Post for 7-15-2015

Chapters 23 and 24, Independence and Development in the Global South and Accelerating Global Interaction

while titled differently in my edition of the book, a majority of the content is the same, judging from what we looked at in class.

Chapter 23: Independence and Development in the Global South aka End Of Empire

     The best summary of the decolonization chapter:

"Variously called the struggle for independence or decolonization, that process carried an immense significance for the history of the twentieth century. It marked a dramatic change in the world’s political architecture, as nation-states triumphed over the empires that had structured much of African and Asian life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It mobilized millions of people, thrusting them into political activity and sometimes into violence and warfare. Decolonization signaled the declining legitimacy of both empire and race as credible bases for political or social life. It promised not only national freedom but also personal dignity, abundance, and opportunity. What followed in the decades after independence was equally significant. Political, economic, and cultural experiments proliferated across these newly independent nations, which during the cold war were labeled as the third world and now are often referred to as developing countries or the Global South.Their peoples, who represented the vast majority of the world’s population, faced enormous challenges: the legacies of empire; their own deep divisions of language, ethnicity, religion, and
class; their rapidly growing numbers; the competing demands of the capitalist West and the communist East; the difficult tasks of simultaneously building modern economies, stable politics, and coherent nations; and all of this in a world still shaped by the powerful economies and armies of the wealthy, already industrialized nations. The emergence of the developing countries onto the world stage as independent and assertive actors has been a distinguishing feature of world history in this most recent century." p.1081-1082

Many countries in the 20th century let go of their colonies in Africa, Asia, and the developing world.
the way that each occupied colony was decolonized and left alone had lasting impacts and reflected in those newly-emerged countries today. India separated from Britain with enough success that it now has one of the world's largest populations and has great business growth due to the tech revolution of the past decades.  in contrast, many East African countries like Sudan are in very deep water; with the African continent torn apart in many places by civil war.

In sum, decolonization did not turn out well for most colonies at first, but many of them persevered and today, those like India for example have a lot going for them :)

Chapter 24: Accelerating Global Interaction aka Capitalism & Culture

the recent population growth explosion is staggeringly massive.
sustainability has never been more important.
however, the globe is engulfed in constant struggle and while certain countries may fight wars with others, it is generally a most peaceful era from a military perspective. however the American Empire stands not on military might, but rather on economic leverage.

I recall as a child playing with made in usa toys, yet my younger brother and sister grew up with Made In China products. China depends on the US and the US depends on china for manufacturing, even though most products are designed domestically, such as Apple technology.

however, many US companies outsource their tech labor to India, for much lower costs, so India is indirectly tied to China. the worlds two LARGEST populations depend on each other economically, with the middleman (USA) dictating most of the terms.

I fear we will soon approach a path leading to Economic warfare and Terrorism in some cases.

that's all i have for now.

July 7th Post

on ch 20, colonial encounters:

    "For many millions of africans and asians, colonial rule—by the British, French, Germans, Italians, Belgians, Portuguese, Russians, or Americans—was the major new element in their historical experience during the nineteenth century. Between roughly 1750 and 1950,much of the Afro-Asian-Pacific world was enveloped within this new wave of European empire building.The encounter with European power in these colonized societies was more immediate, and often more intense, than in those regions that were buffered by their own independent governments, such as Latin America, China, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire. Of course, no single colonial experience characterized these two centuries across this vast region. Much depended on the cultures and prior history of various colonized people. Policies of the colonial powers sometimes differed sharply and changed over time. Men and women experienced the colonial era differently, as did traditional elites,Western-educated classes, urban artisans, peasant farmers, and migrant laborers. Furthermore, the varied actions and reactions of such people, despite their oppression and exploitation, shaped the colonial experience, perhaps as much as the policies, practices, and intentions of their temporary European rulers. All of them—colonizers and colonized alike— were caught up in the flood of change that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and a new burst of European imperialism." p.924

that pretty much sums it up :)

it is important to note that 19th century colonialism is its own animal and differs from other Emperial-colonial eras. Not only were Europeans foreign rulers, but they also bore the seeds of a very different way of life, which grew out of their own modern transformation.

on ch 21 & communism:

boy oh boy i spent semesters studying 19th-20th century communism and socialist history, one thing i missed however, was a sharp focus on China, especially from 1949-present day

i had no idea the China communist party was founded in 1921.

June 30 Post

Much of this assignment regarding Europse's impact on the world during the 18th and 19 centuries was fairly well know to me, and that made me have an easier time reading and digesting the information.

some parts that were new to me included:

a) everything regarding the Haiti Revolution in 1791, the only successful slave rebellion in history, who were inspired by what happened in France just 2 years prior and by the ideas of freedom and popular sovereignty

a pattern of world revolutions emerged around the Atlantic in the late 18th century, which i have never connected the dots on before. first the American in 1776, then the French, on the other side of the world in 1789, and then in Haiti back in the Americas in 1791.

that being said, although Europe was in the highlights, Strayer managed to through in other parts of the world, such as Women's Voting rights in 1893 in New Zealand, as well as Women's rights in South America regarding potable water and overall safety/security of their families.

moreover, i knew nothing about the Chinese revolution in 1911, nor that Japen annexed Korea 1910.

Strayer's comment on p. 773, although lacking hard evidence, has stuck in my mind:

Some scholars have suggested that the events of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—the end of colonial empires, the rise of India and especially China, and the assertion of Islam—mark the end, or at least the erosion, of the age of Europe.

Further on, Strayer says,

"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 divisions and conflicts greatly assisted the European takeover. Europe’s Scientific Revolution drew upon earlier Islamic science and was stimulated by the massive amounts of new information pouring in from around the world.The Industrial Revolution, explored in Chapter 18, likewise benefited from New World resources and markets and from the stimulus of superior Asian textile and pottery production. Chapters 19 and 20 make clear that European control of other regions everywhere depended on the cooperation of local elites."

that doesnt mean that the European Era was somehow less significant or profound. it simply suggests that The European spotlight resulted from a unique intersection of European historical development with that of other regions and peoples.

As far as the industrial revolution chapter is concerned, the new part for me was reading about the US incursions into south America, and the process by which south america entered into the industrial age.

Reading Post for June 23rd 2015

from chapter 13, China, Islam, and the America sections are mentioned in the previous post, to wrap things up, I want to highlight a passage from p.594: "Few people in the fifteenth century lived in entirely separate and self-contained communities. Almost all were caught up, to one degree or another, in various and overlapping webs of influence, communication, and exchange. Such interactions represent, of course, one of the major concerns of world history. What kinds of webs
or networks linked the various societies and civilizations of the fifteenth century?"

These webs/networks include Empires, such as the Mughal and Ottoman empires, as well as religion-based links and trade networks.

these links formed the foundation of the "Modern Era" and directly led to what we are as a species today; the links persist world-wide, and with the advent of the World Wide Web in the last three decades, the globalization has truly been expanded tot he point where "few people in the world lived beyond the cultural influences, economic ties, or political relationships of a globalized world." p.597

As for chapter 14, I am more than familiar with Americas/European/Africa histories, as they were all inextricably linked during 15-18th centuries, and i've studied Western Civ, US history, and Modern European History extensively in the past.
New part for me were Asian events, including:

1582: Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrives in China
16th century conflict between Ottoman and Safavid empires & the Flourishing of Mughal Empire under Emperor Akbar
1644: the Ming/Qing transition in China
1742: Ottoman printing press closed due to impiety
1750's: Chinese territorial expansion in Inner Asia
18th century: Fragmentation of Mughal empire & Wars of Islamic renewal in West Africa

Of course, with all this globalizing interaction among peoples and cultures, Global commerce flourished as well, which brings me to chapter 15. from p. 674, "Despite their growing prominence in long-distance exchange, Europeans were far from the only active traders. Southeast Asians, Chinese, Indians, Armenians,Arabs, and Africans likewise played major roles in the making of the world economy of the early modern era."

What drove Europe to stick its nose into Asia? did it not have enough from Africa and the Americas? well, on p. 675, "the desire for tropical spices—cinnamon,nutmeg,mace, cloves, and, above all, pepper—which were widely used as condiments and preservatives and were sometimes regarded as aphrodisiacs. Other products of the East, such as Chinese silk, Indian cottons, rhubarb for medicinal purposes, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, also were in great demand."  these could not be found elsewhere.

To this day, one thing that puzzles me about the Russian Empire is how, having lasted for the entire Modern Ear as a sustained Empire and world power, and stretching from Poland to Alaska, failed to conquer more territory. the English, French, & Spanish chopped up the Americas, the Dutch & Spanish traded in the Philippines, heck, even the Portuguese had Brazil. What did Russia have? some tiny piece of Oregon, Washington, and Alaska, which it later sold to the US for next to nothing in the 19th century?! All im saying is, its seems that until the 18th century, Russia was in a prime position to engulf the rest of Europe, especially given the turmoil cause by wars in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

I've never studied asian history before, let alone mongolian. first, i cannot express how amusing it is to me some asian terms/names for things. say for instance, Lamas, are Religious Mongolian Teachers. who knew?

among many Mongol tidbits, i gathered the significance of the Mongols and C. Khan thusly:

the Mongols, and many other such peoples,
were pastoral nomads who disdained farming while centering their economic lives
around their herds of animals. Normally they did not construct elaborate cities,
enduring empires, or monumental works of art, architecture, and written literature.
*The Mongols left an indelible mark on the historical development of the entire
Afro-Eurasian hemisphere, and particularly on the agricultural civilizations with
which they so often interacted.* (p.522)

For all of its size and fearsome reputation, the Mongol Empire left a surprisingly
modest cultural imprint on the world it had briefly governed. Unlike the Arabs, the
Mongols bequeathed to the world no new religion or civilization. Whereas the
Islamic community offered a common religious home for all converts—conquerors
and conquered alike—the Mongols never tried to spread their own faith among subject
peoples. (p. 530)

In a similar fashion, the Turkish people and Ottoman Empires, spread and delivered Islam to many corners of Asia. Not only did Turkic peoples become Muslims themselves, but they carried Islam
to new areas as well.Their invasions of northern India solidly planted Islam in that
ancient civilization. In Anatolia, formerly ruled by Christian Byzantium, they brought
both Islam and a massive infusion of Turkic culture, language, and people, even as
they created the Ottoman Empire (p. 527)

But let me not ignore Mother Africa. The prestige and the military success of the Masai encouraged agricultural societies to borrow elements of Masai culture, such as hairstyles, shield decorations,
terms referring to cattle, and the name for their high god. Farming societies also adopted elements of Masai military organization, the long Masai spear, and the practice of drinking cow’s milk before battle.12 Peaceful interaction and mutual dependence as well as conflict and hostility characterized the relationship of nomadic herders and settled farmers in East Africa, much as it did in Eurasia. (p.529)

as for the World of the 15th century, i had no idea China did their own Columbus thing. so interesting, how throughout history, similar things happen all over the world in different places, without ever communicating with each other!

the fifteenth century, during which both zheng he and Columbus undertook their momentous expeditions, proved in retrospect to mark a major turning point in the human story.At the time, of course, no one was aware of it. No one knew in 1405 that the huge armada under Zheng He’s command would be recalled in 1433, never to sail again.And no one knew in 1492 that Columbus’s minuscule fleet of three ships would utterly transform the world, bringing the people of two “old worlds” and two hemispheres permanently together, with enduring consequences for them all.The outcome of the processes set in motion by those three small ships included the Atlantic slave trade, the decimation of the native population of the Americas, the massive growth of world population, the Industrial Revolution, and the growing prominence of Europeans on the world stage. But none of these developments were even remotely foreseeable in 1492. Thus the fifteenth century, as a hinge of major historical change, provides an occasion for a bird’s-eye view of the world through a kind of global tour.This excursion around the world will serve to briefly review the human saga thus far and to establish a baseline from which the transformations of the modern era might be measured.
p(569, 571)

Map 13.3 Africa in the Fifteenth Century
By the 1400s, Africa was a virtual museum of political and cultural diversity, encompassing large empires, such as Songhay; smaller kingdoms, such as Kongo; city-states among the Yoruba, Hausa, and Swahili peoples; village-based societies without states at all, as among the Igbo; and nomadic pastoral peoples, such as the Fulbe. Both European and Chinese maritime expeditions touched on Africa during that century, even as Islam continued to find acceptance in the northern half of the continent.

The most striking difference in these two cases lay in the sharp contrast between China’s decisive ending of its voyages and the continuing, indeed escalating, European effort, which soon brought the world’s oceans and growing numbers of the world’s people under its control. This is the reason that Zheng He’s voyages were so long neglected in China’s historical memory. They led nowhere, whereas the initial European expeditions, so much smaller and less promising, were but the first steps on a journey to world power. But why did the Europeans continue a process that the Chinese had deliberately abandoned?
p. (583)


         Europe had no unified political authority with the
power to order an end to its maritime outreach. Its system of competing states, so
unlike China’s single unified empire, ensured that once begun, rivalry alone would
drive the Europeans to the ends of the earth.Beyond this,much of Europe’s elite had an
interest in overseas expansion. Its budding merchant communities saw opportunity
for profit; its competing monarchs eyed the revenue that could come from taxing
overseas trade or from seizing overseas resources; the Church foresaw the possibility
of widespread conversion; impoverished nobles might imagine fame and fortune
abroad. In China, by contrast, support for Zheng He’s voyages was very shallow in
official circles, and when the emperor Yongle passed from the scene, those opposed
to the voyages prevailed within the politics of the court.
         Finally, the Chinese were very much aware of their own antiquity, believed strongly in the absolute superiority of their culture, and felt with good reason that, should they desire something from abroad, others would bring it to them. Europeans too believed themselves unique, particularly in religious terms as the possessors of Christianity, the “one true religion.” In material terms, though, they were seeking out the greater riches of the East, and they were highly conscious that Muslim power blocked easy access to these treasures and posed a military and religious threat to Europe itself. All of this propelled continuing European expansion in the centuries that followed.
(p.584)

all in all, i wish we had more time to really read the whole text at a slower pace. alas, that is the curse of summer courses ;)

World History 4 pst

p282 listed major continental differences, including Population densities,
population of Eurasia(>80%) vs Africa (11%) Americas(7%)
Lack of domesticatable animals, and geographical differences.

I enjoyed reading chapter 7. I learned about the Mayans and other Meso-Americans. I also learned about the Bantu, Axum, and many other African civilizations I had not even known existed.

moreover the benefits to each Third-wave civilization who participated in the Silk, Sand, and Sea roads far exceeded simple trade of goods.
with the people who carries those goods from east to west and visa-versa, Religion and culture followed. For instance, the spread of Christianity or Buddhism from china to the Mediterranean

It is clear to me know that proper historical record-keeping is not easy to organize. there are many factors in play, from p305:
Duration, Population Densities, Religious influence, and of course, the availability of reliable evidence.

In chapter 8, i found the stories about the silk roads and the African kingdoms of Mali and Ghana quite un-ordinary, in the sense it seemed different than other stories i've read before.

chapter 10 was a pleasure to read - it was mostly review, since I had studied both Western Civ and Modern European History (AP).
Also, having taken several Russian Language and culture course at my former University, I was quite familiar with ever mention of northern/central Asia.
one thing that was new to me, was the making of a Christian China that "did not take root in any permanent fashion, although it briefly generated a fascinating expression of the Christian faith."

post 6-2-2015

nice postwolrd history class posts_3

civilization represents a new and particular
type of human society, made possible by the immense productivity of the
Agricultural Revolution. Such societies encompassed far larger populations than
any earlier form of human community and for the first time concentrated some of
those people in sizable cities, numbering in the many tens of thousands. In these
cities, people were organized and controlled by powerful states whose leaders could
use force to compel obedience.  page 86

page 87   Norte Chico
"Less well known and only recently investigated by scholars was a third early
civilization that was developing along the central coast of Peru from roughly
3000 B.C.E. to 1800 B.C.E., at about the same time as the civilizations of Egypt and Sumer.
Norte Chico was a distinctive civilization in many ways. Its cities were smaller
than those of Mesopotamia and show less evidence of economic specialization.The
economy was based to an unusual degree on an extremely rich fishing industry in
anchovies and sardines along the coast.These items apparently were exchanged for
cotton, essential for fishing nets, as well as food crops such as squash, beans, and
guava, all of which were grown by inland people in the river valleys using irrigation
agriculture. Unlike Egypt and Mesopotamia, Peruvian civilization did not rest
upon grain-based farming; the people of Norte Chico did not develop pottery or
writing; and few sculptures, carvings, or drawings have been uncovered so far."
TOTALLY new civ i never heard of.

page 88  Indus Valley
Unlike its Middle Eastern counterparts, the Indus Valley civilization apparently
generated no palaces, temples, elaborate graves, kings, or warrior classes.

Shang
The early civilization of China, dating to perhaps 2200 B.C.E., was very different
from that of the Indus Valley.The ideal of a centralized state was evident from
the days of the Xia dynasty (2200–1766 B.C.E.), whose legendary monarch Wu
organized flood control projects that “mastered the waters and made them to flow
in great channels.” Subsequent dynasties—the Shang (1766–1122 B.C.E.) and the
Zhou (1122–256 B.C.E.)—substantially enlarged the Chinese state, erected lavish
tombs for their rulers, and buried thousands of human sacrificial victims to accompany
them in the world to come. By the Zhou dynasty, a distinctive Chinese political
ideology had emerged, featuring a ruler, known as the Son of Heaven. This
monarch served as an intermediary between heaven and earth and ruled by the
Mandate of Heaven only so long as he governed with benevolence and maintained
social harmony among his people. An early form of written Chinese has been discovered
on numerous oracle bones, which were intended to predict the future and
to assist China’s rulers in the task of governing. Chinese civilization, more than any
other, has experienced an impressive cultural continuity from its earliest expression
into modern times.

Olmec
A final First Civilization, known as the Olmec, took shape around 1200 B.C.E.
along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico near present-day Veracruz in southern
Mexico. Based on an agricultural economy of maize, beans, and squash, Olmec
cities arose from a series of competing chiefdoms and became ceremonial centers
filled with elaborately decorated temples, altars, pyramids, and tombs of rulers.The
most famous artistic legacy of the Olmecs lay in some seventeen colossal basalt
heads, weighing twenty tons or more. Recent discoveries suggest that the Olmecs
may well have created the first written language in the Americas by about 900 B.C.E.

page 92:
However they got started (and much about this is still guesswork), the First
Civilizations, once established, represented a very different kind of human society
than anything that came before.All of them were based on highly productive agricultural
economies.Various forms of irrigation, drainage, terracing, and flood control
enabled these early civilizations to tap the food-producing potential of their
regions. In dry lands with good soil, such as northern China and southern Iraq,
water made all the difference and vastly increased the agricultural output. In all these
civilizations, pottery likewise enhanced the productivity of farming, as did animaldrawn
plows and metalworking in Afro-Eurasia. Ritual sacrifice, often including
people, usually accompanied the growth of civilization, and the new rulers normally
served as high priests or were seen as divine beings, their right to rule legitimated
by association with the sacred.

Also, I found so many intersting tidbits scintilating

5-26-2015 Chapter 1 & 2

I love how the text is organized. On page 12, the test asks, "does it make sense to ignore the first 200,000 years or more of human experience?" I agree it does, since "the achievements of Paleolithic peoples—the initial settlement of the planet, the creation of the earliest human societies, the beginning of reflection on the great questions of life and death—deserve our attention. The changes they wrought, though far slower than those of more recent times,were extraordinarily rapid in comparison to the transformation experienced by any other species.Those changes were almost entirely cultural or learned, rather than the product of biological evolution, and they provided the foundation on which all subsequent human history was constructed. Our grasp of the human past is incomplete—massively so—if we choose to disregard the Paleolithic era."

The Ju-Hoansi were a pleasure to read about. "What made the Ju/’hoansi way of life possible was a particular kind of society, one characterized by mobility, sharing, and equality.The basic unit of social organization was a band or camp of roughly ten to thirty people, who were connected by ties of exchange and kinship with similar camps across a wide area." page 26

At one level, Ju/’hoansi society was extremely simple. "No formal leaders, chiefs, headmen, priests, or craft specialists existed, and decisions were made by individual families and camps after much discussion. On another level, social relationships were extremely complex...Richard Lee noted “relative equality between the sexes with no-one having the upper hand.” Teenagers engaged quite freely in sex play, and the concept of female virginity was apparently unknown, as were rape, wife beating, and the sexual double standard. Although polygamy was permitted, most marriages were in fact monogamous because women strongly resisted sharing a husband with another wife. Frequent divorce among very young couples allowed women to leave unsatisfactory marriages easily." [page 27]

As for chapter 2 about agriculture and its spread, that didn't interest me as much as the social people chapter did. food is food, it is consumed and grown and consumed again :/
However, many of the breakthroughs to agriculture occurred only after gathering and hunting peoples had already grown substantially in numbers and had established a sedentary way of life, so it definitely did not happen overnight.

for instance, "in present-day Sudan. Between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago, however,“the Saharan desert . . . effectively did not exist,” according to scholars, as the region received more rainfall than currently, had extensive grassland vegetation, and was “relatively hospitable to human life.”8 It seems likely that cattle were domesticated in this region about 1,000 years before they were separately brought under human control in the Middle East and India. At about the same time, the donkey also was domesticated in northeastern Africa near the Red Sea and spread from there into Southwest Asia, even as the practice of raising sheep and goats moved in the other direction. In Africa, animal domestication thus preceded the domestication of plants, while elsewhere in the world it was the other way around."

one other thing i found interesting: corn was nutritionally poorer than the protein-rich cereals of the Fertile Crescent. To provide sufficient dietary protein, corn had to be supplemented with squash and beans, which were also domesticated in the Americas. Thus while Middle Eastern societies quite rapidly replaced their gathering and hunting economy with agriculture, that process took 3,500 years in Mesoamerica. It is a clear argument on why agriculture grew differently in different parts of the world.

blog creation

done!