3. Contrasting East and West

Question 1

Define Ming Dynasty

Answer 1

The Chinese dynasty in power from 1368 to 1644; it marked a period of vibrant urban culture.

Question 2

Define civil service examinations

Answer 2

A highly competitive series of written tests held at the prefecture, province, and capital levels in China to select men to become officials

Question 3

Define Qing Dynasty

Answer 3

The dynasty founded by the Manchus that ruled China from 1644 to 1911.

Question 4

Define banners

Answer 4

Units of the Manchu army, composed of soldiers, their families, and slaves.

Question 5

Define Nō theater

Answer 5

A type of Japanese theater performed on a bare stage by one or two actors wearing brilliant brocade robes, one actor wearing a mask. The performers conveyed emotions and ideas as much through gestures, stances, and dress as through words.

Question 6

Define daimyo

Answer 6

Regional lords in Japan, many of whom were self-made men

Question 7

Define Tokugawa Shogunate

Answer 7

The Japanese government in Edo founded by Tokugawa Ieyasu. It lasted from 1603 to 1867.

Question 8

Define alternate residence system

Answer 8

Arrangement in which Japanese lords were required to live in Edo every other year and left their wives and sons there as hostages to the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Question 9

What sort of state and society developed in China after the Mongols were ousted?

Answer 9

The founding of the Ming Dynasty ushered in an era of peace and prosperity. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, the Ming government was beset by fiscal, military, and political problems.

Question 10

Did the return of alien rule with the Manchus have any positive consequences for China?

Answer 10

The next dynasty, the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), was founded by the Manchus, a non-Chinese people who were descended from the Jurchens. In the late sixteenth century the Manchus began expanding their territories, and in 1644 they founded the Qing (CHING) Dynasty, which brought peace and in time prosperity. Successful Qing military campaigns extended the borders into Mongol, Tibetan, and Uighur regions, creating a multiethnic empire that was larger than any earlier Chinese dynasty.

Question 11

How did Japan change during the twelfth-century period of political instability?

Answer 11

In the twelfth century Japan entered an age dominated by military men, an age that can be compared to Europe’s feudal age. The Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1333) had its capital in the east, at Kamakura. It was succeeded by the Ashikaga Shogunate (1338–1573), which returned the government to Kyoto (KYOH-toh) and helped launch, during the fifteenth century, the great age of Zen-influenced Muromachi culture. The sixteenth century brought civil war over succession to the shogunate, leading to the building of massive castles and the emergence of rulers of obscure origins who eventually unified the realm.

Question 12

What was life like in Japan during the Tokugawa peace?

Answer 12

On his deathbed, Hideyoshi set up a council of regents to govern during the minority of his infant son. The strongest regent was Hideyoshi’s long-time supporter Tokugawa Ieyasu (toh-koo-GAH-wuh ee-eh-YAH-soo) (1543–1616). In 1600 at Sekigahara, Ieyasu smashed a coalition of daimyo defenders of the heir and began building his own government — thus ending the long period of civil war. In 1603 he took the title “shogun.” The Tokugawa Shogunate that Ieyasu fashioned lasted until 1867. This era is also called the Edo (AY-doh) period after the location of the shogunate in the city of Edo (now called Tokyo), starting Tokyo’s history as Japan’s most important city

Question 13

How did the sea link the countries of East Asia, and what happened when Europeans entered this maritime sphere?

Answer 13

In the period 1400–1800 maritime trade and piracy connected China and Japan to each other and also to Korea, Southeast Asia, and Europe. Both Korea and Japan relied on Chinese coinage, and China relied on silver from Japan. During the fifteenth century China launched overseas expeditions. Japan was a major base for pirates. In the sixteenth century European traders appeared, eager for Chinese porcelains and silks. Christian missionaries followed. Political changes in Europe changed the international makeup of the European traders in East Asia, with the dominant groups first the Portuguese, next the Dutch, and then the British.

Question 14

Define Treaty of Paris

Answer 14

The 1763 peace treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War, according vast French territories in North America and India to Britain and Louisiana to Spain.

Question 15

Define Declaration of Independence

Answer 15

The 1776 document in which the American colonies declared independence from Great Britain and recast traditional English rights as universal human rights.

Question 16

Define Antifederalists

Answer 16

Opponents of the American Constitution who felt it diminished individual rights and accorded too much power to the federal government at the expense of the states.

Question 17

Define Estates General

Answer 17

Traditional representative body of the three estates of France that met in 1789 in response to imminent state bankruptcy.

Question 18

Define National Assembly

Answer 18

French representative assembly formed in 1789 by the delegates of the third estate and some members of the clergy, the second estate.

Question 19

Define Jacobin club

Answer 19

A political club during the French Revolution to which many of the deputies of the Legislative Assembly belonged.

Question 20

Define Mountain

Answer 20

Led by Robespierre, the French National Convention’s radical faction, which led the Convention in 1793.

Question 21

Define Girondists

Answer 21

A moderate group that fought for control of the French National Convention in 1793.

Question 22

Define sans-culottes

Answer 22

The laboring poor of Paris, so called because the men wore trousers instead of the knee breeches of the wealthy; the term came to refer to the militant radicals of the city.

Question 23

Define Reign of Terror

Answer 23

The period from 1793 to 1794, during which Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety tried and executed thousands suspected of political crimes and a new revolutionary culture was imposed.

Question 24

Define Thermidorian reaction

Answer 24

A reaction in 1794 to the violence of the Reign of Terror, resulting in the execution of Robespierre and the loosening of economic controls.

Question 25

Define Napoleonic Code

Answer 25

French civil code promulgated in 1804 that reasserted the 1789 principles of the equality of all male citizens before the law and the absolute security of wealth and private property.

Question 26

Define Grand Empire

Answer 26

The empire over which Napoleon and his allies ruled, encompassing virtually all of Europe except Great Britain.

Question 27

Define Continental System

Answer 27

A blockade imposed by Napoleon in which no ship coming from Britain or its colonies was permitted to dock at any port controlled by the French.

Question 28

Define Creoles

Answer 28

People of European descent born in the Americas.

Question 29

Define peninsulares

Answer 29

A term for natives of Spain and Portugal.

Question 30

What were the factors behind the age of revolution in the Atlantic world?

Answer 30

The origins of revolutions in the Atlantic world were complex. No one cause lay behind them, nor was revolution inevitable or certain of success. However, a series of shared factors helped set the stage for reform. They included fundamental social and economic changes and political crises that eroded state authority; the impact of political ideas derived from the Enlightenment; and, perhaps most important, imperial competition and financial crises generated by the expenses of imperial warfare.

Question 31

Why and how did American colonists forge a new, independent nation?

Answer 31

Although inspired in part by events in North America, the French Revolution did not mirror the American example. It was more radical and more complex, more influential and more controversial. For Europeans and most of the rest of the world, it was the great revolution of the eighteenth century, the revolution that opened the modern era in politics.

Question 32

Why and how did revolutionaries in France transform the nation first into a constitutional monarchy and then into a republic that entered war with European powers?

Answer 32

Although inspired in part by events in North America, the French Revolution did not mirror the American example. It was more radical and more complex, more influential and more controversial. For Europeans and most of the rest of the world, it was the great revolution of the eighteenth century, the revolution that opened the modern era in politics.

Question 33

How did Napoleon Bonaparte assume control of France and much of Europe, and what factors led to his downfall?

Answer 33

For almost fifteen years, from 1799 to 1814, France was in the hands of a keen-minded military dictator of exceptional ability. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) realized the need to put an end to civil strife in France in order to create unity and consolidate his rule. And he did. But Napoleon saw himself as a man of destiny, and the glory of war and the dream of universal empire proved irresistible.

Question 34

How did a slave revolt on colonial Saint-Domingue lead to the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804?

Answer 34

• 90% of the population consisted of people of color/slaves.
• there were free people of color.
• free people of color wanted to be seen as equals to Creoles (white people born in the colonies).
• L’Overture: was a political leader and commander, once a slave but then he was freed, first he fought with the Spanish but then he switched to fighting with the French against the Spanish.
• slaves held meetings in which they discussed when they were going to revolt.
• slaves rebelled and destroyed sugar and coffee plantations.
• France promised freedom to those who joined them in defeating the rebels.
• 1804: Haiti became an independent nation.

Question 35

How did a slave revolt on colonial Saint-Domingue lead to the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804?

Answer 35

• 90% of the population consisted of people of color/slaves.
• there were free people of color.
• free people of color wanted to be seen as equals to Creoles (white people born in the colonies).
• L’Overture: was a political leader and commander, once a slave but then he was freed, first he fought with the Spanish but then he switched to fighting with the French against the Spanish.
• slaves held meetings in which they discussed when they were going to revolt.
• slaves rebelled and destroyed sugar and coffee plantations.
• France promised freedom to those who joined them in defeating the rebels.
• 1804: Haiti became an independent nation.

Question 36

Why and how did the Spanish and Portuguese colonies of North and South America shake off European domination and develop into national states?

Answer 36

In 1800 the Spanish Empire in the Americas stretched from the headwaters of the Mississippi River in present-day Minnesota to the tip of Cape Horn in the Antarctic. Portugal controlled the vast territory of Brazil. Spain and Portugal believed that the great wealth of the Americas existed for the benefit of the Iberian powers, a stance that fostered bitterness and a thirst for independence in the colonies. Between 1806 and 1825 the colonies in Latin America were convulsed by upheavals that ultimately resulted in their independence. For Latin American republicans, their struggles were a continuation of the transatlantic wave of democratic revolution.

Question 37

Define Industrial Revolution

Answer 37

A term first coined in the 1830s to describe the burst of major inventions and economic expansion that took place in certain industries, such as cotton textiles and iron, between 1780 and 1850.

Question 38

Define spinning jenny

Answer 38

A simple, inexpensive, hand-powered spinning machine created by James Hargreaves about 1765.

Question 39

Define water frame

Answer 39

A spinning machine created by Richard Arkwright that had a capacity of several hundred spindles and used waterpower; it therefore required a larger and more specialized mill — a factory.

Question 40

Define steam engines

Answer 40

A breakthrough invention by Thomas Savery in 1698 and Thomas Newcomen in 1705 that burned coal to produce steam, which was then used to operate a pump; the early models were superseded by James Watt’s more efficient steam engine, patented in 1769.

Question 41

Define Rocket

Answer 41

The name given to George Stephenson’s effective locomotive that was first tested in 1829 on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and reached a maximum speed of 35 miles per hour.

Question 42

Define Crystal Palace

Answer 42

The location of the Great Exhibition in 1851 in London, an architectural masterpiece made entirely of glass and iron.

Question 43

Define iron law of wages

Answer 43

Theory proposed by English economist David Ricardo suggesting that the pressure of population growth prevents wages from rising above the subsistence level.

Question 44

Define tariff protection

Answer 44

A government’s way of supporting and aiding its own economy by laying high taxes on imported goods from other countries, as when the French responded to the flood of cheaper British goods in their country by imposing high tariffs on some imported products.

Question 45

Define Factory Act of 1833

Answer 45

English law that led to a sharp decline in the employment of children by limiting the hours that children over age nine could work and banning employment of children younger than nine.

Question 46

Define separate spheres

Answer 46

A gender division of labor with the wife at home as mother and homemaker and the husband as wage earner.

Question 47

Define Mines Act of 1842

Answer 47

English law prohibiting underground work for all women and girls as well as for boys under ten.

Question 48

Define Luddites

Answer 48

Group of handicraft workers who attacked factories in northern England in 1811 and after, smashing the new machines that they believed were putting them out of work.

Question 49

Define class-consciousness

Answer 49

An individual’s sense of class differentiation, a term introduced by Karl Marx.

Question 50

Define Combination Acts

Answer 50

English laws passed in 1799 that outlawed unions and strikes, favoring capitalist business owners over skilled artisans. Bitterly resented and widely disregarded by many craft guilds, the acts were repealed by Parliament in 1824.

Question 51

Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain, and how did it develop between 1780 and 1850?

Answer 51

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, the nation created by the formal union of Scotland, Wales, and England in 1707. The transformation in industry was something new in history, and it was unplanned. It originated from a unique combination of possibilities and constraints in late-eighteenth-century Britain. With no models to copy and no idea of what to expect, Britain pioneered not only in industrial technology but also in social relations and urban living.

Question 52

How did countries in Europe and around the world respond to the challenge of industrialization after 1815?

Answer 52

Britain’s claim to be the “workshop of the world” was no idle boast, for it produced two-thirds of the world’s coal and more than half of its iron and cotton cloth. More generally, in 1860 Britain produced a remarkable 20 percent of the entire world’s output of industrial goods, whereas it had produced only about 2 percent of the world total in 1750. As the British economy significantly increased its production of manufactured goods, the gross national product (GNP) rose roughly fourfold at constant prices between 1780 and 1851. At the same time, the population of Britain boomed, growing from about 9 million in 1780 to almost 21 million in 1851. Thus growing numbers consumed much of the increase in total production.

Question 53

How did work evolve during the Industrial Revolution, and how did daily life change for working people?

Answer 53

The rise of industrialization in Britain, western Europe, and the United States thus caused other regions of the world to become increasingly economically dependent. Instead of industrializing, many territories underwent a process of deindustrialization or delayed industrialization. In turn, relative economic weakness made them vulnerable to the new wave of imperialism undertaken by industrialized nations in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Question 54

How did the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution lead to new social classes, and how did people respond to the new structure?

Answer 54

In Great Britain industrial development led to the creation of new social groups and intensified long-standing problems between capital and labor. A new class of factory owners and industrial capitalists arose. The demands of modern industry regularly brought the interests of the middle-class industrialists into conflict with those of the people who worked for them — the working class. As observers took note of these changes, they raised new questions about how industrialization affected social relationships. Meanwhile, enslaved laborers in European colonies contributed to the industrialization process in multiple ways.

Question 55

Define Congress of Vienna

Answer 55

A meeting of the Quadruple Alliance (Russia, Prussia, Austria, Great Britain) and France held in 1814–1815 to fashion a general peace settlement after the defeat of Napoleonic France.

Question 56

Define conservatism

Answer 56

A political philosophy that stressed retaining traditional values and institutions, including hereditary monarchy and a strong landowning aristocracy.

Question 57

Define liberalism

Answer 57

A philosophy whose principal ideas were equality and liberty; liberals demanded representative government and equality before the law as well as such individual freedoms as freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom from arbitrary arrest.

Question 58

Define laissez faire

Answer 58

A doctrine of economic liberalism advocating unrestricted private enterprise and no government interference in the economy.

Question 59

Define nationalism

Answer 59

The idea that each people had its own spirit and its own cultural unity, which manifested itself especially in a common language and history and could serve as the basis for an independent political state.

Question 60

Define socialism

Answer 60

A radical political doctrine that opposed individualism and that advocated cooperation and a sense of community; key ideas were economic planning, greater economic equality, and state regulation of property.

Question 61

Define bourgeoisie

Answer 61

The well-educated, prosperous, middle-class groups.

Question 62

Define proletariat

Answer 62

The Marxist term for the working class of modern industrialized society.

Question 63

Define modernization

Answer 63

The changes that enable a country to compete effectively with the leading countries at a given time.

Question 64

Define October Manifesto

Answer 64

The result of a great general strike in Russia in October 1905, it granted full civil rights and promised a popularly elected Duma (parliament) with real legislative power.

Question 65

Define germ theory

Answer 65

The idea that disease is caused by the spread of living organisms that can be controlled.

Question 66

Define evolution

Answer 66

The idea, developed by Charles Darwin, that all life had gradually evolved from a common origin through a process of natural selection.
Darwin’s theory

Question 67

Define Social Darwinism

Answer 67

The application of the theory of biological evolution to human affairs, it sees the human race as driven to ever-greater specialization and progress by an unending economic struggle that determines the survival of the fittest.

Question 68

Define Romanticism

Answer 68

A movement in art, literature, and music characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both art and personal life.

Question 69

Define Dreyfus affair

Answer 69

A divisive case in which Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army, was falsely accused and convicted of treason. The Catholic Church sided with the anti-Semites against Dreyfus; after Dreyfus was declared innocent, the French government severed all ties between the state and the church.

Question 70

Define Zionism

Answer 70

The movement toward Jewish political nationhood started by Theodor Herzl.

Question 71

Define revisionism

Answer 71

An effort by various socialists to update Marxist doctrines to reflect the realities of the time.

Question 72

How did the allies fashion a peace settlement in 1815, and what radical ideas emerged between 1815 and 1848?

Answer 72

After finally defeating Napoleon, the conservative aristocratic monarchies of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Great Britain — known as the Quadruple Alliance — reaffirmed their determination to hold France in line and to defeat the intertwined dangers of war and revolution. At the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), they fashioned a lasting peace settlement that helped produce fifty years without major warfare in Europe. On the domestic front, they sought to restore order and limit the spread of revolutionary ideas.

Question 73

Why did revolutions triumph briefly throughout most of Europe in 1848, and why did they fail?

Answer 73

As liberal, nationalist, and socialist forces battered the conservatism of 1815, social and economic conditions continued to deteriorate for many Europeans, adding to the mounting pressures. In some countries, such as Great Britain, change occurred gradually and largely peacefully, but in 1848 radical political and social ideologies combined with economic crisis to produce revolutionary movements that demanded an end to repressive government. Between 1815 and 1848 many European countries, including France, Austria, and Prussia, experienced variations on this basic theme. The Revolution of 1848 failed in its attempt to unify the German-speaking states because the Frankfurt Assembly reflected the many different interests of the German ruling classes. Its members were unable to form coalitions and push for specific goals. The first conflict arose over the goals of the assembly.

Question 74

How did strong leaders and nation building transform Italy, Germany, and Russia?

Answer 74

Louis Napoleon’s triumph in 1848 and his authoritarian rule in the 1850s provided Europe’s victorious forces of order with a new political model. To what extent might the expanding urban middle classes and even portions of the working classes rally to a strong and essentially conservative national state that also promised change? This was one of the great political questions in the 1850s and 1860s. In central Europe a resounding answer came with the national unification of Germany and Italy.

Question 75

What was the impact of urban growth on cities, social classes, families, and ideas?

Answer 75

By 1900 western Europe was urban and industrial as surely as it had been rural and agrarian in 1800. Rapid urban growth in the nineteenth century worsened long-standing overcrowding and unhealthy living conditions, lending support to voices calling for revolutionary change. In response, government leaders, city planners, reformers, and scientists urgently sought solutions to these challenges. Over the long term, success in improving the urban environment and the introduction of social welfare measures encouraged people to put their faith in a responsive national state.

Question 76

How did nationalism and socialism shape European politics in the decades before the Great War?

Answer 76

After 1871 Europe’s heartland was organized into strong national states. Only on Europe’s borders — in Ireland and Russia, in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans — did people still strive for national unity and independence. Nationalism served, for better or worse, as a new unifying political principle. At the same time, socialist parties grew rapidly. Governing elites manipulated national feeling to create a sense of unity to divert attention from underlying class conflicts, and increasingly channeled national sentiment in an antiliberal and militaristic direction, tolerating anti-Semitism and waging wars in non-Western lands. This policy helped manage domestic conflicts, but only at the expense of increasing the international tensions that erupted in World War I.

Question 77

Define palm oil

Answer 77

A West African tropical product often used to make soap; the British encouraged its cultivation as an alternative to the slave trade.

Question 78

Define jihad

Answer 78

Religious war waged by Muslim scholars and religious leaders against both animist rulers and Islamic states that they deemed corrupt.

Question 79

Define Sokoto caliphate

Answer 79

Founded in 1809 by Uthman dan Fodio, this African state was based on Islamic history and law.

Question 80

Define Berlin Conference

Answer 80

A meeting of European leaders held in 1884–1885 to lay down basic rules for imperialist competition in sub-Saharan Africa.

Question 81

Define protectorate

Answer 81

An autonomous state or territory partly controlled and protected by a stronger outside power.

Question 82

Define Afrikaners

Answer 82

Descendants of the Dutch settlers in the Cape Colony in southern Africa.

Question 83

Define New Imperialism

Answer 83

The late-nineteenth-century drive by European countries to create vast political empires abroad.

Question 84

Define quinine

Answer 84

An agent that proved effective in controlling attacks of malaria, which had previously decimated Europeans in the tropics.

Question 85

Define white man’s burden

Answer 85

The idea that Europeans could and should civilize more primitive nonwhite peoples and that imperialism would eventually provide nonwhites with modern achievements and higher standards of living.

Question 86

Define Tanzimat

Answer 86

A set of radical reforms designed to remake the Ottoman Empire on a western European model.

Question 87

Define Young Turks

Answer 87

Fervent patriots who seized power in the revolution of 1908, forcing the conservative sultan to implement reforms; they helped pave the way for the birth of modern secular Turkey.

Question 88

Define great migration

Answer 88

The mass movement of people from Europe in the nineteenth century; one reason that the West’s impact on the world was so powerful and complex.

Question 89

Define migration chain

Answer 89

The movement of peoples in which one strong individual blazes the way and others follow.

Question 90

Define great white walls

Answer 90

Discriminatory laws passed by Americans and Australians to keep Asians from settling in their countries in the 1880s.

Question 91

What were the most significant changes in Africa during the nineteenth century, and why did they occur?

Answer 91

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the different regions of Africa experienced gradual but monumental change. The transatlantic slave trade declined and practically disappeared by the late 1860s. In the early nineteenth century Islam expanded its influence south of the Sahara Desert, and Africa still generally remained free of European political control. After about 1880 further Islamic expansion to the south stopped, but the pace of change accelerated as France and Britain led European nations in the “scramble for Africa,” dividing and largely conquering the continent. By 1900 the foreigners were consolidating their authoritarian empires.

Question 92

What were the causes and consequences of European empire building after 1880?

Answer 92

Western expansion into Africa and Asia reached its apex between about 1880 and 1914. In those years the leading European nations sent streams of money and manufactured goods to both continents and also rushed to create or enlarge vast overseas political empires. This frantic activity differed sharply from the limited economic penetration of non-Western territories between 1816 and 1880, which had left a China or a Japan “opened” but politically independent. By contrast, late-nineteenth-century empires recalled the old European colonial empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and led contemporaries to speak of the New Imperialism.

Question 93

How did the Ottoman Empire and Egypt try to modernize themselves, and what were the most important results?

Answer 93

Stretching from West Africa into southeastern Europe and across Southwest Asia to the East Indies, Islamic civilization competed successfully with western Europe for centuries. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, however, the rising absolutist states of Austria and Russia began to challenge the Ottoman Empire and gradually to reverse Ottoman rule in southeastern Europe. In the nineteenth century European industrialization and nation building further altered the long-standing balance of power, and Western expansion eventually posed a serious challenge to Muslims everywhere.

Question 94

What were the global consequences of European industrialization between 1800 and 1914?

Answer 94

Over the course of the nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution expanded and transformed economic relations across the face of the earth. As a result, the world’s total income grew as never before, and international trade boomed. Western nations used their superior military power to force non-Western nations to open their doors to Western economic interests. Consequently, the largest share of the ever-increasing gains from trade flowed to the West, resulting in a stark division between rich and poor countries.

Question 95

What fueled migration, and what was the general pattern of this unprecedented movement of people?

Answer 95

A poignant human drama was interwoven with this worldwide economic expansion: millions of people left their ancestral lands in one of history’s greatest migrations, the so-called great migration. In the early eighteenth century the world’s population entered a period of rapid growth that continued unabated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Europe’s population (including Asiatic Russia) more than doubled during the nineteenth century, from approximately 188 million in 1800 to roughly 432 million in 1900. Since African and Asian populations increased more slowly than those in Europe, Europeans and peoples of predominantly European origin jumped from about 22 percent of the world’s total in 1850 to a high of about 38 percent in 1930.