Strayer 100

World war I effectively launched the twentieth century, considered a new phase of world history. Europe's modern transformation and its global ascendancy were not accompanied by a growing  unity or stability among it own peoples, quite the opposite in fact. The biggest division was among competing states. By the early twentieth 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. Slavic nationalism and Austro-Hungarian opposition to it certainly lay at the heart of the war's beginning. The Great Powers of Europe competed intensely for colonies, spheres of influence, and superiority in armamnets and the public pressure of competing nationalism ensured widespread popular support for the decision to go to war, at least initially. Each country had a incentive to strike first and rapid industrialization  of warfare which led to some 10 million...

A new era in the human journey, according to historians at the time, began in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I. They say this because this conflict represented a fratricidal civil war within Western civilization, triggered the Russian revolution and the beginning of world communism, and stimulated many in the colonial world to work for their own independence. This  most century both carried from the past and has set courses for today and for the future. The 20th Century brought wars, revolutions, and political upheavals, and this chapter will explore the global themes that shaped the history of the past century.

China was among the countries that confronted an aggressive and industrializing West while maintaining  it independence, along with Japan, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Ethiopia, and Thailand. These areas avoided outright incorporation into European colonial empires, retaining some ability to resist European aggression and to reform or transform their own societies. To try and show their independence, in 1793 Chinese emperor Qianlong sharply rejected British requests for a less restricted trading relationship with his country. However, by 1912 China's long established imperial state had collapsed, and the country transformed to a weak and dependent participant in a European dominated world system in which Great Britain was the major economic and political player. The crisis within china at the time was the extreme population growth from about 100 million people  in 1685 to around 430 million in 1863. However, China did not have an event as major as the industrial revolution to c...

The visuals on Chapter 18 show European soldiers as very large and standing on top of Africa. It symbolizes how the European countries came and took over Africa's resources, stole the people as slaves, and overall took over the whole continent.

The second wave of European Colonialism conquests was focused in Asia, Africa, and Oceania rather than in the Western Hemisphere. Europeans were fighting hard to create their new empires, as countess wars of conquest attest. The passage to colonial status occurred in various ways. through trading, absense of cultural or political unity of other empires, and through different alliances from local authorities and European traders. Old ways of working were eroded almost everywhere in the colonial world. The strength of European empires erased the need for peasant families farming, hand made artisan goods, and Asian and African merchants for trade. The new ways of working that emerged during the colonial era derived directly from the demands of the colonial state. The most obvious was the required and unpaid labor on public projects such as constructing railroads, government buildings, and transporting goods. In some places, colonial rule created conditions that facilitated and increased c...

No element of Europe's modern transformation held a greater significance for the history of humankind than the Industrial Revolution. The global context for this economic transformation was due to the increase in population from about 375 million in 1400 to about 1 billion in the early nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution marks a human response to that dilemma as nonrenewable fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas replaced the previously used renewable energy sources of wind, water, wood, and the muscles power of people and animals. Their ability to farm with more advanced techniques allowed to feed the rapidly growing population. Access to huge new sources of energy gave rise to an enormously increased output of goods and services. It began to grow beyond the textile industry to iron and steel production, railroads and steamships, food processing, and construction. Following this later in the nineteenth century, industrial revolution began to focus on chemicals, ...

 The differences in the revolutions were how they were started, the quite different social and political-tensions, and they varied considerably in their outcomes. The American Revolution was a struggle for independence form oppressive British rule. It began with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, resulted in a military victory by 1781,, and generated a federal constitution  in 1787. The main change of this revolution was in politics, looked at as a conservative movement because it originated in an effort to preserve the existing liberties of the colonies rather than create new ones. Overall, The american revolution grew fro a sudden and unexpected effort by the British government to tighten its control over the colonies and to extract more revenue from them. The French came next in the dram of the Atlantic revolutions. The cause for tension was how the privileged, prestigious, and wealthy members of the nobility resisted the monarchy's attempt to subject them to new tax...

This chapter dives into the Revolutions by different countries and how that shaped where we are today. The Atlantic Revolutions in North America, France, Haiti, and Latin America took place within a larger global framework.  These occurred in the context of expensive wars, weakening states, and destabilizing process of commercialization. Furthermore, the Atlantic revolutions were distinctive in that they were very closely connected to each other. The american revolutionary leader Thomas Jefferson was the U.S ambassador to France on the eve of the French Revolution. While there, he provided advice and encouragement to French reformers and revolutionaries. Simon Bolivar, a leading figure in Spanish American struggles for independence, twice visited Haiti, where he received military aid from the first black government in the Americas. The ideas that animated the Atlantic revolutions derived from the European Enlightenment and were shared across the ocean in newspapers, books, and pamp...

During the century and a half between 1750 and 1914, also known as the long nineteenth century, the creation of a new kind of human society emerged, know as modern.  It came from the intersection of the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions. Those societies generated many of the transformative ideas that have guided human behavior over the past several centuries including the ideas that women could be equal to men, slavery was no longer necessary, and many more enlightened ideas and philosophies. The second theme of this century and a half was the growing ability of these modern societies to exercise enormous power and influence over the res of humankind. These two themes thrust Western Europe, and partly North America, into a new and more prominent role in world history. The power that Europeans accumulated during the long nineteenth century included the ability to rewrite geography and history in ways that centered the human story on Europe. Other countries looked up to ...

The early modern era of world history gave birth to two intersecting cultural trends that continue to play out in the twenty-first century. The first was the spread of Christianity to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans. The second was the emergence of a modern scientific outlook, which sharply challenged Western Christianity even as it too heavily grew globally. During the early modern era, Christianity was largely limited to Europe. In 1500, the world of Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east, with small communities of various kinds in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia. Internally, the Christian world was seriously divided between the Roman Catholics of Western and Central Europe and the eastern Orthodox of Eastern Europe and Russia. Externally it was in defense against Islam. In the early sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation shattered the unity of Roman Catholic Christianity. The reformation began in 1517 when a Germ...

The second half of this Chapter begins with the role of fur in global commerce. In the early modern era, furs joined silver, textiles, and spices as major items of global commerce. Their production had an important impact  for the human societies that generated and consumed them. By 1500, European population and agricultural growth had sharply diminished the supply of fur-bearing animals. Furthermore,  much of the early modern era witnessed a period of cooling temperatures and harsh winters, known as the little ice age, which heavily increased the demand for furs. With people having no choice but to buy fur for the cold winters, the cost of good fur pelt quadrupled in France. This translated into strong economic  incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animals in North America, which was easier because of the regrowth of forest habits for fur-bearing animals following the great dying. This chapter then goes into commerce in people, referri...

The first half of Chapter 14 digs into early acting countries in modern commerce and overall the making of the world economy during the early modern era. the slave trade was described by strayer as one of the only components of international networks of exchange that shaped human interactions during the centuries between 140 and 1750.  beyond then, it goes into the different voyages made by European countries to reach rich networks of commerce. the first voyage was made by Portuguese mariner Vasca da Gama where they went to Asia to explore a sea route to the East, but their most immediate motivation for the voyage was tropical spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, and pepper which were widely used. The big problem for Europeans was paying for Eastern goods because they did not have products that were attractive in East Markets. This problem for the Europeans contributed heavily to the desire for the precious metals and goldfields in Africa. While the spice trade of Eurasia...

during the three centuries of the early modern era, Empire building was a global process. In the Americas, the Aztec and Inca empires flourished before the incorporation of rival empires of the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French, and Dutch. This led to the first interaction between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans. Initially, Europeans had an advantage in settling in North America. Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe were simply closer to the Americas than any potential Asian competitors. on top of that, their innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design enabled them to sail the Atlantic Ocean easier, allowing people to settle and empires to form. following the arrival of Europeans and African laborers came what is referred to as the Great Dying. When Native American peoples came into contact with these European and African diseased, they died in appalling numbers, in many cases losing up to 90 percent of the population.

in this reading, Strayer keys in on the beginnings of genuine globalization, elements of distinctly modern societies, and a growing European presence in world affairs. The most obvious expression of globalization at the time was in the oceanic journeys of European explorers and the European conquest and colonial settlements of the Americas. The trade and  transfer of slaves, silver, plants, animals, and people created new networks of interaction across the Atlantic and Pacific between the Americas and European Countries. Japan, India, and Europe experienced the beginnings of modern population growth as Eurasia recovered from the Black Death and crops in America were able to support these large population numbers. World Population more than doubled between 1400 and 1800 (from about 374 million to 968 million)