State Building, Expansion, and Conflict, 1750-1900 Flashcards
~Nation-state
● A state-level community united at least in theory by a common ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural heritage
● Emerged as the leading form of political organization in more parts of hte world, particularly in the West
~Change in political order
● In the mid-1700s, all of Europe’s major powers were monarchies, in which the ruler shared power almost exclusively with aristocratic nobles who, despite their small numbers, controlled most of the country’s wealth, owned most of the nation’s land, and enjoyed virtually all influence over politics
● Even parliamentary monarchies like Great Britain allowed comparatively little popular representation at this time
● Most of Latin America and the Caribbean, along with much of North America, lived under European colonical authority
~Atlantic revolutions
● Between the 1770s and the 1810s
● State of affairs was shaken apart
● Include the America Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Rebellion and the Latin American Wars of Independence
● Ended European colonical rule over most of the America
● People began to fight for social and political systems that gave them more voice in government
~American Revolution
● 1775-1783
● The poorly trained and poorly equipped American forced, led by George Washington, struggled against Britain’s professional armies and superior navy
● Battle of Saratoga won France’s support and they had the advantaage of fighting on their homeland
~Declaration of Independence
● Written in 1776
● Authored chiefly by Thomas Jefferson
● Considered a classic Enlightenment text
- Influenced hugely by thinkers such as John Lock and Montesquieu
~United States Constitution
● The process invovled much disagreement and lasted untilt he Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the ratification in 1789
● The resulting system was a democratic republic, in which a federal government shared power with governemnts in each of the 13 states
● First attempt by a major state to base a political system on Enlightenment philosophy
~Balance of power
● Three branches of federal power - Executive (president) - Legislative (Congress) - Judicial (Supreme Court) ● Based on Montesquieu's ideology ● Both at the state and federal level, governments were to be elected
~French Revolution
● 1789-1799
● Include the Estates General, storming of Bastille, Tennis Court Oath, Declaration and counterrevolution
● Radicalized into reign of terror and lead into Napoleonic reign
~Estates General
● A national assembly of delegates from each estate in France
~National assembly
● In late June, 1789, the delegates of the Thrid Estate, with liberal members of the First and Second Estates, formed a new governmental body, the National Assembly, and vowed not to leave Versailles until the king granted them a constituion
~Storming of the Bastille
● The people of Paris and other cities rose up in support of hte assembly in July, so did peasants int he countryside
● They freed many prisoners and seized weaponry
~Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen
● Guided by Enlightenment ideas and the American Declaration of Independence
● Overseen by the Marquis de Lafayette
● Futuer assemblies were to be elected by popular vote
● Aristocratic status and privileges, especially the exemption from taxes, were done away with, and church and state were separated
● Policy was guided by the motto “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality”
~Counterrevolution
● Louis XVI secretly plotted this, encouraged by Marie Antoinette
~French Republic (First)
● In the fall of 1792, a new constitution stripped hte king of all powers and proclaimed a republic
● Elections to a new legislature brought radicals to power, including jacobins
● Civil war erupted in the countryside, as peasants rebelled against conscription and hte radicals’ efforts ot do away with Catholicism
~Jacobins
● Radical gropu led by Maximilien Robespiere, a fanatically idealistic lawyer
~Committee of Public Safety
● An executive body created by Jacobins
● Assumed dictatorial powers and attempted the radical transofrmation of French society
● Expanded the war effort, mobilized hte economy for combat, and carried out modern Europe’s first national draft
~Reign of Terror
● Between the summer of 1793 and the summer of 1794
● Carried out by RObespierre and the Ommitte, supported by the urban sans-culottes
● Searching for traitors and counterrevolutionary foes
● In July 1794, a coup within the committee overthrew and executed Robespierre, ending the Terror
~Directory
● For five years, a more moderate regime presided over the revolution, stablizing the military situation and attempting to heal the wounds caused by the Terror
● Proved unpopular
● 1799, overthrew by Napoleon
~Napoleon Bonaparte
● Quickly seized power for himself after overthrowing the Directory
● Claimed to be a man of revolutionary ideals, but in reality he created a new dictatorship, going so far as to crown himself emperor in 1804
● Best known for his military career
~Bank of France
● Created by Napoleon as an act to modernize France
~Civil Law Code/Napoleonic Code
● Foundation for modern law not just in France, but wherever France extended its colonial influence
~Battle of Waterloo
● The last battle fought by Napoleon
● Lost and exiled to Sicily
~Congress of Vienna
● 1814-1815
● Peace was restored at this after Napoleonic wars
● Forged a long-lasting if informal agreement among Europe’s major regimes to work together to preserve order and prevent change
~Saint Domingue
● Prior to independence, the suar- and coffee-producing colony of Haiti
● By the French and Santo Domingo by the Spanish, with each country occupying half the island and relying heavily on slave labor imported from Africa
● Was threw into turmoil after 1789 because rights of man and the citizen were not extendd to everyone living in French colonies
~Creoles
● Those of European descent but born in the colonies
● Upper and middle classes
~Haitian Rebellion
● 1791-1804
● The only large-scale slave revolt to succeed in the New World
● In 1802, Napoleon sent a large force to end the rebellion
- The French proved unequal to tropical warfare and lost 40,000 soldiers to yellow fever
● The independent nation of Haiti was born in 1804
~Francois Toussaint L’Ouverture
● A talented commander known as the “Black Washington”
● Come to elad the revolt in 1793
● His goal was full independence and the liberation of slaves on the Spanish side of the island, which he invaded in 1798
~Louisiana Purchase
● Secured by Thomas Jefferson in 1803
● Significantly boosted hte US chances of eventually mastering the netire continent and can be seen in hindsight as a major shift in global power
● Influenced by the Haitian Rebellion
~Latin American wars of independence
● 1810-1825
● Mexico, Central America, and South America
● By 1825, royalists had been cleared out of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru and Spanish South America was free
~Simon Bolivar
● A revolutionaries known as the Liberator
● A member of Venezuela’s criollo upper class, he was inspired by Englightenment ideals, frustrated by the inefficiency and injustice of Spanish rule, and personally ambitious
● He took control of the independence movement in 1810, sweeping across hte northern parts of Spanish South America
~Jamaica Letter
● Written bby Bolivar in 1815 ● Elaborated his principles ● Turned a small and unsuccessful upper- and middle-class rebellion into a mass war of independence
~Jose de San Martin
● A general turned revolutionary
● between 1816 and 1820, San Martin had freed southern areas such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay
● He was more conservative, despite political differences
~Mexican War of Independence
● 1810-1823
● Complicated by the inability of various social classes to cooperate
● In the end, Mexico’s revolt was completed by the elite, not the lower classes
● A Mexican republic was proclaimed in 1923, the same year that the nations immediately to the south established the United Provinces of Central America
~Miguel Hidalgo
● The priest who called for freedom from Spain
● He was killed in 1811, but his fight was carried on by another priest, Morelos
~Jose Maria Morelos
● Took Hidalgo’s platform
● Killed in 1815 by conservative Mexicans
~Agustin Iturbide
● A right-wing colonel who overthrew Spanish rule in 1820-1821
● He tried to establish himself as a dictator, but was quickly ousted
~New imperialism
● The more aggressive and systematic character of western colonial expansion
● Was an impressive military feat, and it brought Europe and America great power and wealth
● Inseparable from blooshed, racial prejudice and slavery
~Heart of Darkness
● Written by English-Polish author Joseph Conrad
● one of the classic literary depictions of European imperialism
~Quinine
● Anti-malarial treatment
● Westerners could enter tropical zones where illnesses like sleeping sickness, yellow fever, and malaria had previously kept them from gaining footholds
~White man’s burden/La mission civilisatrice
● Many westerners became convinced that they had a duty to teach and modernize those peoples
● Labled by the English poet Rudyard Kipling (former)
● French spoke of their civilizing mission (latter)
● Could be well-meaning and useful but they did so at least partly out of condescension and they often trampled on or eradicated native cultural practices andbeliefs
~Overseas empires/settler colonies
● Best-known empires
● Largest being Britain’s
● Famous motto “the sun never sets”
● Countries like Spain, Portugal and hte Netherlands continued to hold on to certain overseas possessions from the Columbian age of exploration
● After 1870, Germany and Italy began to build overseas empires in an attempt to catch up
~Land-based empires
● Expanded as well
● Austria maintained one in eastern and southeastern Europe, colliding with the empire ruled by the Ottoman Turks
● Russia conquered Siberia, much of Central Asia, and for a time, parts of North America
● Japan extended its imperial reach to the Asian mainland at the end of the century
~Economic imperialism
● Typically involved pressuring weaker nations to offer favorable trade terms, rather than outright colonization
● Prominent targets during this century included Latin America, Qing China and arguably Egyt during and after the construction of hte Suez Canal
~Eastern Question
● How to fill the power vacuum caused int he Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Empire’s steady decline
● If they fell, chaos or a stronger foe might aris in their place
● It might upset Europe’s balance of power
● Agreed to manage the empire’s decline slowly and carefully, and even to prop it up if it seemed in danger of immediate collapse
~Great Game
● The collision of British and Russian spheres of influence in Central Asia
~Scramble for Africa
● The rush to subjugate the entire continent between the 1880s and the 1910s
~Balance of power (Europe)
● Was made increasingly harder for Western states to maintain
● The Congress of Vienna preserved peace among the European powers before the Crimean War (1853-1856)
● After mid-century, wars involving Western states became more common, including Franco-Prussian War
~Franco-Prussian War
● 1870-1871
● Created the modern German state and completed hte process of Italian unification
~jingoism
● Growing spirit of belligerent patriotism
~Long Peace
● Relative stability among the Western powers was maintained between 1871 and 1914
~Potential for a major conflict
● Especially after 1890, when the Otto von Bismarck was dismissed by the rash and impatient emperor Wilhelm II
● A cautious diplomat and a key architect of hte European balance of power
● German chancellor
~European alliance system
● During the 1890s adn the early 1900s
● It divided the great powers into two armed camps
~Triple Alliance
● Germany and Austria were already aligned with Italy
● Formed in 1881
● Italy dropped out in 1914
~Franco-Russian alliance
● In the mid-1890s, France, bitter about defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, allied with Russia, which viewed Austria as a threat in the Balkans, which both countries viewed as ttheir rightful sphere of influence
● They had their rivals surrounded geographically
~Triple Entente
● Britain informally partnered with the Franco-Russian alliance in 1907
~Reaction
● Arch-conservative stance
● Between 1815 and 1848, most govenrments, convinced that even the slightest liberalism would lead to renewed political chaos, attempted to minimized change or even undo what had transpired during the revolutionary and Napoleonic years
● Guiding principle of the COngress of Vienna
~1832 Reform Act
● Slightly expanded the vote in the parliamentary states Britain
● The worst industrial-era working conditions began to attract Parliament’s attenntion
~1830 revolution
● Futher limited the power of hte monarch in France
~Revolution of 1848
● Key turning point
● Began in France, where the king was deposed and Napoleon’s nephew appointed president
● Uprisings then spread to much of the rest of Europe, although they spared Britian and Russia
~Second (1867) and Third (1885) Reform Acts
● Granted economic concessions and fairer labor laws to the lower classes ● Extended the vote to middle- and lower-class males
~Napoleon II
● The president Louis Napoleon staged a coup and crowned himself emperor in 1851
● He was not an absolute dictator and he helped to modernized Paris and industrialize the country
● His defeat during the Franco-Prussian War cuased his abdication
~Second Republic of France
● After a short but bloody revolution , a new democratic republic arose in 1871 and lasted until 1940
● Corruption, financial scandals, and party rivalries rocked France
~Dreyfus Affair
● 1894-1906
● The army and government falsely blamed a Jewish officer for the leaking of military secrets to Germany
● Controversy divided hte left (maintained Dreyfus’s innocence) from the right (which was convinced of his guilt) and exposed the ugly streak of anti-Semitism in modern European society
~Unification of Italy
● As a parliamentary monarchy took place in the 1860s and was finished in 1870
~Unification of Germany
● Spearheaded by Prussia in a series of three short conflicts, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871
● The new German emperor shared power with a legislature called the Reichstag, and all adult males technically had the vote–althought the electoral system was heavily stacked in faovr of the upper classes
~Otto von Bismarck
● Serving the emperor as chancellor, Germany rapidly modernized udner policy of state-directed industrialization
● Offered the lower classes substantial economic concessions to keep them from becoming attracted to trade unions or socialism
~Ausgleich of 1867
● Granted equal status to Austria’s largest minory, the Hungarians, and the state was remaned the Austro-Hungarian Empire
~Alexander II
● Shaken by his country’s embarrassing loss int he Crimean War, the moderately liberal Alexander II modernized Russia with a series of “Great reforms”
● The most important of which was his 1861 emancipation of the serfs
● Assassinated by radical terrorists who believed he had not gone far enough, and hte conservative tsars who succeeded him undid many of his changes
~Nicholas II
● Met with a terrible defeat during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) almost lost his throne during the 1905 revolution
● Compelled him to share power with a new and popularly-elected legislature, the Duma
- Once the dange passed, he weakened the Duma and avoided cooperating with it
~Pogroms
● Anti-Jewish raids
● Anti-Semitic persection escalated in late tsarist Russia
● Became distressingly common
~Tanzimat reforms
● From 1839 to 1876
● Janissary power was broken in the 1820s, and hte army and navy were upgraded and Westernized
● GOvernment promoted greater religious tolerance for non-Muslims
● Introduced Western science and technology into the educational system
● Boosted industrialization and built railroads and telegraphs
● Liberalized and secularized the legal system, at least to a degree
~Constitution of 1876
● Sultan Abdul Hamid II proclaimed a constiuttion and agreed to share power with an eleected legislature
● It was suspended for 20 years in 1878
~Young Turks
● A growing number of modernizing politicians and military oficers who wanted more change than he was willing to deliver
● By the early 1900s, they would play a decisive role in ending Abdul Hamid II’s rule
~Greek War of Independence
● 1821-1832
● Inspired futuer nationalist uprisings among other Balkan Christians and by persuading Britain and Russia to intervene out of sympathy for the Greeks, it stoked a decades-long anti-Turkish prejudice in Europe
~Muhammad Ali
● Who transformed Egypt into an autonomous principality in 1805
● Demonstrated the Ottoman Empire’s vulnerability
● He created a Western-style military, recruited European professionals and advisors, and industrialized the production of Egyptian cotton
● Governed autocratically as khedive and subjected cotton growers and textile workers to oppressive labor conditions
~French colonization of Algeria (Respect of Ottoman)
● Taken from the Turks in 1830 and brutally pacific by the end of hte 1840s
● Demonstrated the Ottoman Empire’s vulnerability
~Crimean War
● 1853-1856
● Russia’s sudden annexation of Ottoman provinces on the Danube provoked it
● Britain and France stepped in to aid the Turks against Russia
~Balkan Crisis
● 1876-1878
● Balkan nationalism intensified when Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Serbs, and Romanians revolted against economically harsh policies
● Ottoman troops committed terrible anti-Christian atrocities, undermining the Tanzimat reforms’ modernizing spirit and triggering widespread anti-Turkish revulsion in Europe
● The rebel nations went free, and the empire’s grip ont he Balkans continued to loosen
~Construction of Suez Canal
● 1854-1869
● Financed by the French-dominated Suez Canal Company and doverseen by the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps
● Gave France huge economic leverage over the khedive in Egypt
● THe leverage passed in the 1870s and 1880s to Britain which purchased shares in the canal and then stepped in militarily to save hte khedive from an 1881 revolt
~Anglo-Egyptian Administration
● British established a protectorate in 1881
● Left the khedive on the thron but placed real control in British hands
~Enver Pesha
● THe Young Turks depose Abdul Hamid II in 1908-1909
● Installing a figurehead sultan and restoring the constitution of 1867
● Pursued a program of industralization, secularization and socioeconomic reform
● THey modeled their industrialization on Germany–led them to support the losign side in WWI
~Barbary states
● Of Islamic North Africa (present-day Morocco, Algeria, tunisia and Libya)
● Technically ruled by the Ottomans but increasingly autonomous
● Piratical corsairs from these states threatened European and American shipping and enslaved captives as galley oarsmen
- Partly provoked the French colonization of Algeria
~Ashanti/Asante Kingdom
● In West Africa’s Gold Coast (present-day Ghana)
● Engaged in a dramatic military buildup during the late 1700s, financed by its participation int he Atlantic slave trade
● Threantened European outposts and trade routes along the Gold Coast and resisted Euro-American attempts to destroy the slave trade
● Britain fought a series of wars starting in 1823 until 1902
~Zulu kingdom
● Existed ont he edge of Dutch and British possessions in South Africa
● The Bantu-speaking Zulu were organized into small, relatively peaceful clans before 1800
● Around 1816, a new chieftain, Shaka, united them into a single tribe and used his military talents to conquer niehgbors
● THeir warlike expansion caused a large wave of tribal migration and clashed with Boers and British settlers
~Zanzibar
● Producer of spices, sugar, and cloves for the Indian Ocean trade network and a key hub for the East African slave trade
● RUled by the Arab sultanate of Oman after 1698, it became hte Omani capital in 1840 and was promoted to the status of sultanate in 1861
● Controlled the Zanj, a large portion of hte East African coast
~Ethiopia
● Remained Coptic Christian in predominantly muslim East Africa
● Existed largely in isolation between the mid-1600s when it expelled the Portuguese and the mid-1800s, when Theodore II, a pro-Western but entally erratic king, began a process of military modernization
● This policy allowed Etiopia to ward off European invasion
● Victory over Italian forces at Adowa in 1896
~Great Trek
● Displaced by the British, the Boers made a Great Trek to the north and east during the 1830s and soon founded their own states
~The Orange Free State and Transvaal
● On the border of British South Africa
● Boer’s own states
~Zulu War of 1879
● The Boers and British periodically clashed with each other, and more regularly with the local Xhosa and Zulu
● THe discovery of South African gold mines and diamond fields heightened military tensions here and led to the cruel exploitation of African laborers
~French colonization of Algeria
● Carried out during the 1830s and 1840s
● Scorched-earth devastation and frightful violence against local civilians
● French became particularly attached to Algeria, viewing it as their most important possession int he way Britian regarded India
~Berlin Conference
● 1884-1885
● Convened by the German statesman Otto von Bismarck to defuse diplomatic tensions stirred up by the Europeans’ headlong rush to carve up Africa
● Boundaries wree agreed upon, as were guidelines for further expnasion
● Long-term harm was done to Africa that lines drawn on the map during and after Berlin reflected only European desires
- Bore no relation at all tot he traditional territorial demarcations used by African themselves
~British colonies in Africa
● Several colonies int he west, including the Gold Coast (home to the Ashanti) and the nearly unbroken chain of possessions it gianed int he east, largely at the expense of the Omani Arabs
● Governed with a blend of exploitative selfishness, racist sentiment and well-meaning condescension in India
- Trained native elites and native troops int eh Western style and broght new sciecne, medicine, and industrial technology to Africa
~Cape to Cairo
● British dreamed of building a railroad stretching the entire length of the continent but were blocked by Germany’s acquisition of territory on the eastern coast
~French colonies in Africa
● Similar to British
● Acted mainly in accordance with its mission civilisatrice
● Dominated the Saharan north and large portions ofthe west, inaddition to the island of Madagascar