6. The Light and Dark of Wester Dominance Flashcards
Chapters 26 - 30
Define Great Mutiny / Great Revolt
The terms used by the British and the Indians, respectively, to describe the last armed resistance to British rule in India, which occurred in 1857.
Define Indian Civil Service
The bureaucracy that administered the government of India. Entry into its elite ranks was through examinations that Indians were eligible to take, but these tests were offered only in England.
Define Indian National Congress
A political association formed in 1885 that worked for Indian self-government.
Define Java War
The 1825–1830 war between the Dutch government and the Javanese, fought over the extension of Dutch control of the island.
Define Nguyen Dynasty
The last Vietnamese ruling house, which lasted from 1802 to 1945.
Define Opium War
The 1839–1842 war between the British and the Chinese over limitations on trade and the importation of opium into China.
Define extraterritoriality
The legal principle that exempts individuals from local law, applicable in China because of the agreements reached after China’s loss in the Opium War.
Define Taiping Rebellion
A massive rebellion by believers in the religious teachings of Hong Xiuquan, begun in 1851 and not suppressed until 1864.
Define Boxers
A Chinese secret society that blamed the country’s ills on foreigners, especially missionaries, and rose in rebellion in 1900.
Define 1911 Revolution
The uprising that brought China’s monarchy to an end.
Define gunboat diplomacy
The imposition of treaties and agreements under threat of military violence, such as the opening of Japan to trade after Commodore Perry’s demands.
Define Meiji Restoration
The 1867 ousting of the Tokugawa Shogunate that “restored” the power of the Japanese emperors.
Define Russo-Japanese War
The 1904–1905 war between Russia and Japan fought over imperial influence and territory in northeast China (Manchuria).
Define indentured laborers
Laborers who agreed to a term of employment, specified in a contract.
In what ways did India change as a consequence of British rule?
Arriving in India on the heels of the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, the British East India Company outmaneuvered French and Dutch rivals and was there to pick up the pieces as the Mughal Empire decayed during the eighteenth century (see “From the British East India Company to the British Empire in India” in Chapter 17). By 1757 the company had gained control over much of India. During the nineteenth century the British government replaced the company, progressively unified the subcontinent, and harnessed its economy to British interests.
Why were most but not all Southeast Asian societies reduced to colonies?
At the beginning of the nineteenth century only a small part of Southeast Asia was under direct European control. By the end of the century most of the region would be in foreign hands.
Was China’s decline in the nineteenth century due more to internal problems or to Western imperialism?
In 1800 most Chinese had no reason to question the concept of China as the central kingdom. A century later China’s world standing had sunk precipitously. In 1900 foreign troops marched into China’s capital to protect foreign nationals, and more and more Chinese had come to think that their government, society, and cultural values needed to be radically changed.
How was Japan able to quickly master the challenges posed by the West?
During the eighteenth century Japan (much more effectively than China) kept foreign merchants and missionaries at bay. It limited trade to a single port (Nagasaki), where only the Dutch were allowed, and forbade Japanese to travel abroad. Because Japan’s land and population were so much smaller than China’s, the Western powers never expected much from Japan as a trading partner and did not press it as urgently. Still, the European threat was part of what propelled Japan to modernize.
What were the causes and consequences of the vast movement of people in 19th century Pacific region?
The nineteenth century was marked by extensive movement of people into, across, and out of Asia and the broad Pacific region. Many of these migrants moved from one Asian country to another, but there was also a growing presence of Europeans in Asia, a consequence of the increasing integration of the world economy.
What explains the similarities and differences in the experiences of Asian countries in the 19th century?
At the start of the nineteenth century the societies of Asia varied much more than those of any other part of the world. In the temperate zones of East Asia, the old established monarchies of China, Japan, and Korea were all densely populated and boasted long literary traditions and traditions of unified governments. They had ties to each other that dated back many centuries and shared many elements of their cultures. South of them, in the tropical and subtropical regions, cultures were more diverse. India was just as densely populated as China, Japan, and Korea, but politically and culturally less unified, with several major languages and dozens of independent rulers reigning in kingdoms large and small, not to mention the growing British presence. In both India and Southeast Asia, Islam was much more important than it was in East Asia. All the countries with long written histories and literate elites were at a great remove from the thinly populated and relatively primitive areas without literate cultures and sometimes even without agriculture, such as Australia and some of the islands of the Philippines and Indonesia.
Define oligarchs
In Latin America, the small number of individuals and families that had monopolized political power and economic resources since the colonial era.
Define Circum-Caribbean
The region encompassing the Antilles as well as the lands that bound the Caribbean Sea in Central America and northern South America.
Define caudillismo
Government by figures who rule through personal charisma and the support of armed followers in Latin America.
Define manifest destiny
The doctrine that the United States should absorb the territory spanning from the original Atlantic states to the Pacific Ocean.
Define Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The 1848 treaty between the United States and Mexico in which Mexico ceded large tracts of land to the United States.
Define Lerdo Law
An 1856 Mexican law that barred corporate landholdings.
Define neocolonialism
The establishment of political and economic influence over regions after they have ceased to be formal colonies.
Define free womb laws
Laws passed across the nineteenth-century Americas that instituted a gradual form of abolition through which children born to slaves gained their freedom.
Define latifundios
Vast landed estates in Latin America.
Define Porfiriato
The regime of Porfirio Díaz, who presided in Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911.
Define Plan de Ayala
Document written by Zapatistas during the Mexican Revolution that demanded the government return all land, forests, and waters taken from rural communities.
Define anarcho-syndicalism
A version of anarchism that advocated placing power in the hands of workers’ unions.
Define Monroe Doctrine
An 1823 proclamation that established a U.S. sphere of influence over the Americas by opposing European imperialism on the continent.
Define Roosevelt Corollary
A corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stating that the United States would correct what it saw as “chronic wrongdoing” in neighboring countries.
How and why did the process of nation-state consolidation vary across the Americas?
After American nations gained their independence between 1783 and 1825, each began a long and often-violent process of state-building and consolidating its eventual national territory. In countries such as Mexico and Argentina new governments failed to establish the trust needed for political stability. In the United States long-standing tensions culminated in the Civil War, while in Cuba nationalists fought a long struggle for independence from Spain.
Why did slavery last longer in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba than in the other republics of the Americas? How did resistance by slaves shape abolition?
In former Spanish-American colonies, the abolition of slavery quickly followed independence. In British colonies, slavery ended in 1834, and the British navy suppressed the Atlantic slave trade. But in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil slavery endured well into the nineteenth century. In each of these countries the question of abolition became entwined with the disputes over the nature of government and authority — federal unionism versus states’ rights in the United States, independence for Cuba, and monarchy versus republicanism in Brazil.
As Latin America became more integrated into the world economy, how did patterns of economic growth shape political culture and social reactions?
Beginning in the 1850s and accelerating through conflicts like Mexico’s Wars of Reform, the U.S. Civil War, and the Paraguay War in South America, the consolidation of liberalism in the Americas created conditions for a return of foreign investment that brought economic growth. But liberal reforms created new economic pressures against rural workers and indigenous communities who led reform and resistance movements such as those unleashed by the Mexican Revolution.
What factors shaped patterns of immigration to the Americas? How did immigrants shape — and how were they shaped by — their new settings?
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries unprecedented numbers of people from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East settled across North and South America. The largest wave of immigrants — some 28 million between 1860 and 1914 — settled in the United States. Another 8 million had settled in Argentina and Brazil by 1930. This cycle of immigration was a product of liberal political and economic reforms that abolished slavery, established stable political systems, and created a framework for integrating immigrants as factory and farm laborers.
