revival.

Soon after coming to power, Hitler implemented policies that increasingly restricted Jewish life, like excluding them from universities, professional organization…etc. In the meanwhile, Nazis celebrated the superiority of the German race, its culture and its ancient heroes. If WW I and the Great Depression brought about political and economic collapse to Europe, Nazi movement brought its moral collapse.  

            The modern history of Japan paralleled that of Italy and Germany. All three were newcomers to great power status, with Japan joining the club of industrializing and empire-building state only in the 19th century. Although japan during the 1930s shared some common features with fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it remained a less repressive and more pluralistic society.

            World War II began in Asia before it occurred in Europe. In the late 1920s and 1930s, Japanese imperial ambitions mounted as the military became more prominent and powerful in Japan’s political life and as nationalism grew in society. The first attack began against China; in 1940-1941, Japan extended its military operations to the French, British, Dutch, and American colonies in the Pacific Ocean.

            As a consequence of its defeat on WW I and the harsh terms of the Versailles, many Germans had deep resentments about the country’s position in the international arena and the Nazi pledged to rectify the treaty. War was essential to the Nazi phenomenon in several ways: 1) Nazism was born out of WW I, 2) the celebration of war as a mean of ennobling humanity and enabling the rise of the superior race was at the core of the Nazi ideology. 

            World War II was the most destructive conflict in world history, with total death of estimated 60 millions, with 50% civilians with many more injured and homeless. A further dimension of the war lay in governments’ effort to mobilize their economies, their people and their propaganda machine.

Part Five: Chapter 17

 The European Moment in world History

How can we avoid an inappropriate Eurocentris when dealing with a phase of world history in which Europeans were in fact central?

First, is simply to remind ourselves how recent and perhaps how brief the European moment in world history has been. Second, we need to remember that the rise of Europe occurred within an international context. It was the withdrawal of the Chinese naval fleet that allowed Europeans to dominate the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, while Native Americans’ lack of immunity to European diseases and their own division and conflicts greatly assisted the European takeover. Third, the rise of Europe to a position of global dominance was not an easy or automatic process. Frequently it occurred in the face of ferocious resistance and rebellion, which often required Europeans to modify their policies and practices. Fourth, Peoples the world over made active use of Europeans and European ideas for their own purposes, seeking to gain advantage over local rivals or to benefit themselves in light of new conditions. Fifth and final, antidote to Eurocentrism in an age of European centrality lies in the recognition that although Europeans gained an unprecedented prominence on the world stage, they were not the only game in town, nor were they the sole preoccupation of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern people.

Atlantic Revolutions and Their Echoes

The various revolutions in North America, France, Haiti, and Latin America were clearly influenced by each other and triggered similar revolutions in other parts of the world in centuries to come. These revolutions shared a set of common ideas that were derived from the European Enlightenment and were communicated across the ocean through newspapers, books and pamphlet. At the heart of these ideas was the notion that human political and social status can be engineered and improved through human actions. The conventional and established way of living­ – the divine right of the kings, state control of trade, the authority of a single church – was losing grounds and the new ideas of liberty, equality, free trade, religious tolerance and others were taking over. Politically, the core notion was “popular sovereignty”, which means that the authority of the state is derived from the people rather than from God. 

The American Revolution was launched with the declaration of independence in 1776, resulted in an unlikely military victory in 1781, and generated a federal constitution in 1787, joining thirteen states in one nation. The revolution was a movement to preserve the existing liberties that the colonies had enjoyed rather than creating new ones. For much of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the British colonies in North America enjoyed a great degree of local autonomy. The colonies were governed by assemblies of elected individuals, mostly of wealthy families. The availability of land, the scarcity of people, and the absence of an established church meant that social life was very open. Because of such freedom, almost no one in the colonies thought of breaking from England since much economic and social values came from England. Thus, the American Revolution did not grow out of social tensions within the colonies, but from a quick and unexpected effort by the British government to tighten its control over the colonies and extract more revenue from them in the form of taxes and tariffs that the American Revolution started. They Americans went to war armed with the ideas of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and consent of the governed. Many historians argue that the society that emerged after the revolution was a society that had existed for a long time and not a direct product of the revolution.

The French revolution began in 1989 after thousands of French soldiers, who had provided assistance to the American Revolution, returned home full of republican enthusiasm. At that time, the French government was in the brink of bankruptcy. The French revolution was quite different from its North American predecessor. Whereas the American Revolution expressed the tension with a colonial relationship with a distant imperial power, the French Revolution was driven by conflicts within French society. All classes had their own resentment to the monarchical power: the nobles resented and resisted the new taxes, the growing middle class groups were offended from being excluded from the privileged class, the ordinary urban residents saw their wealth decline by increasing prices, the peasants were increasingly subject to dues and landlords. These social conflicts gave the French Revolution a much more violent, far-reaching and radical character than its American counterpart. In early 1793, King Louis XVI and his queen were executed, an act of regicide that shocked Europe and marked a new stage in revolutionary violence.

The impact of the revolution was felt in many ways: streets got new names, people referred to each other as “citizen so-and-so”, many people joined political clubs and politics became a public affair, common citizens began to think of them as belonging to a nation and the state replaced the church in conducting civil administration.

The French Revolution differs from the American Revolution in the way its influence spread. Until the end of the 19^th century, the influence of the American Revolution came from people’s admiration to its constitution, the French Revolution, on the other hand, spread through conquest, largely under the leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte. 

The French Revolution made a quick and great influence on the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later named Haiti, which was regarded as the richest colony in the world. It produces 40% of the world sugar and half of its coffee. The social structure in Haiti was extremely unequal and therefore was primed for explosion. The slaves numbered around 500,000, while the white masters were about 40,000. In such a volatile setting, the ideas and example of the French Revolution lit several fuses and set in motion a spiral of violence that engulfed the colony for more than a decade.

The revolution had remarkable and unprecedented impacts. Socially, this was the only successful slave revolt in the world. Politically, by thrown off French colonial rule, it became the second independent republic in America and the first non-European state to emerge from Western colonialism. This revolution inspired other slave uprisings. Unfortunately, the destructiveness of the Haitian Revolution: its bitter division of race, color and class; and continuing external opposition contributed much to Haiti abiding poverty and instability.

The final act in a half century of Atlantic revolutionary upheaval took place in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of mainland Latin America. These revolutions differed from the North American and Haitian revolutions in many aspects. The settlers in the Spanish colonies had little tradition of local self-government that had developed in North America. The revolutionary process lasted more than twice as long as it did in North America, partly because Latin American societies were so conflicted and divided by race, class and region. So, the entire independence movement in Latin America took place under the shadow of fear of social rebellion from below. The great violence of the French and Haitian revolutions taught the Latin American elites that political change can easily result in uncontrolled fights. The significant social and regional differences explain the failure of Latin Americans to unit a single country like what happened in North America.

In a little more than a century from 1780 to 1890, slavery lost its legitimacy and was largely ended. In this amazing process, the ideas and practices of the Atlantic revolutions played an important role. The Enlightenment thinkers in the 18^th century had become very critical of slavery and wrote frequently against its legitimacy. Also, the revolt of slaves in Haiti and the other similar revolts showed that slaves were willing to take actions to elevate the oppression.

The Atlantic revolutions also gave rise to new prominence to a relatively new kind of human community – the nation. By the end of the 20^th century, the idea that humankind was divided into separate nations, each with a distinct culture and territory and deserving independent political life, was very widespread. This idea was very new as human usually formed their identity around local identities such as clan, village or region. This typical loyalty framework began to change during the era of Atlantic revolutions.

Nationalism proved to be a very flexible and powerful idea in the 19^th century. It inspired the political unification of both Germany and Italy. It encouraged Greeks and Serbs to gain their independence from the Ottoman Empire, and many others followed. Moreover, governments throughout the Western world claimed to act on behalf of their nations and deliberately tried to instill national loyalties in their citizens. 

Thinkers and European Enlightenment had challenged many ancient traditions like women’s intrinsic inferiority. The French revolution raised the possibility of re-creating human societies on new foundations. Many women participated in its events and some insisted that the revolution ideas of liberty and equality must include women. Like nationalism, a concern with women’s rights spread beyond Western Europe and the United States.

Chapter 16: Religion and Science

            In 1500, Christianity was mostly limited to Europe. Then, it spread to small communities in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia. With time, serious divisions occurred within Christianity (Roman Catholic vs. Eastern Orthodox).  Christianity was on the defensive against Islam since the inception of the latter.

            In Western Christendom, Protestant Reformation began in 1517 by Martin Luther King. Luther’s ideas provoked a massive schism in Catholic Christendom, many women were attracted to Protestantism, but the Reformation didn’t give them a greater role in church or society. The recently invented printing press helped Reformation thought spread rapidly. As the Reformation spread, it splintered into an array of competing Protestant churches. Religious difference made Europe’s fractured political system even more volatile. Protestant Reformation provoked a Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the Reformation encouraged skepticism toward authority and tradition.

            Christianity motivated and benefited from European expansion. Imperialism made the globalization of Christianity possible. Process of population collapse, conquest, and resettlement made Native Americans receptive to the conquering religion.  Europeans claimed exclusive religious truth, tried to destroy traditional religions instead of accommodating them.

            Expansion and Renewal in the Islamic World and the continuing spread of Islam depended not on conquest but on wandering holy men, scholars, and traders. The syncretism of Islamization was increasingly offensive to orthodox Muslims,  the most well-known Islamic renewal movement of the period was Wahhabism.

            Scientific Revolution’s initial breakthrough was by Nicolaus Copernicus,. Other scientists built on Copernicus’s insight, sir Isaac Newton was the apogee of the Scientific Revolution. By Newton’s death, educated Europeans had a fundamentally different view of the physical universe. The human body also became less mysterious. Catholic Church strenuously opposed much of this thinking.