Ways of the World

by: Nichelle Trulove

Chapter 17 – The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution started two years after the French Revolution began a 'slave revolt' of the native peoples against the foreigners in their land.

The Haitian people “burned 1,000 plantations and killed hundreds of whites as well as mixed-race peoples” in an attempt to take back their freedom and their land.

This was “a revolution unique in the Atlantic world and in world history. Socially, the last had become first”.

It was the “only completely successful slave revolt in world history, 'the lowest order of the society – slaves – became equal, free, and independent citizens'”.

Haiti remained free and built up their society to farm and provide for their own needs.

However, Haiti is now unstable and in the midst of poverty.

(Stryer 507-510)

Chapter 17 – The Abolition of Slavery

In the Eighteenth Century, Enlightenment thinkers, as well as Quakers and Protestant religious thinkers came to think of slavery as a 'violation of natural rights', 'repugnant to our religion', and 'a crime in the sight of God'.

The idea of slavery soon was thought as non-essential for economic success and was 'out of date' and so slaves began to be let lose from the bonds of their masters and slavery was eventually banned in Britain.

“The end of Atlantic slavery during the nineteenth century surely marked a major and quite rapid turn in the world's social history and in the moral thinking of humankind”.

Freed slaves sought land but only some found it, mostly in Jamaica, and they “did not achieve anything close to political equality”.

(Stryer 513-516)

Chapter 17 – Feminist Beginnings

Along with the abolition of slavery, the development of feminist movements was another 'echo' of the Atlantic revolutions. Many women stated that, “the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality must include women.”

More women were able to be educated, especially in the middle class, and were involved in missionary work, charities, organizations, etc.

“The first organized expression of this new feminism took place at at a women's rights conference in New York in 1848. There, Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a statement that began by paraphrasing the Declaration of Independence: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women were created equal”.

By 1900, some women were able to enter universities, join the medical field, and several were able to become teachers.

(Stryer 520-523)

Chapter 18 – The Middle Class

Those in the middle class benefited the most from the industrial revolution than any other group.

The 'highest' middle class were able to contain their wealth by becoming owners of factories and mines and working as bankers and merchants.

The more common middle class were “businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists and other professionals required in any industrial society”.

(Stryer 536)

“Women in middle-class families were increasingly cast as homemakers charged with creating an emotional haven for their men and were the moral center of family life. They worked productively alongside their husbands”.

As the economy in Britain developed, a 'lower middle-class' arose. These citizens found jobs such as clerks, sales people, hotel staff, police, etc.

Chapter 18 – The Laboring Classes

70% or more of the population in Britain in the nineteenth century were the laboring classes – those who work in the “mines, ports, factories, construction sites, workshops and farms” in a struggle to support their families.

The laboring classes were the ones who “suffered the most and benefited the least” during the industrial revolution.

Their conditions were due mainly to the rapid population growth in urban societies. “Liverpool's population alone grew from 77,000 to 400,000 in the first half of the nineteenth century”. The people came to the cities to seek work, and a majority found near poverty.

They lived in overcrowded and smoke-filled cities with failing sanitation, spreading sicknesses, limited water supply and lacking services.

The work conditions had incredibly long hours and poor pay which led to child labor when desperate families sent their children to help provide.

(Stryer 537-538)

Chapter 18 – Russia: Industrialization and Revolution

While the United States “was the world's most exuberant democracy in the nineteenth century, Russia remained the sole outpost of absolute monarchy. The state exercised far more control over individuals and society than anywhere in the Western world”.

“Until 1861, most Russians were peasant surfs, bound to the estates of their masters, subject to sale, greatly exploited, and largely at the mercy of their owners. In Russia, serfdom approximated slavery”.

Before the Industrial Revolution in Russia began, the country desired to be more like Europe and so worked toward modernization of their military forces, education system and manufacturing. Their clothing changed to European styles.

The revolution developed a growing number of educated peoples founded in Marxist socialism and later Lenin.

Russia is the only country where industrialization was associated with violence.

(Stryer 545-548)

Chapter 19 – New Perceptions of the “Other”

Before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans defined other peoples in religious terms, but since the revolution, it turned to science.

Scientists “used allegedly scientific methods and numerous instruments to classify the size and shape of human skulls and concluded that those of whites were larger and therefore more advanced”.

Europeans felt that they were responsible for the 'weaker' peoples and decided that they had the right to dominate and control them. They believed they were doing these others a favor.

Europe then adopted the theories of Darwinism which they believed involved the destruction of the 'inferior races'.

(Stryer 563-564)

Chapter 19 – Reform

During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire “mounted increasingly ambitious reforms designed to preserve and strengthen the state”, to 'cure' the illnesses that it recognized within itself.

“Nationalist revolts in the empire's periphery, rather than Chinese- style peasant rebellion at the center, represented the primary internal crisis of nineteenth-century Ottoman history”.

“Ottoman reforms began in the late eighteenth century when Sultan Selim III attempted to set up new military and administrative structures alongside traditional institutions as a means of enhancing and centralizing state power”.

The Ottoman Empire began the development of modernization and Westernization – schools, courts, railroads, factories, etc. - after 1839 when they “sought to provide the economic, social and legal underpinnings for a strong and newly re-centralized state”.

(Stryer 573-575)

(Sultan Selim III)

Chapter 19 – The Tokugawa Background

“For 250 years, Japan had been governed by a shogun (a military ruler) from the Tokugawa family who acted in the name of a revered but powerless emperor, 300 miles away from the seat of power in Tokyo”.

“The chief task of this Tokugawa shogunate was to prevent the return of civil war among some 260 rival feudal lords, each whom had a cadre of armed retainers, the famed samurai warriors of Japanese traditions”.

Due to the shoguns, “Japan enjoyed more than two centuries of internal peace. The shoguns regulated internal travel and communication and required the feudal lords to spend alternate years in the capital of modern day Tokyo, leaving their families behind in their absence”.

These centuries of peace led to “a remarkable burst of economic growth, commercialization and urban development” in Japan.

(Stryer 578-579)

(Tokugawa Shogunate)

Chapter 20 – Economies of Coercion: Forced Labor and the Power of the State

“The most infamous cruelties of forced labor occurred during the early twentieth century in the Congo Free State”.

The abuse laborers received was eventually broad-cast across the territories and the Belgian government then overtook Congo in 1908 which stopped the violent patterns.

As the events in Congo spread, the concept of forced labor took effect in Indonesia and eventually spread to East Africa and so on.

(Stryer 599-600)

(Congo boys)

“Such conditions prompted a massive rebellion in 1905 and persuaded the Germans to end the forced growing of cotton. In Mozambique, a combination of peasant sabotage, the planting on unauthorized crops and the smuggling of cotton across the border to more profitable markets ensured that Portugal never achieved its goal of becoming self-sufficient in cotton production. In such ways did the actions of the colonized alter or frustrate the plans of the colonizers”.

Chapter 20 – Women and the Colonial Economy: An African Case study

During the Precolonial days in Africa, women did help with the crops, but due to the economy change with colonization, “women's lives diverged more and more from those of men”.

The workload of the women increased as the men often left to get involved with trade and crops that were in a higher demand. Women were left to work the fields, make clothing, pots, etc. on their own. “Women's working hours increased from forty-six per week in precolonial times to more than seventy by 1934”.

“In South Africa, where the demands of European economy were particularly heavy, some 40 to 50 percent of able-bodied adult men were absent from the rural areas, and women headed 60 percent on households”.

Some women “introduced laborsaving crops, adopted new farm implements and earned some money as traders. In the cities, they established a variety of self-help associations, including those for prostitutes and for brewers of beer”.

(Stryer 604-605)

Chapter 20 – Education

“For an important minority, it was the acquisition of Western education, obtained through missionary or government schools, that generated a new identity”.

The chance for education was a way to get out of slave labor and gain higher positions in the future, like businessmen.

“Many such people ardently embraced European culture, dressing in European clothes, speaking French or English, building European-style houses, getting married in long white dresses, and otherwise emulating European ways”.

Many, such as in India, saw that “European education was an instrument of progress and liberation from the stronghold of tradition”.

(Stryer 607-609)

Chapter 21 – Legacies of the Great War

When World War 1 began, most thought that it would be a temporary war and that “the boys will be home by Christmas”, but it lasted a long four years that affected everyone everywhere.

“In factories, women replaced the men who had left for the battlefront, while labor unions agreed to suspend strikes and accept sacrifices for the common good”.

Due to the collapse of world empires such as Russia, Poland, Central Europe, etc., world communism had a starting force which held a dominant position.

Colonies such as Asia and Africa, having seen the Europeans kill one another, returned to their homes with little to no respect for the European rulers and a expectation to be treated more fairly.

“The first World War brought the United States to center stage as a global power”.

(Stryer 629-633)

Chapter 21 – Capitalism Unraveling:The Great Depression

“European industrial capitalism had spurred the most substantial economic growth in world history and had raised the living standard of millions, but to many people it was a troubling system. Never had the instabilities of capitalism been so evident or so devastating as during the decade that followed the outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929”.

“Banks closed, and many people lost their life's savings. Investments dried up, world trade dropped by 62 percent within a few years and businesses contracted when unable to sell. People lost work and unemployment soared everywhere”.

President Roosevelt initiated his 'New Deal' program in an effort to improve conditions and prevent future outbreaks, but it did not end up being greatly successful.

It was not until “Word War 2 kicked in did that economic disaster abate in the United States”.

(Stryer 633-636)

Chapter 21 – World War 2:The Outcomes of Global Conflict

“The Second World War was the most destructive conflict in world history, with total deaths estimated some six times the deaths in World War 1. More than half of those casualties were civilians. The Soviet Union accounted for over 40 percent of them”.

“Everywhere, the needs of war drew large numbers of women into both industry and the military. Women constituted more than half of the workforce by 1945”.

Among the most haunting outcomes of the war was the Holocaust, implementing the Nazi dream of ridding Germany of its Jewish population” and any whom they deemed 'imperfect'.

“As the war ended, Europe was impoverished, shattered, many of its great cities in ruins and many people homeless or displaced. It's role in the world was diminished.

“The horrors of having two world wars within a single generation prompted renewed interest in an international effort to maintain peace and the chief outcome was the United Nations”.

(Stryer 648-653)

Chapter 22 – Communist Feminism

“Among the earliest and most revolutionary actions of these new communist regimes were efforts at liberating and mobilizing their women. Russia, the new communist government, declared full legal and political equality for women; marriage became a civil procedure among freely consenting adults; divorce was legalized and made easier, as was abortion; illegitimacy was abolished; woman no longer had to take their husbands' surnames; pregnancy leave for employed women was mandated; and women were actively mobilized as workers in the country's drive to industrialization”.

In China, “women became much more actively involved in production outside the home. By 1978, 50 percent of agricultural workers and 38 percent of nonagricultural laborers were female. 'Woman can do anything' became a famous party slogan in the 1960's”.

(Stryer 669-670)

Chapter 22 – Socialism in the Countryside

The Soviet Union, China and Russia created an effort to build up socialism and redistribute land “on an much more equitable basis to the peasantry”.

It was a more difficult process in China. “Hastily trained land reform teams were dispatched to the newly liberated areas, where they mobilized the poorer peasants in thousands of separate villages to confront and humiliate the landlords or the more wealthy peasants and seize their land, animals, tools, houses, and money for redistribution to the poorer members of the village”.

The effort in China was to “mobilize China's enormous population for rapid development and at the same time to move toward a fully communist society with an even greater degree of of social equality and collective living”.

(Stryer 670-671)

Chapter 22 – Nuclear Standoff and Third World Rivalry

“The Cuban missile crisis gave concrete expression to the most novel and dangerous dimension of the cold war – the arms race in nuclear weapons”. After World War 2, the Soviet Union made an even bigger effort to obtain nuclear weapons. During the forty years after they succeeded “the world moved from a mere handful of nuclear weapons to a global arsenal of close to 60,000 warheads within the next forty years”.

Many people lived in fear during those four decades. “Cold war fears of communist penetration prompted U.S. intervention, sometimes openly and often secretly, in Iran, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, the Congo and elsewhere”.

(Stryer 677-678)

Chapter 23 – The End of Empire in World History

“Never before had the end of empire been so associated with the mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology; nor had these earlier cases generated a plethora of nation-states, each claiming an equal place in a world of nation-states”.

“The twentieth century witnessed the demise of many empires. The Australian and Ottoman empires collapsed after World War 1, giving rise to a number of new states in Europe and the Middle East”.

“World War 2 ended the German and Japanese empires. African and Asian movements for independence shared with these other 'end of empire' stories the ideal of national self-determination”.

“The winning sides of both world wars believed that humankind was naturally divided into distinct peoples or nations, each of which deserved an independent state of it's own”.

(Stryer 692-693)

Chapter 23 – Experiments with Freedom

“Africa's first modern nationalist hero, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, paraphrased a biblical quotation when he urged his followers, 'Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these things will be added unto you'”.

The newly emerged nations of colonial rule asked if seeking political rule was really the answer for a better way of life. “They were joined in that quest by already independent but non-industrialized countries and regions such as China, Thailand, Ethiopia, Iran, Turkey and Central and South America. Together they formed the bloc of nations known variously as the third world, the developing countries, or the Global South. In the second half of the twentieth century, these countries represented perhaps 75 percent of the world's population and accounted for almost all of the fourfold increase in human numbers that the world experienced during the twentieth century”.

(Stryer 705-706)

(Kwame Nkrumah)

Chapter 23 – Experiments in Economic Development: Changing Priorities, Varying Outcomes

“At the top of the agenda everywhere in the Global South was economic development. The quest for development, now operating all across the planet, represented the universal acceptance of beliefs unheard of not many centuries earlier – that poverty was no longer inevitable and that it was possible to deliberately improve the material conditions of life for everyone”.

“A growing recognition of the role of women in agriculture led to changes of 'male bias' in development planning and to mounting efforts to assist women farmers directly. Women also were central to many governments' increased interest in curtailing population growth. Women's access to birth control, education and employment provided powerful incentives to limit family size”.

“East Asian countries in general have had the strongest record of economic growth. South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong were dubbed 'newly industrialized countries and China had the most rapid economic growth in the world by the end of the twentieth century”.

(Stryer 710-715)

Chapter 24 – Reglobalization

A 'reglobalization' process started after the second World War and “world trade skyrocketed from a value of some $57 billion in 1947 to well over $7 trillion in 2001. Department stores and super markets stocked their shelves with goods from every part of the world”.

“By the end of the twentieth century, international credit cards had taken hold almost everywhere, allowing for easy transfer of money across national boarders. In 2003, Master Card was accepted at some 32 million businesses in 210 countries or territories”.

Companies known as transnational corporations are huge to global economics. They “produce goods or services spontaneously in many coutures, such as the Barbie doll made in factories located in Indonesia, Malaysia and China using models from the U.S., plastic hair from Taiwan and Japan and cotton cloth from China”.

This globalization also created a flow of international travelers and migrating laborers.

(Stryer 725-727)

Chapter 24 – International Feminism

Perhaps the most impressive achievement of feminism in the twentieth century was the ability to project the 'woman question' as a global issue and to gain international recognition for the view that 'women's rights are human rights'”.

“Feminism registered as a global issue when the United Nations, under pressure from women activists, declared 1975 as International Woman's Year and the next ten years as the Decade for Women. By 2006, 183 nations had ratified a UN Convention to eliminate discrimination against women, which committed them to promote women's legal equality, to end discrimination, to actively encourage women's development and to protect their human rights”.

Some Muslim women “opposed a call for equal inheritance for women, because Islamic law required that sons receive twice the amount than daughters”. In contrast, some African women “were aware of how many children had been orphaned by AIDS and felt that girls' chances for survival depended on equal inheritance”.

(Stryer 738-739)

Chapter 24 – Religious Alternatives to Fundamentalism

“Considerable debate among Islamic people has raised questions about the proper role of the state, the difference between the eternal law of God and the human interpretations of it, the rights of women, the possibility of democracy and many other issues. Some have argued that traditions can change in the face of modern realities without losing their distinctive Islamic character”.

“Many Christian organizations were active in agitating for debt relief for poor countries. Pope John Paul 2 was openly concerned about 'the growing distance between rich and poor, unfair competition which puts the poor nations in a situation of ever-increasing inferiority'”.

“In Asia, a growing movement known as 'socially engaged Buddhism' addressed the needs of the poor though social reform, educational programs, health services, and peacemaking action during times of conflict and war”.

(Stryer 746-747)

(Pope John Paul 2)

Sources

Stryer, Robert W. Ways of the World. 2. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009. 44-45. Print.

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