Chapter 23: A New Phase of Global Interaction

People spook about globalization and they referred to immense accleration in international economic transactions that took place in the second half of the 20th century and it continued into he 21st century. The aftermath of World War II was very different. The capitalist victors in the conflict, led by the United States, were determined to avoid any return to such depression-era conditions. The 'Bretton Woods system' negotiated the rules for commercial and financial dealing among the major capitalist countries, while promoting relatively free trade, stable currency values linked to the U.S dollar, and high levels of capital investment. Technology also was a contribution to the acceleration of economic globalization. There were containerization shipping, huge oil tankers, and air express services dramatically lowered transportation costs, while fiber optic cables and later the Internet provided the communication infrastructure for global economic interaction. In the development of this the countries population grew and especially when tied to growing economies and modeling societies.

The kind of economic globalization was taking shape in the 1970's and after was widely known as neoliberalism. The approach to the world economy favored the reduction of tariffs, the free global movement of capital, a mobile and temporary workforce, the privatization of many stature enterprises, and the government efforts to regulate the economy. The collapse of the state controlled economies of the communist world only furthered such unrestricted global capitalism. As the communism collapsed by the end of the 20th century, capitalism was global and the global was capitalist.

Women were mobilized outside of the Western world during the 20th century. They faded very different situations than did white women in the United States and Europe. From much Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the predominant issues colonialism, racism, the struggle for independence, poverty, development, political oppression, and sometimes the revolution were not indirectly related to gender. Women were affected by and engaged with all of those efforts and were welcomed by nationalist and communist leaders, mostly men, who needed their support.

Chapter 22: The End of Empire

In 1900, the Europeans colonial empires in Africa and Asia appeared as the permanent features of the world's political landscape. There was the first major breakthroughs that occurred in Asia and the Middle East in the late 1940's when the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Israel achieved independence. The 20th century it witnessed the demise of many empires. For example, the Austrian and Ottoman empires collapsed from the World War I. The Russian empire also unraveled, although it was soon reassembled under the auspices of the Soviet Union. World War II ended the German and Japanese empires. African and Asia movements from independence shared these other end of empire stories the ideal of national self-determination. Empires without territory, such as the powerful influence that the United States exercised in Latin America, likewise came under attack from highly nationalist governments. One of the outcomes of that upheaval was the nationalization in 1937 of Mexico's oil industry.

The most important political expression of an all-Indian identity took shape in the Indian National Congress which was often called the Congress party, it established in 1885. This was an association of English educated Indians, lawyers, journalists, teachers, businessman that were regionally prominent high case Hindu families. The INC had difficulty in gaining a mass among the India's vast peasant population. It began to change in World War I. Gandhi was born in the province of Gujarat in western India. Gandhi personally experience overt racism for the first time. Gandhi also embraced efforts to mobilize women for the struggle against Britain and to elevate their standing in marriage and society. Gandhi and the INC leadership had to contend with a wide range of movements, parties, and approaches who very diversity tore at the national unity. As the movement of independence gained the ground, the muslims league and its leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, argued that those parts of India that had a Muslims majority should have separate political status. 

Chapter 21

Communism was a phenomenon of enormous significance in the world of the 20th century. Communist came to power almost everywhere in the tumultuous wake of war, revolution, or both. The struggle divided continents, countries, and cities into communist and noncommunist halves. It also prompted global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the Global South. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed the collapse of communist regimes or the abandonment of communist principles practically everywhere. The great goal struggle of capitalism and communism, embodied in the United States and the Soviet Union, was resolved in favor or the former far more quickly and much more peacefully than anyone had imagined possible.

Most European socialists came to believe that they could achieve their goals peacefully and through the process of democratic, which can define themselves as a communist in the 20th century. Russia was called the Soviet Union because they were the first country to experience the revolution. Also, the Marxist theory had to do with communism and how the final stage of historical development was a social equality and collective living would be most fully developed, largely without private property. Socialism was an intermediate stage along the way to that final goal. Karl Marx viewed a prerequisite for revolution of the 20th century that took place in a largely agrarian societies.The communist government controlled the state that were powered, communist movements took root in still other places.

Communist movements self-consciously had the mystique of the earlier French Revolution, which had the new and better worlds that could be constructed by human actions. The French had the old ruling classes and dispossessed landed aristocracies. Communist also worried about the lest of their revolutions end up in a military dictatorship like that of Napoleon following the French Revolution. Marxist ideology was to commit an industrial future that could help the economy to do better in political equality and abolish the private property. Russian and Chinese revolutions shared the general features in respecting they differences.

Chapter 20: Collapse at the Center

The Great War which was called The First World War or World War because it was considered a new phase of world history. The Western Europe for more than a century dominated the center of the modern world system. The Europeans controlled the world's other people through their formal empires, their informal influence, or the weight of their numbers. European had the dominance as less than a half a century later. That was the start of the first World War. There was a rivalry, which was Italy and Germany in which they joined a fragmented territories into two major new powers around the 1870. By the 20th century the balance of power was expressed in two rival alliances. the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain. The system of alliances intended to keep the peace created obligations that drew the Great Powers of Europe into a general war.

The Great Powers of Europe had to complete the colonies, sphere of influence, and superiority in armaments. There was a lot of men that were rushed into recruiting offices and a fear to what the war might end before they could enlist. Europe's armed rivalries had long ensured that military men enjoyed great social prestige, and most heads of state wore uniforms in public. The Great Powers had armies and excepted for Britain, relied on conscription. The rapid industrialization of warfare had generated an array of novel weapons, including submarines, tanks, airplanes, poison gas, machine guns, and barbed wire. The new military technology contributed casualties the war including some 10 million deaths the majority were male and twice that number were wounded, crippled, or disfigured. For women they would be no husbands or children.

World War I was represented as a political collapse of Europe, there was a catastrophe that suggested the Western capitalism system to fall as well. There was unemployed in both Germany and the United States that reached about 30% or more by 1932. Latin American countries who economies were based on the export of agriculture products and raw materials were also vulnerable to the world market. The Great Depression also challenged the government of industrialized capitalist countries and they believed that the economy would regulate itself through the market.

Chapter 19

China was one of the countries that confronted an aggressive and industrializing West while maintaining its formal independence, unlike some colonized areas. The governments of these regions avoided outright incorporations into European colonial empires, retaining some ability to resist the Europeans aggression and to reform or transform their own societies. Europe faced the immense military and political ambitions of rival of the European states. Second, they became a network of trade, investment, and they migrated from an industrializing and capitalist to generate a new world of economy. Third, European culture were inspired from French, English, or German language to convert into Christianity or to the study the European literature and philosophy. Lastly, they believed in a better future and its idea that nationalism, socialism, feminism, and individualism were a logical achievement.

China was one of their own victim of being successful. The economy and American food crops had been enabled because of the substantial population of growth and from that 100 million people in 1685 to some 430 million in 1853. For Europe there was a similar population, but no Industrial Revolution accompanied the amount of the number that increased of people. China also had an internal expansion to the west and south to generate anything that was about wealth and resources that derived from Europe's overseas empire. The state was increasingly enabling the effects as tax collection, flood control, social welfare, and public security. Hong Xiuquan, who is the younger brother of Jesus, was sent to cleanse the world of demons and to establish a "heavenly kingdom of great peace."Hong, himself denounced the Qing dynasty as foreigners who poisoned China and defiled the emperor's throne.

The general failure of 'self-strengthening' became apparent at the end of the century, when there was an anti-foreign movement known as the Boxer Uprising, which was caused by the northern China. The Boxers killed a lot of Europeans and Chinese Christians. The Western powers and Japan had Beijing occupied as to crush the rebellion and imposed a huge payment on China as a punishment. China remained a dependent country under the foreign control. There was also organizations as National Rejuvenation Study Society, Society to Protect the Nation, and Understand the National Shame Society that were not only Western science and technology but they were also the Western political practices that limit the authority of the ruler and permit people to take part in public life.

Japan modern transformation economy grew, it opened trades, and embraced of civilization and enlightenment from the West. Japan escaped from their semi-colonial entanglement with the West, but it also launched its own empire-building enterprise, even as European powers and the United States were carving up much of Asia and Africa into colonies to be influenced

Chapter 18

The industry and empire of Europe had the enormous productive of industrial technology and the growing affluence which created the need for raw material and agricultural products which were wheat from American Midwest/ Russia, meat from Argentina, bananas from Central America, rubber from Brazil, coca and oil from West Africa, tea from Ceylon, an gold and diamonds from South Africa. Also, the European's saw social benefits to foreign markets which served to keep European's factories humming and its workers employed. The "Great Power" was a symbol for a nation and their acquisitions as a matter of urgency and even possess a little economic value. There was another interesting thing about the Europeans they were defined others largely in religious terms. European's adopted the ideas and techniques in how to advance society. Chinese and Indians civilization were in high regard as they were freely mixed and mingled with Asian and African elites and often married their women. Europeans viewed the culture and achievements of Asian and African people through the prism of a new kind of racism, expressed now in terms of modern science. Race was a matter of fact viewed as human intelligence, moral development, and destiny. "Race is everything".

During the second wave Germany, Italy, Belgium, Japan, and the United States who were not all involved in the earlier phase, while the Spanish and Portuguese operated through the economy penetration and military intervention. There was a new European empires in the Afro-Asian world, empires everywhere were involved in military force or the threat of it. The European military advantage lay in the organization, drill, and practice, and also the command structure. In the 19th century, the European also had the advantages of fire powering, as they invented rifles and machine guns as well. The 'scramble for Africa' was half a dozen European powers against one another as they partitioned the entire continent among themselves in only about twenty-five years.

The scramble Africa was a various perspective. European leaders themselves were surprised by the intensity of their rivalries and the speed with which they acquired huge territories. The process involved an endless but peaceful negations among the competing Great Powers about 'who got what' and the extensive and intensive military.

Chapter 17

Chapter 17 is about the industrialization. The population grow as in Western Europe, China, and Japan as in wood and charcoal, also as in prices rising up. The Industrial Revolution marked that human response was to nonrenewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas to replace the early reliance on the energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscle power of people and animals. Also, the massive extraction nonrenewable raw materials to feed and to fuel the industrial machinery as in coal, ore, iron, and petroleum. There were signs of technology in the Industrial Revolution as in Britain innovated and transformed cotton textile for production. Later in the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution focused on chemicals, precision machinery, electricity, telephone, and telegraph, rubber, printing, and much more. In the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution became global as a number of Asian, African, and Latin American countries developed a substantial industrial sectors. Oil, natural gas , and nuclear reactions joined coal as a widely available source of energy.

Europe was destined to lead the way to modern economic life. India had the long corporation of the cotton textile production, sugar, the agriculture of innovations, and mathematics innovations. China was clearly the world leader in technology innovation between the 700 and 1400 and then also by the 1200. But when the technology began to change Europe began to pick it up. The earlier the achievements Europe began to rise and not stand alone as in its capacity for the technology innovation. Europe had no obvious economic lead as the Industrial Revolution. The European capacity for the industrial development lied in the industrial techniques. Even though, the process was highly uneven.

Women in the middle class families were highly increased as to wives, mothers, and homemakers. Women were also expected to be the moral center of their family life and responsible of their household consumption. "An ideology of domesticity defined homemaking, child raring, charitable endeavors, and refined activities such as embroidery, music, and drawing, as the proper sphere for women, while paid employment and public sphere of life outside the home beckoned." I think that was pretty sad that women were just looked upon on how they take cared of things and their families. The fact that men had no part as what they women did for their families and also for their husband is really disrespectful.