World History II: 1400 to the Present

This is Unit Six of Social Sciences and History, part two of two: world history from the creoles' juntas to the institutions of nineteen ninety-one. Part one closed on the Atlantic revolutions and on the anchor's question, revolution for whom. This part carries the exam's own phrase for the unit, global themes and interactions, and reads six centuries as one argument: each century's interaction rested on the one before. The plantations rested on the crossing, the revolutions on the public sphere, the empires on the factories, the institutions on the wars. Hold that chain, and the capstone at the end draws it whole, with the anchor's caution that interaction brought catastrophe as often as exchange. By the end you will be able to say what the creoles resented and how their revolutions differed. To name the Second Industrial Revolution's industries and define an export economy. To classify a response to industrialization by who acts and by what means. To sort a Cold War event. And to read six centuries of interaction as a chain.

Three entries on Latin American independence: the creoles and their juntas, Mexico from Hidalgo to the republic, and the liberators of South America with Brazil's emperor.

The creoles.

SSH 0523 Creoles, Juntas, and Cádiz

Creole elites, American-born of European descent, resented the peninsulares' political power and Spain's economic restrictions in viceroyalties ruled by the king's direct representatives. When France overthrew Spain's monarchy, creoles sat on local juntas and some joined the Cortes at Cádiz, which wrote a short-lived constitution. That taught them independence was possible. The models were the United States and France.

Mexico.

SSH 0524 Mexico: Hidalgo to the Republic

Hidalgo's Grito de Dolores of eighteen ten called peasants and miners against the viceroyalty under the Virgin of Guadalupe, and his social demands cost him creole support. In eighteen twenty-one Iturbide's Plan de Iguala won independence as a monarchy; he abdicated in twenty-three and Mexico became a republic. The anchor's summary misdates the Grito to eighteen sixteen. The course follows its text.

South America and Brazil.

SSH 0525 Bolívar, San Martín, and Brazil's Emperor

Venezuela's junta declared independence in eighteen eleven, and royalists fought back with mixed-race allies. Bolívar won Haiti's help by promising to abolish slavery, relied on the llaneros, and liberated Gran Colombia; San Martín crossed the Andes; both entered Peru, the last royalist stronghold. Pedro the First's Grito do Ipiranga of eighteen twenty-two kept Brazil an empire. Cúcuta abolished slavery gradually.

Six entries on industry, imperialism and labor: capitalism and Marx, the second revolution and export economies, imperialism's costs, coerced labor and migration, the responses sorted, and Japan and China.

Capitalism and Marx.

SSH 0526 Capitalism, Mechanization, and Marx

Mechanization, driven by capitalism, made owners rich at high cost to workers: skilled artisans' handiwork became unskilled, low-paid machine tending, and workers lost control of their conditions, so Luddites broke machines. Marx answered that the bourgeoisie exploited labor, that class struggle underlay all history, and that socialism would follow. Unit fifteen owns Marx and Smith; unit four owns the Industrial Revolution.

The second revolution.

SSH 0527 The Second Industrial Revolution and Export Economies

After eighteen fifty Britain, France, Belgium, Germany and the United States entered the Second Industrial Revolution: steel, rubber, chemicals, electricity and the internal combustion engine. Canada, Italy, Russia and Japan followed. India, Egypt, Latin America and China became export economies supplying raw materials and markets, and deindustrialization named a region's industry declining. Export economy is a key term the exam tests.

Imperialism.

SSH 0528 Imperialism's Motives, Means, and Costs

Industrial nations wanted cheap raw materials, markets and harbors for steamships, and took Africa, Asia and the Pacific, aided by medicine, transport and weapons. The Scramble left nearly all Africa European, with the Congo Free State's Force Publique enforcing quotas; France took Indochina, Japan Korea, the United States the Pacific islands. The costs: cash crops, low wages, disease. India resisted by organizing.

Coerced labor.

SSH 0529 Coerced Labor and Migration in the Industrial Age

Slavery persisted in the United States and Brazil, serfdom in Russia; contract and indentured labor worked every inhabited continent; debt bondage trapped sharecroppers and Japanese textile workers; prisoners labored as punishment. Migrants fleeing poverty and violence took low-paid work on plantations and railroads, and the United States, Canada and Australia barred Asian migration. The demographic transition brought smaller families by nineteen hundred.

Classifying a response.

SSH 0530 Reform, Unions, and Socialisms: Classifying a Response

The exam asks who answered industrialization's problems and how, and the anchor's section sorts the answers. Governments: laws abolishing child labor, insuring workers, requiring safe housing, curbing pollution, regulating prostitution. Middle-class reformers: personal behavior, morality, temperance, and often women's rights. Workers: unions to force shorter hours, higher wages and safer conditions; a trade union organized one craft, a labor union all workers. Socialists: holding that capitalism's destruction would cure social ills, social democrats built parties that organized unions and forced protective legislation through democratic means, while other socialists, and some anarchists, urged violent overthrow. A law limiting a factory's hours for children is government regulation. A campaign to close saloons is middle-class reform. A strike for an eight-hour day is a union. A party contesting elections to legislate for workers is social democrat. A bomb aimed at the ruling elite is anarchist or revolutionary socialist. Ask who acts and by what means: law, persuasion, bargaining, ballot, or force. The trap is putting all socialists under revolution; the anchor's social democrats chose democratic means. The second trap is trade union for labor union; the anchor's key terms separate one craft from all workers.

Japan and China.

SSH 0531 Japan's Meiji Turn and China's Boxers

Japan and Russia fought; Britain and Russia nearly fought over central Asia in the Great Game; the powers and the United States claimed spheres of influence in China, where the Boxers, an anti-foreign secret society, rose. Japan's Meiji Restoration of eighteen sixty-eight ended the shogunate and began its industrialization. Japan then built its own empire in Korea.

Five entries on the world wars and between: alliances to armistice, Versailles and the mandates, Stalin, the Depression as a global event, and Nanjing to Hiroshima.

The First World War.

SSH 0532 Alliances to Armistice, 1914–1918

Germany's naval ambitions collided with Britain's. Nationalities strained the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary; a Bosnian Serb killed Franz Ferdinand in June nineteen fourteen, and alliance obligations spread the war. Belgium marked Germany the aggressor, the Marne fixed the trenches, Russia bled, and total war brought tanks, machine guns, planes and colonial troops. Nicholas abdicated in seventeen; the Kaiser in November eighteen, then armistice.

Versailles.

SSH 0533 Versailles, the League, and the Mandates

Versailles in nineteen nineteen blamed Germany, set reparations above thirty-three billion dollars, the anchor's figure unconverted, shrank it, redrew Europe's map, and created the League of Nations. America emerged a creditor, and Germany's instability opened the door to the Nazis. Mandates passed territories to the powers under League oversight; Balfour came in seventeen, the Salt March in thirty.

Stalin.

SSH 0534 The Soviet Union Under Stalin

The Bolsheviks won a civil war, then argued over principles, and Lenin's New Economic Policy allowed some capitalism. After Lenin's death Stalin emerged. His Five-Year Plans centralized the economy and hardened the state; collectivization brought famine and death; suspicion of disloyalty meant prison or execution, while socialist realism made the worker its subject. Unit four carries the purges and Khrushchev's verdict.

The Depression.

SSH 0535 The Depression as a Global Event

The Great Depression of the nineteen thirties showed how connected the world's economies were; nearly every country suffered, and the gold standard and GDP are the chapter's key terms. No single event caused it. Work relief, food programs and new policies eased it without solving it, and in Italy and Germany new parties exploited the instability. Unit two carries the New Deal.

The Second World War.

SSH 0536 From Nanjing to Hiroshima

Japan's advance through China and attack on Nanjing showed its aims. Munich in thirty-eight conceded the Sudetenland; the Nazi-Soviet pact followed; Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty-one brought the United States in. Midway turned the Pacific, Mussolini fell in forty-three, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended it. The Holocaust: over six million Jewish people and at least three million others, the anchor's count.

Four entries to close: sorting Cold War events, satellites and crises, globalization's institutions, and interaction as the unit's theme.

Sorting the Cold War.

SSH 0537 Containment or Non-Alignment: Sorting Cold War Events

The exam gives a Cold War event and asks what it shows, and the anchor's chapter supplies three categories. Containment: the Western policy of confining communism to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, tested at the Berlin blockade of nineteen forty-eight to forty-nine and answered by the airlift and NATO, with the Warsaw Pact as reply; extended to Korea in nineteen fifty, to South Vietnam after France's war, and to interventions in Guatemala and Cuba. Communism's spread: Mao's victory in nineteen forty-nine, unrecognized by the United States; North Korea's invasion; North Vietnam. Non-alignment: Yugoslavia outside the Soviet orbit though communist; former colonies, led by Indonesia, India and Egypt, seeking development without becoming either superpower's satellite, while still taking aid from one or both. An airlift to a blockaded city is containment tested. A communist state refusing Moscow's orbit is non-alignment, Yugoslavia. A new republic the United States refused to recognize is communism's spread, China. A bloc's answer to NATO is the Warsaw Pact. The trap is treating non-alignment as neutrality in practice; the anchor says its leaders accepted aid from both, and Egypt leaned Soviet. The second trap is dating the Sino-Soviet split early; the anchor puts it in the late sixties.

Satellites and crises.

SSH 0538 Satellites, Crises, and Decolonization

Soviet satellites tested Moscow in the fifties and sixties; rebellions in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia were crushed. Berlin in sixty-one and Cuba in sixty-two brought the superpowers near war; détente and proxy wars followed in the seventies. Africa's colonies fought for independence, and Mao's China suffered famine and the Cultural Revolution. Apartheid ends in nineteen ninety-one in the anchor's key term.

Nineteen ninety-one.

SSH 0539 1991 and After: Globalization's Institutions

In the eighties Afghanistan and an American arms buildup strained the Soviet Union; Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost failed, the Warsaw Pact states broke away, and the USSR disbanded in nineteen ninety-one. Deng brought elements of capitalism to China. GATT became the WTO; the European Union dates from ninety-three, NAFTA from ninety-two. The anchor names the buildup's presidents; the course names the decade.

The unit's theme.

SSH 0540 Interaction as the Theme: Six Centuries of Exchange, 1400–2000

The exam's phrase for this unit is global themes and interactions, and the anchor's fourteen chapters read as one argument about how the world's regions came to act on one another. In fourteen hundred the interactions ran along old routes: Malacca's straits, the Saharan caravans, the Swahili monsoon trade, the Islamic world's markets, with firearms and maps moving among them. The turn to the sea, forced by fourteen fifty-three and made possible by borrowed navigation, added an ocean. What crossed it first was biological, the Columbian Exchange and its diseases, and then economic: mercantilism's colonies, the sugar plantations, and the triangular trade that carried twelve million Africans and fed profits into Europe's first factories. The eighteenth century's interaction was intellectual and political: an Enlightenment indebted to Muslim and Indian science, argued in coffeehouses, and enacted in revolutions that differed in how much they broke. The nineteenth century's was industrial: the Second Industrial Revolution sorted the world into industrial nations and export economies, and imperialism took most of Africa and much of Asia while labor moved, free and coerced, across every continent. The twentieth century's was catastrophic and then institutional: two total wars, a depression that proved the economies were one, a Cold War of containment, proxies and non-alignment, and after nineteen ninety-one the institutions the anchor lists as globalization's frame. Each century's interaction rested on the last: the plantations on the crossing, the revolutions on the public sphere, the empires on the factories, the institutions on the wars. That is what the exam means by interaction, and it is why a question about any one century may be answered from the one before. This is a reading of the anchor's order, not a claim the anchor states in one place. The anchor's own caution stands: interaction brought catastrophe as often as exchange, and the record of Nanjing, the Congo, the Holocaust and the slave trade is voiced here as record. That is the chain this lecture opened with, drawn whole.

Look at what you can now do. You can say the creoles resented the peninsulares and Spain's restrictions, that Cádiz taught them independence was possible, and that Hidalgo's social demands lost what Iturbide's plan kept. You can name steel, rubber, chemicals, electricity and the engine, and define an export economy as a supplier of raw materials and a market. You can classify a response to industrialization by asking who acts and by what means: law, persuasion, bargaining, ballot, or force. You can sort a Cold War event as containment, communism's spread, or non-alignment, and you know the non-aligned took aid from both sides. And you can read six centuries of interaction as each resting on the last, with the anchor's caution that it brought catastrophe as often as exchange. Unit seven turns to American government, opening on the Constitution's design.