Ch 17, module 1

5) How did Britain's middle classes change during the 19th century?

The upper levels of the middle class consisted of wealthy factory owners and mine owners, bankers and merchants. While this may be true, the majority of the middle class included businessmen, doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, journalists, scientists, and any other professionals who were necessary in an industrial society. These people were the reason for the Reform Bill of 1832, which granted middle class men the right to vote, but still excluded women. Their main concern was the idea of "respectability," which combines both social status and virtuous behavior. In terms of gender roles, people who came from middle class families often seemed to adopt traditional roles. The industrial revolution was a turning point in the lives of many middle class women, since they went from being a housewife who couldn't work to earn a profit to entering the labor force in a wide range of careers. The industrial revolution provided both men and women with an abundant amount of new employment options. This is what helped these people be able to distinguish themselves from the working class and claim their position in the middle class. It allowed the majority of the middle class an opportunity to grow and this is what allowed the industrializing process to continue. 

7) What were the differences between industrialization in the United States and that in Russia?

Mostly due to the available resources the United States possessed it became the world’s leading industrial power by the year 1914. The U.S. government made it relatively easy for corporations to form, gave tax breaks, offered grants of public land to the railroad companies, and there was an absence of overt regulation of industry. All of these played a role in the rise of very large business enterprises. The United States also developed new ways to use mass production, the assembly line, and “scientific management” in order to produce for a mass market. On the other hand, Russia remained without a national parliament, had no legal political parties, and no nationwide elections at the time. It remained under the control of titled nobility of various ranks and an unchecked tsar. Russia began to see change through the wars they fought such as the Crimean War (1854-1856). This is when they began coming to the realization that things like serfdom were no longer beneficial to the overall development of the country. It wasn’t until 1890 that the Russian industrial revolution began. This revolution was mostly centered around railroads and heavy industry and a great amount of foreign investment

10) In what ways was Latin America linked to the global economy of the 19th century, and what was the impact of these links?

Latin America began producing large amounts of silver and raw materials such as copper from Chile, tin from Bolivia, nitrates from Chile, and guano (bird droppings) from Peru. Many other materials can be added to this list and came from other parts of Latin America as well. An exchange of goods would occur between Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Latin America would provide the necessary raw materials for industrializing countries and in return they would import weapons, machinery, tools, textiles, and luxury goods from Europe and the United States. Urbanization occurred as a result to this exchange and Latin America sought to become more like Europe. Impoverished Europeans were recruited and promised a new and prosperous life in Latin America. These promises were often unfulfilled though. The exports that Latin America was engaging in at the time impacted the Upper-class landowners and the Middle-class urban dwellers. These two groups represented one percent and eight percent of the population respectively. These people were seen as valuable and necessary for the growth and modernization of society. The rest of the population was lower class and struggled with impoverishment. These are the people who were living in rural areas and benefited the least out of everyone from the export boom. 

Foundresses week

During Foundresses week I was able to attend the art show. It consisted of various art pieces that had been submitted by members of the Belmont community. Each art piece was significant in its own way and had its own story behind it. I enjoyed attending this event, because the various meanings of each art piece captured and celebrated the diversity of the person who created it. Overall, it was a successful event and directly connected to the mission of Notre Dame de Namur learning institutions.

ch 16 pt 1

• The Atlantic revolutions were distinctive in that they were closely connected to one another. 
• The Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) had argued, the "social contract" between ruler and ruled should last only as long as it served the people well.
• Nationalism, perhaps was the most potent ideology of the modern era, was nurtured in the Atlantic revolutions and shaped much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world history.
• By effecting a break with Britain, the American Revolution marked a decisive political change, but in other ways it was a conservative movement, because it originated in an effort to preserve the existing liberties of the colonies rather than create new ones. 
• The American Revolution grew not from social tensions within the colonies, but from a rather sudden and unexpected effort by the British government to tighten its control over the colonies and to extract more revenue from them. 
• On the eve of the French Revolution, a Paris newspaper proclaimed that the United States was "the hope and model of the human race." This was referencing the political ideas and practices of the new country.
• In France, the people had been awakened by the American Revolution.
• The third estate organized themselves as the National Assembly, claiming the sole authority to make laws for the country. 
• The famous French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau had told them that it was "manifestly contrary to the laws of nature...that a handful of people should gorge themselves with superficialities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities." 
• These social conflicts gave the French Revolution, especially during its first five years, a much more violent, far-reaching, and radical character than its American counterpart.
• Nowhere did the example of the French Revolution echo more loudly than the French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue, later renamed Haiti.
• Socially, the last had become the first. In the only completely successful slave revolt in world history, "the lowest order of the society-slaves-became equal, free, and independent citizens."
• Politically, they had thrown off French colonial rule, creating the second independent republic in the Americas and the first non-European state to emerge from Western colonialism. 
• To whites throughout the hemisphere, the cautionary saying, "Remember Haiti" reflected a sense of horror at what had occurred there and a determinism not to allow political change to reproduce that fearful outcome again. 
• Despite their growing disenchantment with Spanish rule, creole elites did not so much generate a revolution as have one thrust upon them by events in Europe. 
• In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain and Portugal, deposing the Spanish King Ferdinand VII and forcing the Portuguese royal family into exile in Brazil. 
• With Legitimate royalty now in disarray, Latin Americans were forced to take action. The outcome was the independence of various Latin American countries by 1826.

ch 16 pt 2

• England and New England were among the most prosperous regions of the Western world in the early nineteenth century and both were based on free labor.
•  The Great Jamaican Revolt of 1831-1832 was particularly important in prompting Britain to abolish slavery throughout its empire in 1833.
• The end of Atlantic slavery during the nineteenth century marked a major and rapid turn in the world's social history and the moral thinking of mankind.
• Newly freed people did not achieve anything close to political equality, except in Haiti.
• Europeans imposed colonial rule on Africa in the late nineteenth century, one of their justifications was that they needed to emancipate enslaved people.
• It was very ironic that they claimed that they needed to end slavery in a continent that they had extracted slaves from for more than four centuries.
• Some nineteenth century Muslim authorities opposed slavery claiming that it went against the Quran's ideals of freedom and equality. 
• Nationalism proved to be an infinitely flexible and enormously powerful idea in the nineteenth-century Europe and beyond.
• A third echo of the Atlantic revolutions lay in the emergence of a feminist movement.
• An organized and substantial group of women called into question the most fundamental and accepted feature of all preindustrial civilizations-the subordination of women to men.
• In the twentieth century feminist thinking transformed "the way in which women and men work, play, think, dress, worship, vote, reproduce, make love and make war"
• From the beginning, feminism became a transatlantic movement in which European and American women attended the same conferences, corresponded regularly, and read one another's work 
• By 1914, some 10,000 women took part in French feminist organizations, while the National American Woman Suffrage Association claimed 2 million members.
• Feminists were viewed as selfish, willing to sacrifice the family or even the nation while pursuing their individual goals.

Ch 15

• The Ottoman Siege of of Vienna in 1529 marked a muslim advance into the heart of central Europe. 
• The Reformation began in 1517 when a German priest, Martin Luther, nailed a document called the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. 
• This document opened up a debate about the various abuses within the Roman Catholic church. 
• What made Luther's protest potentially revolutionary was its theological basis.
• Luther believed that salvation came through faith alone. 
• Although a large number of women were attracted to Protestantism, Reformation teachings and practices didn't offer them a substantially greater role in the church or society.
• In Protestant-dominated areas, the male Christ figure was the sole object of worship.
• The culmination of European religious conflict took shape in the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a Catholic-Protestant struggle that began the Holy Roman Empire but eventually engulfed most of Europe.
• New religious orders such as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), provided a dedicated brotherhood of priests committed to the renewal of the Catholic Church and its extension abroad.
• Christianity motivated European political and economic expansion and also benefited from it.
• In 1535 the bishop of Mexico proudly claimed that he had destroyed 500 pagan shrines and 20,000 idols.
• Throughout the colonial period and beyond, many Mexican Christians also took part in rituals derived from the past, with little sense of incompatibility with Christian practice. 
• Many Jesuits learned Chinese, became thoroughly acquainted with confucian texts and dressed like Chinese scholars.
• They aimed to show people the commonalities between Confucianism and Christianity rather than introducing something new and foreign to them. 
• Missionary efforts over the course of some 250 years (1550-1800) resulted in 200,000 to 300,000 converts, a minuscule number in a Chinese population approaching 300 million by 1800.The early modern era likewise witnessed the continuation of the "long march of Islam" across the Afro-Asian world. 
• Continued Islamization was usually dependent on the wandering of holy Islamic men or Sufis, Islamic scholars, and itinerant traders, none of whom posed a threat to local rulers. 
• What they offered in short was a connection to the wider prestigious, and prosperous world of Islam. 
• Islamization extended modestly even to the Americas, where enslaved African Muslims practiced their faith in North America, particularly in Brazil, where Muslims led a number of slave revolts in the early nineteenth century. 
• Al Wahhab emphasized the rights of women within a patriarchal Islamic framework. 
• These included the right to consent to and stipulate conditions for marriage, to control her dowry, to divorce, and to engage in commerce. 
• He did not insist on head-to-toe covering of women in public and allowed for the mixing of unrelated men and women for business or medical purposes.
• Although an Egyptian army broke the power of the Wahhabi control in 1818, the movement's influence continued to spread across the Islamic world.
• At the level of elite culture, the Mughal ruler Akbar formulated a state cult that combined elements of Islam, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism. 

ch 14 (second half)

• Fur trade was a highly competitive enterprise.
• The Dutch and British were frequent rivals for the great prize: North American furs.
• Native Americans would bring skins and furs to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America.
• Native Americans represented a cheap labor force in this international commercial effort, but they were not a directly coerced labor force.
• With no prior experience of alcohol and little time to adjust to its availability, these drinks caused binge drinking, violence among young men, promiscuity, and addiction. 
• The fur trade offered women a mix of opportunity and liability.
• The international sale of furs greatly enriched the Russian state as well as many private merchants, trappers, and hunters. 
• Slavery came in many forms.
• The slavery that emerged in America was distinctive in several ways.
• This New World slavery was largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking rights in the society of their owners.
• By the seventeenth century, slav trade became highly competitive with the British, Dutch, and French contesting the earlier Portuguese monopoly.
• Enslaved Africans often resisted their fates in a variety of ways. 
• One common act was to flee. 
• Since more men than women were shipped to the Americas, the labor demands on those women who remained increased substantially.
• The unbalanced sex ratios also meant that men could marry multiple women. 
• For much smaller numbers of women, slave trade provided an opportunity to exercise power and accumulate wealth.

ch 14 (first half)

• In the fifteenth century, Europe's population grew and countries like Spain, Portugal, England and France started learning how to tax their subjects more efficiently. 
• Those European countries also learned how to build substantial military forces equipped with gunpowder weapons.
• Europeans were required to pay cash (gold or silver) for Asian spices or textiles. 
• Portuguese voyages along the West African coast were seeking direct access to African goldfields. 
• Most Indian Ocean merchant ships were not heavily armed and lacked onboard cannons.
• The Portuguese saw this as an opportunity to outgun and outmaneuver competing naval forces.
• The Portuguese created a "trading post empire" in the Indian Ocean and aimed to forcefully take control of commerce. 
• They were unable to take control of commerce so they began assimilating themselves to Asian and African cultures.
• Spain was the first to challenge Portugal's position.
• The Dutch and English both entered the Indian Ocean commerce in the seventeenth century.
• The Dutch controlled the shipping and production of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace.
• Both the Dutch and English became heavily involved in trade within Asia.
• Japanese traders began operating in Southeast Asia in the seventeenth century.