Chapter 19

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 combat the population growth like Europe did. The result was growing pressure on the land, smaller farms for China's peasant population, unemployment, impoverishment, misery, and starvation.
the Islamic world in the Ottoman empire felt that its civilization needed little to learn from the "barbarians" in Europe. Unlike China however, Islamic civilization had been a near neighbor to Europe for 1000 years. The Ottoman Empire, the most prominent state, had long governed substantial parts of the Balkans and had a clear military and religious threat to Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was no longer to deal with Europe from a position of equality, let alone superiority. It became known as "the sick man of Europe" because they were unable to prevent region after region from falling under the control of Christian powers. The Ottoman Empire's own domains shrank considerably at the hands of Russian, British, Austrian, and French aggression. The leadership of the Ottoman Empire recognized many of its problems and during the nineteenth century mounted ambitious programs of "defense modernization."
By the beginning of the twentieth century, both China and the Ottoman Empire, experienced the consequences of a rapidly shifting balance of global power

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