6. The Light and Dark of Wester Dominance

Question 1

Define Great Mutiny / Great Revolt

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Define Indian Civil Service

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

Define Indian National Congress

Answer 3

A political association formed in 1885 that worked for Indian self-government.

Question 4

Define Java War

Answer 4

The 1825–1830 war between the Dutch government and the Javanese, fought over the extension of Dutch control of the island.

Question 5

Define Nguyen Dynasty

Answer 5

The last Vietnamese ruling house, which lasted from 1802 to 1945.

Question 6

Define Opium War

Answer 6

The 1839–1842 war between the British and the Chinese over limitations on trade and the importation of opium into China.

Question 7

Define extraterritoriality

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Define Taiping Rebellion

Answer 8

A massive rebellion by believers in the religious teachings of Hong Xiuquan, begun in 1851 and not suppressed until 1864.

Question 9

Define Boxers

Answer 9

A Chinese secret society that blamed the country’s ills on foreigners, especially missionaries, and rose in rebellion in 1900.

Question 10

Define 1911 Revolution

Answer 10

The uprising that brought China’s monarchy to an end.

Question 11

Define gunboat diplomacy

Answer 11

The imposition of treaties and agreements under threat of military violence, such as the opening of Japan to trade after Commodore Perry’s demands.

Question 12

Define Meiji Restoration

Answer 12

The 1867 ousting of the Tokugawa Shogunate that “restored” the power of the Japanese emperors.

Question 13

Define Russo-Japanese War

Answer 13

The 1904–1905 war between Russia and Japan fought over imperial influence and territory in northeast China (Manchuria).

Question 14

Define indentured laborers

Answer 14

Laborers who agreed to a term of employment, specified in a contract.

Question 15

In what ways did India change as a consequence of British rule?

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Why were most but not all Southeast Asian societies reduced to colonies?

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Was China’s decline in the nineteenth century due more to internal problems or to Western imperialism?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

How was Japan able to quickly master the challenges posed by the West?

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

What were the causes and consequences of the vast movement of people in 19th century Pacific region?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What explains the similarities and differences in the experiences of Asian countries in the 19th century?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Define oligarchs

Answer 21

In Latin America, the small number of individuals and families that had monopolized political power and economic resources since the colonial era.

Question 22

Define Circum-Caribbean

Answer 22

The region encompassing the Antilles as well as the lands that bound the Caribbean Sea in Central America and northern South America.

Question 23

Define caudillismo

Answer 23

Government by figures who rule through personal charisma and the support of armed followers in Latin America.

Question 24

Define manifest destiny

Answer 24

The doctrine that the United States should absorb the territory spanning from the original Atlantic states to the Pacific Ocean.

Question 25

Define Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

Answer 25

The 1848 treaty between the United States and Mexico in which Mexico ceded large tracts of land to the United States.

Question 26

Define Lerdo Law

Answer 26

An 1856 Mexican law that barred corporate landholdings.

Question 27

Define neocolonialism

Answer 27

The establishment of political and economic influence over regions after they have ceased to be formal colonies.

Question 28

Define free womb laws

Answer 28

Laws passed across the nineteenth-century Americas that instituted a gradual form of abolition through which children born to slaves gained their freedom.

Question 29

Define latifundios

Answer 29

Vast landed estates in Latin America.

Question 30

Define Porfiriato

Answer 30

The regime of Porfirio Díaz, who presided in Mexico from 1876 to 1880 and again from 1884 to 1911.

Question 31

Define Plan de Ayala

Answer 31

Document written by Zapatistas during the Mexican Revolution that demanded the government return all land, forests, and waters taken from rural communities.

Question 32

Define anarcho-syndicalism

Answer 32

A version of anarchism that advocated placing power in the hands of workers’ unions.

Question 33

Define Monroe Doctrine

Answer 33

An 1823 proclamation that established a U.S. sphere of influence over the Americas by opposing European imperialism on the continent.

Question 34

Define Roosevelt Corollary

Answer 34

A corollary to the Monroe Doctrine stating that the United States would correct what it saw as “chronic wrongdoing” in neighboring countries.

Question 35

How and why did the process of nation-state consolidation vary across the Americas?

Answer 35

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.

Question 36

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?

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

As Latin America became more integrated into the world economy, how did patterns of economic growth shape political culture and social reactions?

Answer 37

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.

Question 38

What factors shaped patterns of immigration to the Americas? How did immigrants shape — and how were they shaped by — their new settings?

Answer 38

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.

Question 39

In what ways did U.S. policies in the Caribbean and Central America resemble European imperialism? How did U.S. foreign policy depart from European imperialism?

Answer 39

By 1890 the United States had claimed the contiguous territories it acquired through purchase, war, and displacement. Its frontier was closed. The United States redirected its expansionist pressures outward, beginning with the remnants of the Spanish Empire: Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, and the Philippine Islands and Guam in the Pacific. The United States emulated the imperialism of European nations like Britain and France by claiming control of land and people that served its economic interests and justifying its domination by arguing that it was advancing civilization.

Question 40

Define militarism

Answer 40

The glorification of the military as the supreme ideal of the state with all other interests subordinate to it.

Question 41

Define Triple Entente

Answer 41

The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia in the First World War.

Question 42

Define trench warfare

Answer 42

Fighting behind rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire; used in World War I with a staggering cost in lives and minimal gains in territory.

Question 43

Define total war

Answer 43

Practiced by countries fighting in World War I, a war in which the government plans and controls all aspects of economic and social life in order to make the greatest possible military effort.

Question 44

Define March Revolution

Answer 44

The first phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, in which unplanned uprisings led to the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a provisional democratic government that was then overthrown in November by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Question 45

Define Petrograd Soviet

Answer 45

A counter-government to the 1917 Russian provisional government, this organization was a huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two to three thousand workers, soldiers, and socialist intellectuals.

Question 46

Define Bolsheviks

Answer 46

The “majority group”; this was Lenin’s camp of the Russian party of Marxist socialism.

Question 47

Define War Communism

Answer 47

The application of the total-war concept to a civil conflict; the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants, introduced rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to work.

Question 48

Define League of Nations

Answer 48

A permanent international organization established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.

Question 49

Define Treaty of Versailles

Answer 49

The 1919 peace settlement that ended World War I; it declared Germany responsible for the war, limited Germany’s army to one hundred thousand men, and forced Germany to pay huge reparations.

Question 50

Define Dawes Plan

Answer 50

The product of the 1924 World War I reparations commission, accepted by Germany, France, and Britain, that reduced Germany’s yearly reparations, made payment dependent on German economic prosperity, and granted Germany large loans from the United States to promote recovery.

Question 51

Define Mein Kampf

Answer 51

Adolf Hitler’s autobiography, published in 1925, which also contains Hitler’s political ideology.

Question 52

Define existentialism

Answer 52

The name given to a highly diverse and even contradictory philosophy that stresses the meaninglessness of existence and the search for moral values in a world of terror and uncertainty.

Question 53

Define id, ego, superego

Answer 53

Freudian terms for the primitive, irrational unconscious (id), the rationalizing conscious that mediates what a person can do (ego), and the ingrained moral values that specify what a person should do (superego).

Question 54

Define modernism

Answer 54

A variety of cultural movements at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth that rebelled against traditional forms and conventions of the past.

Question 55

Define functionalism

Answer 55

The principle that buildings, like industrial products, should serve the purpose for which they were made as well as possible.

Question 56

What were the long-term and immediate causes of World War I, and how did the conflict become a global war?

Answer 56

The First World War clearly marked a major break in the course of world history. The maps of Europe and southwest Asia were redrawn, nationalist movements took root and spread across Asia (the subject of the next chapter), America consolidated its position as a global power, and the world experienced, for the first time, industrialized, total war. Europe’s Great Powers started the war and suffered the most — in casualties, in costs, in destruction, and in societal and political upheaval. Imperialism also brought the conflict to the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, making this a global war of unprecedented scope. The young soldiers who went to war believed in the pre-1914 world of order, progress, and patriotism. Then, in the words of German soldier and writer Erich Remarque (rih-MAHRK), the “first bombardment showed us our mistake, and under it the world as they had taught it to us broke in pieces.”1

Question 57

How did total war affect the home fronts of the major combatants?

Answer 57

The war’s impact on civilians was no less massive than on the men crouched in trenches. Total war mobilized entire populations, led to increased state power, and promoted social equality. It also led to dissent and a growing antiwar movement.

Question 58

What factors led to the Russian Revolution, and what was its outcome?

Answer 58

The 1917 Russian Revolution, directly related to the Great War, opened a new era with a radically new prototype of state and society that changed the course of the twentieth century. Economically, widespread inflation and food shortages in Russia contributed to the revolution. Militarily, inadequate supplies, logistics, and weaponry led to heavy losses that the Russians suffered during World War I; this further weakened Russia's view of Nicholas II. They viewed him as weak and unfit to rule

Question 59

What were the global consequences of the First World War?

Answer 59

In spring 1918 the Germans launched their last major attack against France and failed. A defeated Germany finally ageed to an armistice on November 11, following ones already signed by the Austrian-Hungarian (November 3) and Ottoman (October 30) leaders. All three monarchies fell and their empires broke apart. In January 1919 the victorious Western Allies came together in Paris hoping to establish a lasting peace. Laboring intensively, the Allies soon worked out peace terms with Germany, created the peacekeeping League of Nations, and reorganized eastern Europe and southwest Asia. The 1919 peace settlement, however, failed to establish a lasting peace or to resolve the issues that had brought the world to war. World War I and the treaties that ended it shaped the course of the twentieth century, often in horrible ways. Surely this was the ultimate tragedy of the Great War that cost $332 billion and left 10 million people dead and another 20 million wounded.

Question 60

How did leaders deal with the political dimensions of uncertainty and try to re-establish peace and prosperity in the interwar years?

Answer 60

The pursuit of real and lasting peace in the first half of the interwar years proved difficult for many reasons. Germany hated the Treaty of Versailles. France was fearful and isolated. Britain was undependable, and the United States had turned its back on Europe’s problems. Eastern Europe was in ferment, and no one could predict Communist Russia’s future. Moreover, the international economic situation was poor and was greatly complicated by war debts and disrupted patterns of trade. Yet for a time, from 1925 to late 1929, it appeared that peace and stability were within reach.

Question 61

In what ways were the anxieties of the postwar world expressed or heightened by revolutionary ideas in modern thought, art, and science and in new forms of communication?

Answer 61

Many people hoped that happier times would return after the war, along with the familiar prewar ideals of peace, prosperity, and progress. The war had caused such social, economic, and psychological upheaval, however, that great numbers of men and women felt themselves increasingly adrift in an age of anxiety and continual crisis.

Question 62

Define Permanent Mandates Commission

Answer 62

A commission created by the League of Nations to oversee the developed nations’ fulfillment of their international responsibility toward their mandates.

Question 63

Define Sykes-Picot Agreement

Answer 63

The 1916 secret agreement between Britain and France that divided up the Arab lands of Lebanon, Syria, southern Turkey, Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq.

Question 64

Define Balfour Declaration

Answer 64

A 1917 statement by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour that supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Question 65

Define Treaty of Lausanne

Answer 65

The 1923 treaty that ended the Turkish war and recognized the territorial integrity of a truly independent Turkey.

Question 66

Define Majlis

Answer 66

The national assembly established by the despotic shah of Iran in 1906.

Question 67

Define kibbutz

Answer 67

A Jewish collective farm, first established by Zionists in Palestine, on which each member shared equally in the work, rewards, and defense.

Question 68

Define Lucknow Pact

Answer 68

A 1916 alliance between the Hindus leading the Indian National Congress Party and the Muslim League.

Question 69

Define satyagraha

Answer 69

Loosely translated as “soul force,” which Gandhi believed was the means of striving for truth and social justice through love, suffering, and conversion of the oppressor.

Question 70

Define May Fourth Movement

Answer 70

A Chinese nationalist movement against foreign imperialists and warlord rule; it began as a 1919 student protest against the decision of the Paris Peace Conference to leave the Shandong Peninsula in the hands of Japan.

Question 71

Define zaibatsu

Answer 71

Giant conglomerate firms established in Japan beginning in the Meiji period and lasting until the end of World War II.

Question 72

Define Long March

Answer 72

The 6,000-mile retreat of the Chinese Communist army in 1934 to a remote region on the northwestern border of China, during which tens of thousands lost their lives.

Question 73

Why did modern nationalism develop in Asia between the First and Second World Wars, and what was its appeal?

Answer 73

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the peoples of Asia adapted the European ideology of nationalism to their own situations. The First World War profoundly affected Asian nationalist aspirations by altering relations between Asia and Europe. For four years Asians watched Kipling’s haughty bearers of “the white man’s burden” vilify and destroy each other. Japan’s defeat of imperial Russia in 1905 had shown that an Asian power could beat a European Great Power; Asians now saw the entire West as divided and vulnerable.

Question 74

How did the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in World War I shape nationalist movements in the Middle East?

Answer 74

The most flagrant attempt to expand Western imperialism occurred in southwest Asia. There the British and the French successfully encouraged an Arab revolt in 1916 and destroyed the Ottoman Empire. Europeans then sought to replace Turks as principal rulers throughout the region. Turkish, Arab, and Persian nationalists, as well as Jewish nationalists arriving from Europe, reacted violently. They struggled to win nationhood, and as the Europeans were forced to make concessions, they sometimes came into sharp conflict with each other, most notably in Palestine.

Question 75

What role did Gandhi and his campaign of militant nonviolence play in leading India to independence from the British?

Answer 75

The nationalist movement in British India grew out of two interconnected cultures, Hindu and Muslim. While the two joined together to challenge British rule, they also came to see themselves as fundamentally different. Nowhere has modern nationalism’s power both to unify and to divide been more strikingly demonstrated than in India.

Question 76

How did nationalism shape political developments in East and Southeast Asia?

Answer 76

Because of the efforts of the Meiji reformers, nationalism and modernization were well developed in Japan by 1914. Japan competed politically and economically with the world’s leading nations, building its own empire and proclaiming its special mission in Asia. Initially China lagged behind, but after 1912 the pace of nationalist development began to quicken.

Question 77

Define New Deal

Answer 77

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plan to reform capitalism in the United States through forceful government intervention in the economy.

Question 78

Define Popular Front

Answer 78

A party formed in 1936 in France that encouraged unions and launched a far-reaching New Deal–inspired program of social reform.

Question 79

Define totalitarianism

Answer 79

A radical dictatorship that exercises complete political power and control over all aspects of society and seeks to mobilize the masses for action.

Question 80

Define fascism

Answer 80

A movement characterized by extreme, often expansionist nationalism, anti-socialism, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military.

Question 81

Define five-year plan

Answer 81

Launched by Stalin in 1928 and termed the “revolution from above,” its goal was to modernize the Soviet Union and generate a Communist society with new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity.

Question 82

Define New Economic Policy (NEP)

Answer 82

Lenin’s 1921 policy re-establishing limited economic freedom in the Soviet Union in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry in the face of economic disintegration.

Question 83

Define collectivization

Answer 83

Stalin’s forcible consolidation, beginning in 1929, of individual peasant farms in the Soviet Union into large, state-controlled enterprises.

Question 84

Define Black Shirts

Answer 84

A private army under Mussolini in Italy that destroyed Socialist newspapers, union halls, and local Socialist Party headquarters, eventually pushing Socialists out of the city governments of northern Italy.

Question 85

Define Lateran Agreement

Answer 85

A 1929 agreement in which Mussolini in Italy recognized the Vatican as an independent state and agreed to give the church heavy financial support in return for the pope’s public support.

Question 86

Define Nazism

Answer 86

A movement born of extreme nationalism and racism and dominated by Adolf Hitler from 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945.

Question 87

Define Enabling Act

Answer 87

An act pushed through the Reichstag by the Nazis in 1933 that gave Hitler absolute dictatorial power for four years.

Question 88

Define blitzkrieg

Answer 88

“Lightning war” using planes, tanks, and trucks, first used by Hitler to crush Poland in four weeks.

Question 89

Define New Order

Answer 89

Hitler’s program, based on the guiding principle of racial imperialism, which gave preferential treatment to the Nordic peoples above “inferior” Latin peoples and, at the bottom, “subhuman” Slavs and Jews.

Question 90

Define Holocaust

Answer 90

The attempted systematic extermination of all European Jews and other “undesirables” by the Nazi state during World War II.

Question 91

Define Europe first policy

Answer 91

The military strategy, set forth by Churchill and adopted by Roosevelt, that called for the defeat of Hitler in Europe before the United States launched an all-out strike against Japan in the Pacific.

Question 92

What caused the Great Depression, and what were its consequences?

Answer 92

Like the Great War, the Great Depression must be spelled with capital letters. Beginning in 1929 an exceptionally long and severe economic depression struck the entire world with ever-greater intensity, and recovery was uneven and slow. Only the Second World War brought it to an end.

Question 93

What was the nature of the new totalitarian dictatorships, and how did they differ from conservative authoritarian states and from each other?

Answer 93

Both conservative and radical totalitarian dictatorships arose in Europe in the 1920s and the 1930s. Although they sometimes overlapped in character and practice, they were profoundly different in essence.

Question 94

How did Stalin and the Communist Party build a totalitarian order in the Soviet Union?

Answer 94

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) consolidated his power following Lenin’s death in 1924 and by 1927 was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union. In 1928 he launched the first five-year plan — a “revolution from above,”5 as he so aptly termed it, to transform Soviet society along socialist lines, and to generate a Communist society with new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity. Stalin and the Communist Party used constant propaganda, enormous sacrifice, and unlimited violence and state control to establish a dynamic, modern totalitarian state in the 1930s.

Question 95

How did Italian fascism develop?

Answer 95

Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement and his seizure of power in 1922 were important steps in the rise of dictatorships between the two world wars. Mussolini and his supporters were the first to call themselves “Fascists.” His dictatorship was brutal and theatrical, and it contained elements of both conservative authoritarianism and modern totalitarianism.

Question 96

Why were Hitler and his Nazi regime initially so popular, and how did their actions lead to World War II?

Answer 96

The most frightening dictatorship developed in Nazi Germany. Here Nazism asserted an unlimited claim over German society and proclaimed the ultimate power of its leader, Adolf Hitler. Nazism’s aspirations were truly totalitarian.

Question 97

How did Germany and Japan build empires in Europe and Asia, and how did the Allies defeat them?

Answer 97

World war broke out because Hitler’s and Japan’s ambitions were essentially unlimited. Nazi soldiers scored enormous successes in Europe until late 1942, establishing a vast empire of death and destruction. Japan attacked the United States in December 1941 and then moved to expand its empire throughout Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, the mighty Grand Alliance of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union overwhelmed the aggressors in manpower and military strength. Thus the Nazi and Japanese empires proved short-lived.