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.