AS OF TODAY, JULY 23, 2011 NONE OF YOU HAVE GONE TO WEB-CT AND TAKEN THE EXAM. REMEMBER IT WILL EXSPIRE ON JULY 243TH AT MID-NIGHT. "NO EXCEPTIONS"
DR. GILBERT
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
WEB-CT WORKING
WEB-CT IS NOW WORKING THEREFORE, I WILL POST YOUR EXAM THERE UNDER ASSESSMENT. IT MUST BE COMPLETED BY MIDNIGHT SUNDAY. PLEASE POST A COMENT LETTING ME KNOW THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THIS POST.
DR. GILBERT
DR. GILBERT
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
IMORTANT E-MAIL SENT TO ALL STUDENT
I found out that final exam start on August 3. Therefore, YOUR FLASH DRIVES WILL NOT BE DUE UNTIL, MONDAY, AUGUEST 1ST. REMEMBER THAT YOUR RESEARCH MUST BE SENT TO ME BY MIDNIGHT, JULY 24TH. PLEASE POST A COMMENT BELOW THAT YOU UNDERSTAND THIS MESSAGE.
DR. GILBERT
DR. GILBERT
Monday, July 11, 2011
MODULE II DISCUSSION QUESTIONS_REVIEW
Students: You should be finished with Module II discussion questions. Take a little time and review your answers by comparing your answers with required focus below. You may revise what you have done. THESE ARE NOT ANSWERS, THEY ARE SUGGESTIONS!!!
***********************************************************************************
MODULE II
DISCUSSION
1. Explain the causes and effects of rural poverty in Europe between 1200 and 1500. What role did the natural environment play in people's survival?
1. Students should understand that nine out of ten people lived in rural areas and that this majority of people were subjected to famine as well as epidemics such as the Black Death. Rural people worked hard in the fields, and the fruits of their labor went to the noble landowner. From 1110 to 1300 the European population more than doubled, partly because of environmental changes such as increases in average temperature. This explosion in the population led to the use of the three-field system as well as the opening of new agricultural settlements; however, it also led to the reality that most Europeans would experience extreme hunger at least once in their lives. This was a world of social inequality, where serfs worked and the nobility and the church owned the land. Students should also emphasize inefficient farming practices, widening class differences, and burgeoning population as the root factors creating rural poverty.
2. What is humanism? What technological innovation encouraged the spread of humanist texts in Renaissance Europe?
2. Students should understand that humanism refers to an interest in the humanities: the disciplines of history, poetry, and ethics. Humanist writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio were well known for encouraging the rebirth of classical study. Humanists were influential in reviving secondary education and revising the curriculum to include classical tests. The influence of humanism was enhanced because of new printing technology. Printing originated in China, but western Europeans improved it significantly and used printing for many purposes. Johannes Gutenberg is credited with making at least three major contributions—the mechanical printing press, uniform cast-metal letters for movable type, and a suitable ink. The subsequent explosion of printing encouraged both the spread of literacy and the standardization of languages and was a great boon to European intellectual development.
3. One of the most significant events in Europe in the later Middle Ages was the rise of the new monarchies. What three closely related transformations led to this rise? Choose one of the monarchies to illustrate your answer.
3. The three transformations were (a) monarchs' successes in struggles with their vassals; (b) the development of military technology; and (c) the closer relationship of monarchs with both the commercial elites and the church. The pace and form of these transformations, however, differed from state to state. Italy, for instance, did not unite under one powerful monarch. Britain and France struggled through the Hundred Years War. Britain's monarch reluctantly accepted the Magna Carta. France had less control of the noble vassals, and Spain was finally united after driving out the remaining Muslims.
4. What was the impact of the Spanish in the Americas, as compared with the Portuguese in Africa and the East? What enabled the Spanish to conquer such an enormous territory with so few men?
4. The Spanish were more likely to seek territory and conquest, whereas the Portuguese preferred trading partners. Besides, Amerindians had been completely isolated from the rest of the world—in contrast to the peoples that the Portuguese encountered, who were not strangers to world commerce. Epidemic disease reduced the Amerindian population dramatically, allowing the Spanish to gain a foothold. Spanish steel swords, armor, horses, firearms, and deceit, along with allies among the Amerindians, finished the conquest that disease had begun. Spanish imposition of forced labor and religious conversion helped control Spain's new empire.
5. How significant was the role of religion in driving the forces of exploration from Europe?
5. While not a prime factor in the era of exploration, religious motives did exist. The two main areas that sent explorers, Iberia and Genoa, differed in their religious approaches. The argument could be made that Genoa's purpose was entirely commercial, while the Spanish and Portuguese were competing in both religion and commerce with the Islamic areas that had already established trade, technology, and navigation ventures within Africa, around it, and extending into India and Southeast Asia. Conversion was a stated mission of Prince Henry the Navigator's voyages, which were funded at least in part by the Order of Christ but which also established diplomatic and trade contacts in Christianized Africa. Islamic contenders in Iberia and North Africa had also established roots and routes in Africa that predated Christianizing missions.
6. How did the ideas of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution affect the Enlightenment? Was the Enlightenment only an intellectual concept?
6. The ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation were important to the development of the Enlightenment because they established a precedent of thinking outside the realm of the Catholic Church. The Reformation proclained that nature and religion could coexist, as could science, without direct involvement from the pope or the church. Scientific revolutionaries such as Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, and Newton used the ideas of Greek and Roman (pre-Christian) thinkers as a jumping-off point for their notions about the world around them, although many did not totally discount the idea of Christianity working in harmony with science. The Enlightenment took advantage of the relative acceptability of using knowledge to challenge political institutions and proposed new models, such as the idea of natural rights, that challenged the existing monarchies. The resulting changes in society therefore made the Enlightenment much more than an intellectual concept.
7. How did the basic tenets of Lutheranism and Calvinism differ from those of Catholicism? What was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation?
7. Students should recognize the different paths to salvation—the Catholic belief in salvation through good works, the Lutheran emphasis on faith, and the Calvinist belief in predestination. They should also understand the different philosophies regarding church ornamentation and hierarchy. The “Catholic Reformation” addressed the Protestant challenge at the Council of Trent. While many Catholic beliefs were clarified, the council mostly reaffirmed papal and church power.
8. Warfare was nearly constant in Europe during the early modern era. Using the chronology at the beginning of the chapter, list the wars and examine their economic and human costs. Why were these wars fought, what was their outcome, and what was their significance in European history?
8. Students should acknowledge the widespread death and destruction of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as of the internal and international wars of the era. Their financial expense should also be addressed. Despite the enormous costs in human life and money, these wars led to tremendous innovations in weaponry and skill. All states developed armies and navies to suit their particular needs. For instance, England, an island nation, had no standing army and a large navy. The continental states had much larger armies than navies. Refinements (rather than revolutions) in technology in such areas as firearms, shipping, and metallurgy were important, as were advances in communications and transportation. The development of modern diplomacy was a lasting result of that era of warfare and was evident in the precarious and shifting balance of power.
9. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, how did the European states “pay the piper,” as the chapter suggests? Were politics and warfare related to European economies and economic development?
9. Wars were waged for political gain, and the high cost of warfare demanded further increases in revenue. Monarchs promoted alliances with commercial elites, as well as across religious boundaries. States also began to tax the nobility and raise those taxes directly. Colonialism helped promote economic growth, and government protection and stimulus further increased economic development. On the other hand, Spain is an example of a country that kept increasing its military expenditures without promoting economic development. It also ignored alliances for the sake of religious uniformity and aristocratic privilege.
10. Describe the Scientific Revolution. Why did it begin? Who were some of the notable minds responsible for this revolution? Was there widespread acceptance of their ideas?
10. Students should explain that the Scientific Revolution emerged out of the Renaissance rediscovery of Greek thought. In the sixteenth century some great thinkers began to challenge the discoveries of the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and began a movement to explain the workings of the universe based on natural causes and mathematics. The contributions of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all combined to alter the way of thinking established by Aristotle. Student should understand the heliocentric theory of the universe. Galilieo was condemned for his writings. The scientific method also made contributions to social thought, which, along with economic and political changes, resulted in the Enlightenment.
11. What role did religion play in European settlement of the Americas? Discuss Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British uses of Christianity as a tool of colonization.
11. Students should discuss the role that the Catholic Church played in assimilating Amerindian peoples and in suppressing Amerindian traditional religious practice. Students should also explain how religion was an important force in the English and French North American lands. Among the Catholic colonies of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese, conversion was a strong motivation for colonization. The Catholic Church became the main agent for the transmission of European language and culture to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The British colonies became a refuge for Protestants who wished to escape what they believed were less-than-devout European practices. Several Protestant groups, such as the Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers, settled American lands. French Jesuit missionaries established hospitals, schools, and churches in an effort to convert the indigenous population.
12. Compare and contrast the different colonial regions established in British North America. In what ways were they similar or different?
12. Students should group the colonies into three basic geographic categories: New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the South. The motives for colonization differed. Some were private ventures whose purpose was escape from religious persecution, and others were private ventures designed to gather wealth. Some colonies were established by the monarchy, while others were given only a royal blessing. Their modes of settlement and the types of societies they established varied as widely as their means of supporting themselves. The English added a new system of compulsory labor to the Americas: indentured servants eventually accounted for approximately 80 percent of all English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland. However, as life expectancy in the colonies improved, planters purchased more slaves. As a result, the slave population of Virginia grew rapidly. In the northern part of the Carolinas, an economy based on tobacco and forest products encouraged a slow expansion of slavery. In Charleston and the interior of South Carolina, settlers began to imitate the slave plantation systems of Brazil and the Caribbean. The introduction of rice and indigo crops attracted an increasing flow of African slaves. The New England colonies differed dramatically from the southern economies. New England climate and resources did not favor cash crop agriculture. Instead, New Englanders traded fish, timber, fur, and other forest products. New England also provided commercial and shipping services to the American colonies. Slaves and indentured servants were present in New England, but in very small numbers because of the lack of cash crop agriculture. Therefore, environmental factors and geography played a role in the experience of slaves and the demand for slave labor.
13. What were the effects of the Middle Passage on both slave traders and slaves?
13. Students should be able to describe the trade relations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas at each leg of the Atlantic Circuit. The Middle Passage was the leg of the voyage bringing slaves from Africa across the Atlantic. Students should be able to discuss the status of slaves largely as prisoners of war and to describe the journey, which took six to ten weeks. They should be able to relate the slave traders' desire to maintain a population that was alive and healthy to the risks of the voyage. They should know that there were twice as many male slaves as female. Finally, they should be able to discuss the individual experiences and hardships of the slaves during this voyage.
14. What were the pieces of the new Atlantic economy? Explain how each piece was necessary for the economy's success.
14. As the chapter opener states, slave ships like the Hannibal, though they did not always turn a profit, were an important part of the Atlantic trade network. However, students should recognize that slavery was only one part of the Atlantic economy. The Atlantic system comprised many things that are discussed throughout the chapter. Students should discuss the importance of the capitalist and mercantile systems and the new partnership between government and individual private investors. Also, they should discuss how African and European merchants and elites formed a working economic relationship. Finally, the decision to grow a single cash crop on a plantation gave rise to the Atlantic slave trade and allowed European traders to participate in the global marketplace more effectively and profitably.
15. Compare and contrast the European mercantilist and capitalist systems.
15. Mercantilism comprised the policies used by European states to promote overseas trade and defend national interests. Capitalism grew as an internal European system that involved the management of large financial resources through banks, stock exchanges, and trading companies. Mercantilist policies that supported capitalism included chartered companies, tariffs, and trade laws. The largest capitalist overseas investments were in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. To defend their West Indian plantation colonies from other countries, European states used military actions as well as protective laws.
16. Discuss the role played by African traders and political leaders in the Atlantic slave trade. What steps did Africans take to control the trade with Europeans and how successful were they? How did the slave trade differ across different regions of Africa?
16. Europeans were initially interested in trade, not in colonizing and controlling Africa. It was African kings and merchants who controlled the trade, not Europeans. Africans did not barter people for cheap goods, as is often described. They demanded high-quality goods that they could not produce, or at least could not produce in large quantities. African gold, ivory, and timber remained important features of European trade. African governments controlled both the price and the quantity of slaves and could unilaterally suspend the trade when they wished. Students should realize that the trade differed widely from region to region within Africa, depending on both the African and European nations that were involved.
***********************************************************************************
MODULE II
DISCUSSION
1. Explain the causes and effects of rural poverty in Europe between 1200 and 1500. What role did the natural environment play in people's survival?
1. Students should understand that nine out of ten people lived in rural areas and that this majority of people were subjected to famine as well as epidemics such as the Black Death. Rural people worked hard in the fields, and the fruits of their labor went to the noble landowner. From 1110 to 1300 the European population more than doubled, partly because of environmental changes such as increases in average temperature. This explosion in the population led to the use of the three-field system as well as the opening of new agricultural settlements; however, it also led to the reality that most Europeans would experience extreme hunger at least once in their lives. This was a world of social inequality, where serfs worked and the nobility and the church owned the land. Students should also emphasize inefficient farming practices, widening class differences, and burgeoning population as the root factors creating rural poverty.
2. What is humanism? What technological innovation encouraged the spread of humanist texts in Renaissance Europe?
2. Students should understand that humanism refers to an interest in the humanities: the disciplines of history, poetry, and ethics. Humanist writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio were well known for encouraging the rebirth of classical study. Humanists were influential in reviving secondary education and revising the curriculum to include classical tests. The influence of humanism was enhanced because of new printing technology. Printing originated in China, but western Europeans improved it significantly and used printing for many purposes. Johannes Gutenberg is credited with making at least three major contributions—the mechanical printing press, uniform cast-metal letters for movable type, and a suitable ink. The subsequent explosion of printing encouraged both the spread of literacy and the standardization of languages and was a great boon to European intellectual development.
3. One of the most significant events in Europe in the later Middle Ages was the rise of the new monarchies. What three closely related transformations led to this rise? Choose one of the monarchies to illustrate your answer.
3. The three transformations were (a) monarchs' successes in struggles with their vassals; (b) the development of military technology; and (c) the closer relationship of monarchs with both the commercial elites and the church. The pace and form of these transformations, however, differed from state to state. Italy, for instance, did not unite under one powerful monarch. Britain and France struggled through the Hundred Years War. Britain's monarch reluctantly accepted the Magna Carta. France had less control of the noble vassals, and Spain was finally united after driving out the remaining Muslims.
4. What was the impact of the Spanish in the Americas, as compared with the Portuguese in Africa and the East? What enabled the Spanish to conquer such an enormous territory with so few men?
4. The Spanish were more likely to seek territory and conquest, whereas the Portuguese preferred trading partners. Besides, Amerindians had been completely isolated from the rest of the world—in contrast to the peoples that the Portuguese encountered, who were not strangers to world commerce. Epidemic disease reduced the Amerindian population dramatically, allowing the Spanish to gain a foothold. Spanish steel swords, armor, horses, firearms, and deceit, along with allies among the Amerindians, finished the conquest that disease had begun. Spanish imposition of forced labor and religious conversion helped control Spain's new empire.
5. How significant was the role of religion in driving the forces of exploration from Europe?
5. While not a prime factor in the era of exploration, religious motives did exist. The two main areas that sent explorers, Iberia and Genoa, differed in their religious approaches. The argument could be made that Genoa's purpose was entirely commercial, while the Spanish and Portuguese were competing in both religion and commerce with the Islamic areas that had already established trade, technology, and navigation ventures within Africa, around it, and extending into India and Southeast Asia. Conversion was a stated mission of Prince Henry the Navigator's voyages, which were funded at least in part by the Order of Christ but which also established diplomatic and trade contacts in Christianized Africa. Islamic contenders in Iberia and North Africa had also established roots and routes in Africa that predated Christianizing missions.
6. How did the ideas of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution affect the Enlightenment? Was the Enlightenment only an intellectual concept?
6. The ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation were important to the development of the Enlightenment because they established a precedent of thinking outside the realm of the Catholic Church. The Reformation proclained that nature and religion could coexist, as could science, without direct involvement from the pope or the church. Scientific revolutionaries such as Copernicus, Brahe, Galileo, and Newton used the ideas of Greek and Roman (pre-Christian) thinkers as a jumping-off point for their notions about the world around them, although many did not totally discount the idea of Christianity working in harmony with science. The Enlightenment took advantage of the relative acceptability of using knowledge to challenge political institutions and proposed new models, such as the idea of natural rights, that challenged the existing monarchies. The resulting changes in society therefore made the Enlightenment much more than an intellectual concept.
7. How did the basic tenets of Lutheranism and Calvinism differ from those of Catholicism? What was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation?
7. Students should recognize the different paths to salvation—the Catholic belief in salvation through good works, the Lutheran emphasis on faith, and the Calvinist belief in predestination. They should also understand the different philosophies regarding church ornamentation and hierarchy. The “Catholic Reformation” addressed the Protestant challenge at the Council of Trent. While many Catholic beliefs were clarified, the council mostly reaffirmed papal and church power.
8. Warfare was nearly constant in Europe during the early modern era. Using the chronology at the beginning of the chapter, list the wars and examine their economic and human costs. Why were these wars fought, what was their outcome, and what was their significance in European history?
8. Students should acknowledge the widespread death and destruction of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, as well as of the internal and international wars of the era. Their financial expense should also be addressed. Despite the enormous costs in human life and money, these wars led to tremendous innovations in weaponry and skill. All states developed armies and navies to suit their particular needs. For instance, England, an island nation, had no standing army and a large navy. The continental states had much larger armies than navies. Refinements (rather than revolutions) in technology in such areas as firearms, shipping, and metallurgy were important, as were advances in communications and transportation. The development of modern diplomacy was a lasting result of that era of warfare and was evident in the precarious and shifting balance of power.
9. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, how did the European states “pay the piper,” as the chapter suggests? Were politics and warfare related to European economies and economic development?
9. Wars were waged for political gain, and the high cost of warfare demanded further increases in revenue. Monarchs promoted alliances with commercial elites, as well as across religious boundaries. States also began to tax the nobility and raise those taxes directly. Colonialism helped promote economic growth, and government protection and stimulus further increased economic development. On the other hand, Spain is an example of a country that kept increasing its military expenditures without promoting economic development. It also ignored alliances for the sake of religious uniformity and aristocratic privilege.
10. Describe the Scientific Revolution. Why did it begin? Who were some of the notable minds responsible for this revolution? Was there widespread acceptance of their ideas?
10. Students should explain that the Scientific Revolution emerged out of the Renaissance rediscovery of Greek thought. In the sixteenth century some great thinkers began to challenge the discoveries of the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and began a movement to explain the workings of the universe based on natural causes and mathematics. The contributions of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all combined to alter the way of thinking established by Aristotle. Student should understand the heliocentric theory of the universe. Galilieo was condemned for his writings. The scientific method also made contributions to social thought, which, along with economic and political changes, resulted in the Enlightenment.
11. What role did religion play in European settlement of the Americas? Discuss Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British uses of Christianity as a tool of colonization.
11. Students should discuss the role that the Catholic Church played in assimilating Amerindian peoples and in suppressing Amerindian traditional religious practice. Students should also explain how religion was an important force in the English and French North American lands. Among the Catholic colonies of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese, conversion was a strong motivation for colonization. The Catholic Church became the main agent for the transmission of European language and culture to the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The British colonies became a refuge for Protestants who wished to escape what they believed were less-than-devout European practices. Several Protestant groups, such as the Pilgrims, Puritans, and Quakers, settled American lands. French Jesuit missionaries established hospitals, schools, and churches in an effort to convert the indigenous population.
12. Compare and contrast the different colonial regions established in British North America. In what ways were they similar or different?
12. Students should group the colonies into three basic geographic categories: New England, the Middle Atlantic, and the South. The motives for colonization differed. Some were private ventures whose purpose was escape from religious persecution, and others were private ventures designed to gather wealth. Some colonies were established by the monarchy, while others were given only a royal blessing. Their modes of settlement and the types of societies they established varied as widely as their means of supporting themselves. The English added a new system of compulsory labor to the Americas: indentured servants eventually accounted for approximately 80 percent of all English immigrants to Virginia and Maryland. However, as life expectancy in the colonies improved, planters purchased more slaves. As a result, the slave population of Virginia grew rapidly. In the northern part of the Carolinas, an economy based on tobacco and forest products encouraged a slow expansion of slavery. In Charleston and the interior of South Carolina, settlers began to imitate the slave plantation systems of Brazil and the Caribbean. The introduction of rice and indigo crops attracted an increasing flow of African slaves. The New England colonies differed dramatically from the southern economies. New England climate and resources did not favor cash crop agriculture. Instead, New Englanders traded fish, timber, fur, and other forest products. New England also provided commercial and shipping services to the American colonies. Slaves and indentured servants were present in New England, but in very small numbers because of the lack of cash crop agriculture. Therefore, environmental factors and geography played a role in the experience of slaves and the demand for slave labor.
13. What were the effects of the Middle Passage on both slave traders and slaves?
13. Students should be able to describe the trade relations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas at each leg of the Atlantic Circuit. The Middle Passage was the leg of the voyage bringing slaves from Africa across the Atlantic. Students should be able to discuss the status of slaves largely as prisoners of war and to describe the journey, which took six to ten weeks. They should be able to relate the slave traders' desire to maintain a population that was alive and healthy to the risks of the voyage. They should know that there were twice as many male slaves as female. Finally, they should be able to discuss the individual experiences and hardships of the slaves during this voyage.
14. What were the pieces of the new Atlantic economy? Explain how each piece was necessary for the economy's success.
14. As the chapter opener states, slave ships like the Hannibal, though they did not always turn a profit, were an important part of the Atlantic trade network. However, students should recognize that slavery was only one part of the Atlantic economy. The Atlantic system comprised many things that are discussed throughout the chapter. Students should discuss the importance of the capitalist and mercantile systems and the new partnership between government and individual private investors. Also, they should discuss how African and European merchants and elites formed a working economic relationship. Finally, the decision to grow a single cash crop on a plantation gave rise to the Atlantic slave trade and allowed European traders to participate in the global marketplace more effectively and profitably.
15. Compare and contrast the European mercantilist and capitalist systems.
15. Mercantilism comprised the policies used by European states to promote overseas trade and defend national interests. Capitalism grew as an internal European system that involved the management of large financial resources through banks, stock exchanges, and trading companies. Mercantilist policies that supported capitalism included chartered companies, tariffs, and trade laws. The largest capitalist overseas investments were in the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. To defend their West Indian plantation colonies from other countries, European states used military actions as well as protective laws.
16. Discuss the role played by African traders and political leaders in the Atlantic slave trade. What steps did Africans take to control the trade with Europeans and how successful were they? How did the slave trade differ across different regions of Africa?
16. Europeans were initially interested in trade, not in colonizing and controlling Africa. It was African kings and merchants who controlled the trade, not Europeans. Africans did not barter people for cheap goods, as is often described. They demanded high-quality goods that they could not produce, or at least could not produce in large quantities. African gold, ivory, and timber remained important features of European trade. African governments controlled both the price and the quantity of slaves and could unilaterally suspend the trade when they wished. Students should realize that the trade differed widely from region to region within Africa, depending on both the African and European nations that were involved.
STYLES OF LEARNING SURVEY
The following link will get you to the styles of learning survey. Your mission is to complete the survey, PRINT OUT THE COMPLETION FORM, bring to class for extra credit.
PS. You may also post a comment on your thoughts here.
Dr. Gilbert
http://jsu.qualtrics.com//SE/?SID=SV_2bndHW39Eza7Bru
PS. You may also post a comment on your thoughts here.
Dr. Gilbert
http://jsu.qualtrics.com//SE/?SID=SV_2bndHW39Eza7Bru
Friday, July 8, 2011
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 32
The Cold War and Decolonization, 1945–1975
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should:
1. Understand the causes of the Cold War and its political and environmental consequences for Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the two superpowers.
2. Understand the process of decolonization and be able to illustrate the variations in that process by reference to concrete examples.
3. Understand the challenges of nation building and be able to compare the problems and the nation-building strategies of particular developing countries.
4. Be able to describe and analyze the reasons for the various ways in which the Third World states, China, Japan, and the Middle East were both affected by and took advantage of the Cold War.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. The Cold War
A. The United Nations
1. After World War II Western leaders perceived the Soviet Union as the center of a world revolutionary movement, while Soviet leaders felt themselves surrounded by the western countries and their North Atlantic Treaty Organization (founded 1949). The United Nations provided a venue for face-to-face debate between the two sides in the Cold War.
2. The United Nations was established in 1945 with a General Assembly, Security Council, a full-time bureaucracy headed by the Secretary-General, and various specialized agencies. All signatories of the United Nations Charter renounced war and territorial conquest, but in practice, the United Nations was seldom able to forestall or quell international conflicts.
3. The decolonization of Africa and Asia greatly swelled the size of the General Assembly, which became an arena for expressing opinions and whose resolutions carried great weight in the early years of the United Nations. The influx of new members made the General Assembly more concerned with poverty, racial discrimination, and the struggle against imperialism than with the Cold War, and so the Western powers increasingly ignored the General Assembly.
B. Capitalism and Communism
1. Between 1944 and 1946 the western capitalist countries created a new international monetary system in which supply and demand determined prices and that included a system of exchange rates, an International Monetary Fund, and a World Bank. The Soviet Union, suspicious of Western intentions, established a closed monetary system in which the state allocated goods and set prices for itself and for the communist states of eastern Europe.
2. The United States economy recovered and prospered during and after World War II. The economy of Western Europe, heavily damaged during World War II, recovered in the post-war period with the help of the American Marshall Plan.
3. Western European governments generally increased their role in economic management during this period. In 1948 Europeans launched a process of economic cooperation and integration with the creation of the Organization of European Economic Cooperation, which expanded its membership as it developed into the European Economic Community or Common Market (1957) and then into the European Community (1970).
4. The Soviet Union and eastern European states relied on the government to determine the production, distribution, and price of goods. In the communist states the recovery from World War II was rapid at first, but in the long run the Soviet and eastern European economies were unable to match those of the west in the production of consumer goods, housing, and food.
C. West Versus East in Europe and Korea
1. The rapid establishment of communist regimes in eastern Europe led the United States to perceive the Soviet Union as a worldwide enemy. American perceptions led to the Truman Doctrine (1947) and to the establishment of NATO (1949), to which the Soviet Union responded by organizing the Warsaw Pact (1955).
2. A third great war did not break out in Europe, but the Soviet Union and the West did test each other’s resolve in incidents such as the Soviet blockade of West Berlin (1948–1949), the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), and the West’s encouragement of the rift between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Soviet power was used to ensure the obedience of eastern European nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
3. In Korea, Soviet and American occupation of zones north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel led to the establishment, in 1948, of a communist North Korea and a noncommunist South Korea. North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950 marked the beginning of the Korean War, in which the United States came to the aid of South Korea while China sent troops to assist the north. A truce in 1953 fixed the border again at the thirty-eighth parallel, but no peace treaty was concluded.
D. U.S. Defeat in Vietnam
1. After winning independence from France, communist North Vietnam supported a communist guerilla movement—the Viet Cong—against the noncommunist government of South Vietnam. John F. Kennedy decided to send American military advisers to assist South Vietnam, and President Lyndon Johnson gained Congressional support for unlimited expansion of U.S. military deployment.
2. Unable to stop the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies, the United States ended its involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops took over South Vietnam in 1975.
3. The Vietnam War brought significant casualties to both sides and gave rise to serious economic problems and to an anti-war movement in the United States. Members of the American military and their civilian supporters argued that government restrictions on American military operations had deprived the Americans of their chance for victory; such restrictions were designed to prevent China from entering the war and possibly starting a nuclear confrontation.
E. The Race for Nuclear Supremacy
1. The existence of weapons of mass destruction affected all aspects of the Cold War confrontation, causing paranoia in the United States and spreading fear of nuclear destruction throughout the world. Fear of nuclear war seemed about to be realized when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to American deployment of such missiles in Turkey, but Kruschev backed down and withdrew the missiles from Cuba.
2. The number, means of delivery, and destructive force of nuclear weapons increased enormously, but at the same time, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other countries made some progress on arms limitations. After 1972 the superpowers began the slow, arduous process of negotiating weapons limits.
3. Rather than attempting to keep up with the expensive Soviet-American arms race, the European nations sought to relax tensions between east and west through such organizations as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which led to the signing of the Helsinki Accords.
4. Space exploration was another offshoot of the nuclear arms race, as the ability to launch satellites and to send manned rockets into space was understood to signify equivalent achievements in the military sphere.
II. Decolonization and Nation Building
A. New Nations in South and Southeast Asia
1. After partition in 1947, the independent states of India and Pakistan were strikingly dissimilar.
2. Pakistan defined itself in terms of religion, fell under the control of military leaders, and saw its Bengali-speaking eastern section secede to become the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971. India, a secular republic with a 90 percent Hindu population, inherited a larger share of industrial and educational resources and was able to maintain unity despite its linguistic heterogeneity.
3. In Southeast Asia, the defeats that the Japanese inflicted on the British, French, and Dutch forces in World War II set an example of an Asian people standing up to European colonizers. In the post-war period nationalist movements led to the independence of Indonesia (1949), Burma and the Malay Federation (1948), and the Philippines (1946.)
B. The Struggle for Independence in Africa
1. The postwar French government was determined to hold on to Algeria, which had a substantial French settler population, vineyards, and oil and gas fields. An Algerian revolt that broke out in 1954 was pursued with great brutality by both sides, but ended French withdrawal and Algerian independence in 1962.
2. None of the several wars for independence in sub-Saharan Africa matched the Algerian struggle in scale. But even without war, the new states suffered from a variety of problems including arbitrarily drawn borders, overdependence on export crops, lack of national road and railroad networks, and overpopulation.
3. Some of the politicians who led the nationalist movements devoted their lives to ridding their homelands of foreign occupation. Two examples are Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and later president of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta, who negotiated the independence and became first president of the Republic of Kenya.
4. The African leaders in the sub-Saharan French colonies were reluctant to call for independence because they realized that some of the colonies had bleak economic prospects and because they were aware of the importance of the billions of dollars of French public investment. Nevertheless, the French colonies achieved independence between 1958 and 1960.
5. Decolonization in Africa often involved struggles as people of European descent fought against indigenous Africans in an attempt to retain their personal privileges, control of resources, and political power. Race conflict was particularly severe in the southern part of Africa, including the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and in South and Southwest Africa.
C. The Quest for Economic Freedom in Latin America
1. In Latin America, independence from European rule was achieved earlier, but American and European economic domination increased.
2. In Mexico, the revolutionary rhetoric of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was accompanied by a large and persistent disparity between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. In Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman’s attempt to expropriate the property of large landowners including the United Fruit Company prompted the United States Central Intelligence Agency to assist in a military coup that removed Arbenz from power and condemned Guatemala to decades of political instability and violence.
3. In the 1950s the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista presided over a corrupt, repressive regime, while the United States and a small class of wealthy Cubans dominated the economy. In 1959 Fidel Castro led a popular revolution that forced Batista to leave the country, redistributed land, lowered urban rents, raised wages, and seized the property of U.S. and Cuban corporations.
4. There is little evidence that Castro undertook his revolution to install a communist government, but faced with a U.S. blockade, he turned to the Soviet Union for economic aid, thereby committing his nation to economic stagnation and dependence on the Soviet Union. In April 1961 some fifteen hundred Cuban exiles whom the CIA had trained landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an effort to overthrow Castro, but the attempt failed, partly because the United States did not supply all the air support that the plan had called for.
D. Challenges of Nation Building
1. Decolonization occurred on a vast scale and led to the establishment of dozens of new nations between 1945 and 1965. Each of these new nations had to establish some form of government, and most of them had to do so while facing severe economic challenges.
2. The new nations also had to address serious educational concerns including questions such as which language to teach, how to inculcate a sense of national unity in places where it had not previously existed, and how to provide satisfying jobs for graduates. The new nations were rarely able to surmount these hurdles, and many nations, even those as successful as South Korea, opted for authoritarian rule.
III. Beyond a Bipolar World
A. The Third World
1. In 1955 Indonesia’s President Sukarno hosted a meeting of twenty-nine African and Asian countries at Bandung, Indonesia. This meeting marked the beginning of an effort by the many new, poor, mostly non-European nations emerging from colonialism to gain more weight in the world by banding together in what became known as the nonaligned movement or Third World.
2. Leaders of the so-called Third World countries preferred the label “nonaligned,” but as the movement had the sympathy of the Soviet Union and included communist countries such as China and Yugoslavia, the West did not take the term nonaligned seriously.
3. For the movement’s leaders, nonalignment was primarily a way of extracting money and support from one or both of the superpowers. One example is the ability of the Egyptian leaders Nasir and Sadat to play the two superpowers against each other in order to get assistance in hydroelectric projects, arms, and loans from both sides.
B. Japan and China
1. Both Japan and China were able to take advantage of the superpowers’ preoccupation with the Cold War.
2. The American occupation (1945–1952) gave Japan a constitution that allowed the country only a limited self-defense force and banned the deployment of Japanese troops abroad. The Japanese stayed out of the Cold War and concentrated on building up their industries and engaging in world commerce, gradually developing new markets in Southeast Asia. The Japanese government aided Japanese business in developing three industries that were crucial to Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower after 1975: electricity, steel, and shipbuilding.
3. China was deeply involved in Cold War politics, being allied to and receiving aid from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The PRC and the Soviet Union began to diverge in 1956, and Mao introduced his own radical policies with the disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 and with the Cultural Revolution, which was begun in 1966. The rift between the PRC and the Soviet Union opened so wide that President Richard Nixon was able to establish a cooperative relationship between the United States and China in the early 1970s.
C. The Middle East
1. As the Arab states slowly gained independence in the postwar years, the struggle with Israel came to overshadow all Arab politics.
2. After World War II intense pressure to resettle European Jewish refugees forced Britain to turn the Palestine question over to the United Nations General Assembly, which voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel declared its independence in May 1948 and defeated the Palestinian and other Arab forces that attempted to crush the newborn state.
3. In a six-day war in 1967 Israel took Arab lands including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. The Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Yasir Arafat, waged guerilla war against Israel and engaged in acts of terrorism.
4. The growing demand for oil in the postwar era prompted the oil-producing Arab states to form the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. OPEC embargoed the United States and the Netherlands for their support of Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1972 and quadrupled oil prices in 1974.
D. The Emergence of Environmental Concerns
1. The Cold War and the tremendous postwar economic recovery focused public and government attention on technological innovation and enormous industrial projects; only a few people, such as Rachel Carson, warned that technologies and industrial growth were rapidly degrading the environment.
2. The student protests of the late 1960s in the United States, France, Japan, and Mexico indicated a rising current of youth activism that focused attention on environmental problems.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How did the Cold War affect the economies and the environments of the superpowers and of the European nations?
2. How did the Cold War affect Asian, African, and Latin American countries?
3. What were the major challenges facing the newly emerging nations in the postwar period? How did different nations respond to those challenges?
4. How and why did the process of decolonization and nation building vary within Africa?
5. Analyze the causes and the possible solutions to the political and economic problems of the Middle East.
6. Was the postwar era good or bad for the majority of the world’s people?
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Decolonization
Sources:
a. Ansprenger, Franz. The Dissolution of Colonial Empires. London: Routledge, 1989.
b. Chamberlain, M.E. Decolonization: The Fall of European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
c. Fieldhouse, D.K. The Colonial Empires. New York: Delacorte Press 1967.
d. Lapping, Brian. The End of Empire. London: Granada, 1985.
2. The Cold War
Sources:
a. Iriye, Akira. The Cold War in Asia: A Historical Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1974.
b. Kalb, Madeline. The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—From Eisenhower to Kennedy. New York: Macmillan, 1982.
c. Lafeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992. 7th. New York: New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
d. Taubman, William. Stalin’s America Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.
e. Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
3. The Korean and Vietnam Wars
Sources:
a. Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. 3rd. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
b. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1991.
c. Merrill, John. Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.
d. Wainstock, Dennis D. Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
e. Zhai, Qiang. China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
f. Zhang, Shu Guang. Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
4. The Arab-Israeli Conflict
Sources:
a. Bickerton, Ian J. and M.N. Pearson. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: a History. 2nd. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990.
b. Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974. New York: Harper & Row, 1978
c. Louis, William Roger. The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
d. Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
e. Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
5. Strategies for Nation Building in the People’s Republic of China Under Mao
Sources:
a. Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine. London: John Murray, 1996.
b. Joseph, William A., Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweig, ed. New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University: 1991.
c. Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
d. Naughton, Barry. “The Pattern and Legacy of Economic Growth in the Mao Era.” Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquyar and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., ed. Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1991.
PAPER TOPICS
1. Compare the challenges and the processes of nation building in two African, Asian, or Latin American nations of your choice.
2. On page 861the authors ask: “Was world domination by the superpowers good or bad for the rest of the world?” State and justify your position on this question.
3. What were the causes of Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower in the 1970s?
4. How did the Cold War affect the development of weapons technology?
INTERNET RESOURCES
The following Internet sites contain written and visual material appropriate for use with this chapter. A more extensive and continually updated list of Internet resources can be found on The Earth and Its Peoples web site. Refer to The Earth and Its Peoples Web Site section located at the beginning of this manual for information on how to locate the text homepage.
Soviet Union and the United States (Library of Congress)
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/intro2.html
For European Recovery, the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Marshall Plan (Library of Congress)
http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/marshall/mars0.html
Battlefield Vietnam: A Brief History
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/
Modern History Sourcebook: Decolonization (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook51.html
The Cold War and Decolonization, 1945–1975
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should:
1. Understand the causes of the Cold War and its political and environmental consequences for Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the two superpowers.
2. Understand the process of decolonization and be able to illustrate the variations in that process by reference to concrete examples.
3. Understand the challenges of nation building and be able to compare the problems and the nation-building strategies of particular developing countries.
4. Be able to describe and analyze the reasons for the various ways in which the Third World states, China, Japan, and the Middle East were both affected by and took advantage of the Cold War.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. The Cold War
A. The United Nations
1. After World War II Western leaders perceived the Soviet Union as the center of a world revolutionary movement, while Soviet leaders felt themselves surrounded by the western countries and their North Atlantic Treaty Organization (founded 1949). The United Nations provided a venue for face-to-face debate between the two sides in the Cold War.
2. The United Nations was established in 1945 with a General Assembly, Security Council, a full-time bureaucracy headed by the Secretary-General, and various specialized agencies. All signatories of the United Nations Charter renounced war and territorial conquest, but in practice, the United Nations was seldom able to forestall or quell international conflicts.
3. The decolonization of Africa and Asia greatly swelled the size of the General Assembly, which became an arena for expressing opinions and whose resolutions carried great weight in the early years of the United Nations. The influx of new members made the General Assembly more concerned with poverty, racial discrimination, and the struggle against imperialism than with the Cold War, and so the Western powers increasingly ignored the General Assembly.
B. Capitalism and Communism
1. Between 1944 and 1946 the western capitalist countries created a new international monetary system in which supply and demand determined prices and that included a system of exchange rates, an International Monetary Fund, and a World Bank. The Soviet Union, suspicious of Western intentions, established a closed monetary system in which the state allocated goods and set prices for itself and for the communist states of eastern Europe.
2. The United States economy recovered and prospered during and after World War II. The economy of Western Europe, heavily damaged during World War II, recovered in the post-war period with the help of the American Marshall Plan.
3. Western European governments generally increased their role in economic management during this period. In 1948 Europeans launched a process of economic cooperation and integration with the creation of the Organization of European Economic Cooperation, which expanded its membership as it developed into the European Economic Community or Common Market (1957) and then into the European Community (1970).
4. The Soviet Union and eastern European states relied on the government to determine the production, distribution, and price of goods. In the communist states the recovery from World War II was rapid at first, but in the long run the Soviet and eastern European economies were unable to match those of the west in the production of consumer goods, housing, and food.
C. West Versus East in Europe and Korea
1. The rapid establishment of communist regimes in eastern Europe led the United States to perceive the Soviet Union as a worldwide enemy. American perceptions led to the Truman Doctrine (1947) and to the establishment of NATO (1949), to which the Soviet Union responded by organizing the Warsaw Pact (1955).
2. A third great war did not break out in Europe, but the Soviet Union and the West did test each other’s resolve in incidents such as the Soviet blockade of West Berlin (1948–1949), the construction of the Berlin Wall (1961), and the West’s encouragement of the rift between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Soviet power was used to ensure the obedience of eastern European nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
3. In Korea, Soviet and American occupation of zones north and south of the thirty-eighth parallel led to the establishment, in 1948, of a communist North Korea and a noncommunist South Korea. North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950 marked the beginning of the Korean War, in which the United States came to the aid of South Korea while China sent troops to assist the north. A truce in 1953 fixed the border again at the thirty-eighth parallel, but no peace treaty was concluded.
D. U.S. Defeat in Vietnam
1. After winning independence from France, communist North Vietnam supported a communist guerilla movement—the Viet Cong—against the noncommunist government of South Vietnam. John F. Kennedy decided to send American military advisers to assist South Vietnam, and President Lyndon Johnson gained Congressional support for unlimited expansion of U.S. military deployment.
2. Unable to stop the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies, the United States ended its involvement in Vietnam in 1973, and Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops took over South Vietnam in 1975.
3. The Vietnam War brought significant casualties to both sides and gave rise to serious economic problems and to an anti-war movement in the United States. Members of the American military and their civilian supporters argued that government restrictions on American military operations had deprived the Americans of their chance for victory; such restrictions were designed to prevent China from entering the war and possibly starting a nuclear confrontation.
E. The Race for Nuclear Supremacy
1. The existence of weapons of mass destruction affected all aspects of the Cold War confrontation, causing paranoia in the United States and spreading fear of nuclear destruction throughout the world. Fear of nuclear war seemed about to be realized when the Soviet Union deployed nuclear missiles in Cuba in response to American deployment of such missiles in Turkey, but Kruschev backed down and withdrew the missiles from Cuba.
2. The number, means of delivery, and destructive force of nuclear weapons increased enormously, but at the same time, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other countries made some progress on arms limitations. After 1972 the superpowers began the slow, arduous process of negotiating weapons limits.
3. Rather than attempting to keep up with the expensive Soviet-American arms race, the European nations sought to relax tensions between east and west through such organizations as the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which led to the signing of the Helsinki Accords.
4. Space exploration was another offshoot of the nuclear arms race, as the ability to launch satellites and to send manned rockets into space was understood to signify equivalent achievements in the military sphere.
II. Decolonization and Nation Building
A. New Nations in South and Southeast Asia
1. After partition in 1947, the independent states of India and Pakistan were strikingly dissimilar.
2. Pakistan defined itself in terms of religion, fell under the control of military leaders, and saw its Bengali-speaking eastern section secede to become the independent nation of Bangladesh in 1971. India, a secular republic with a 90 percent Hindu population, inherited a larger share of industrial and educational resources and was able to maintain unity despite its linguistic heterogeneity.
3. In Southeast Asia, the defeats that the Japanese inflicted on the British, French, and Dutch forces in World War II set an example of an Asian people standing up to European colonizers. In the post-war period nationalist movements led to the independence of Indonesia (1949), Burma and the Malay Federation (1948), and the Philippines (1946.)
B. The Struggle for Independence in Africa
1. The postwar French government was determined to hold on to Algeria, which had a substantial French settler population, vineyards, and oil and gas fields. An Algerian revolt that broke out in 1954 was pursued with great brutality by both sides, but ended French withdrawal and Algerian independence in 1962.
2. None of the several wars for independence in sub-Saharan Africa matched the Algerian struggle in scale. But even without war, the new states suffered from a variety of problems including arbitrarily drawn borders, overdependence on export crops, lack of national road and railroad networks, and overpopulation.
3. Some of the politicians who led the nationalist movements devoted their lives to ridding their homelands of foreign occupation. Two examples are Kwame Nkrumah, the independence leader and later president of Ghana and Jomo Kenyatta, who negotiated the independence and became first president of the Republic of Kenya.
4. The African leaders in the sub-Saharan French colonies were reluctant to call for independence because they realized that some of the colonies had bleak economic prospects and because they were aware of the importance of the billions of dollars of French public investment. Nevertheless, the French colonies achieved independence between 1958 and 1960.
5. Decolonization in Africa often involved struggles as people of European descent fought against indigenous Africans in an attempt to retain their personal privileges, control of resources, and political power. Race conflict was particularly severe in the southern part of Africa, including the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique, the British colony of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and in South and Southwest Africa.
C. The Quest for Economic Freedom in Latin America
1. In Latin America, independence from European rule was achieved earlier, but American and European economic domination increased.
2. In Mexico, the revolutionary rhetoric of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was accompanied by a large and persistent disparity between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. In Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman’s attempt to expropriate the property of large landowners including the United Fruit Company prompted the United States Central Intelligence Agency to assist in a military coup that removed Arbenz from power and condemned Guatemala to decades of political instability and violence.
3. In the 1950s the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista presided over a corrupt, repressive regime, while the United States and a small class of wealthy Cubans dominated the economy. In 1959 Fidel Castro led a popular revolution that forced Batista to leave the country, redistributed land, lowered urban rents, raised wages, and seized the property of U.S. and Cuban corporations.
4. There is little evidence that Castro undertook his revolution to install a communist government, but faced with a U.S. blockade, he turned to the Soviet Union for economic aid, thereby committing his nation to economic stagnation and dependence on the Soviet Union. In April 1961 some fifteen hundred Cuban exiles whom the CIA had trained landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an effort to overthrow Castro, but the attempt failed, partly because the United States did not supply all the air support that the plan had called for.
D. Challenges of Nation Building
1. Decolonization occurred on a vast scale and led to the establishment of dozens of new nations between 1945 and 1965. Each of these new nations had to establish some form of government, and most of them had to do so while facing severe economic challenges.
2. The new nations also had to address serious educational concerns including questions such as which language to teach, how to inculcate a sense of national unity in places where it had not previously existed, and how to provide satisfying jobs for graduates. The new nations were rarely able to surmount these hurdles, and many nations, even those as successful as South Korea, opted for authoritarian rule.
III. Beyond a Bipolar World
A. The Third World
1. In 1955 Indonesia’s President Sukarno hosted a meeting of twenty-nine African and Asian countries at Bandung, Indonesia. This meeting marked the beginning of an effort by the many new, poor, mostly non-European nations emerging from colonialism to gain more weight in the world by banding together in what became known as the nonaligned movement or Third World.
2. Leaders of the so-called Third World countries preferred the label “nonaligned,” but as the movement had the sympathy of the Soviet Union and included communist countries such as China and Yugoslavia, the West did not take the term nonaligned seriously.
3. For the movement’s leaders, nonalignment was primarily a way of extracting money and support from one or both of the superpowers. One example is the ability of the Egyptian leaders Nasir and Sadat to play the two superpowers against each other in order to get assistance in hydroelectric projects, arms, and loans from both sides.
B. Japan and China
1. Both Japan and China were able to take advantage of the superpowers’ preoccupation with the Cold War.
2. The American occupation (1945–1952) gave Japan a constitution that allowed the country only a limited self-defense force and banned the deployment of Japanese troops abroad. The Japanese stayed out of the Cold War and concentrated on building up their industries and engaging in world commerce, gradually developing new markets in Southeast Asia. The Japanese government aided Japanese business in developing three industries that were crucial to Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower after 1975: electricity, steel, and shipbuilding.
3. China was deeply involved in Cold War politics, being allied to and receiving aid from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. The PRC and the Soviet Union began to diverge in 1956, and Mao introduced his own radical policies with the disastrous Great Leap Forward in 1958 and with the Cultural Revolution, which was begun in 1966. The rift between the PRC and the Soviet Union opened so wide that President Richard Nixon was able to establish a cooperative relationship between the United States and China in the early 1970s.
C. The Middle East
1. As the Arab states slowly gained independence in the postwar years, the struggle with Israel came to overshadow all Arab politics.
2. After World War II intense pressure to resettle European Jewish refugees forced Britain to turn the Palestine question over to the United Nations General Assembly, which voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel declared its independence in May 1948 and defeated the Palestinian and other Arab forces that attempted to crush the newborn state.
3. In a six-day war in 1967 Israel took Arab lands including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. The Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Yasir Arafat, waged guerilla war against Israel and engaged in acts of terrorism.
4. The growing demand for oil in the postwar era prompted the oil-producing Arab states to form the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. OPEC embargoed the United States and the Netherlands for their support of Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of 1972 and quadrupled oil prices in 1974.
D. The Emergence of Environmental Concerns
1. The Cold War and the tremendous postwar economic recovery focused public and government attention on technological innovation and enormous industrial projects; only a few people, such as Rachel Carson, warned that technologies and industrial growth were rapidly degrading the environment.
2. The student protests of the late 1960s in the United States, France, Japan, and Mexico indicated a rising current of youth activism that focused attention on environmental problems.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How did the Cold War affect the economies and the environments of the superpowers and of the European nations?
2. How did the Cold War affect Asian, African, and Latin American countries?
3. What were the major challenges facing the newly emerging nations in the postwar period? How did different nations respond to those challenges?
4. How and why did the process of decolonization and nation building vary within Africa?
5. Analyze the causes and the possible solutions to the political and economic problems of the Middle East.
6. Was the postwar era good or bad for the majority of the world’s people?
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Decolonization
Sources:
a. Ansprenger, Franz. The Dissolution of Colonial Empires. London: Routledge, 1989.
b. Chamberlain, M.E. Decolonization: The Fall of European Empires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
c. Fieldhouse, D.K. The Colonial Empires. New York: Delacorte Press 1967.
d. Lapping, Brian. The End of Empire. London: Granada, 1985.
2. The Cold War
Sources:
a. Iriye, Akira. The Cold War in Asia: A Historical Introduction. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1974.
b. Kalb, Madeline. The Congo Cables: The Cold War in Africa—From Eisenhower to Kennedy. New York: Macmillan, 1982.
c. Lafeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1992. 7th. New York: New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
d. Taubman, William. Stalin’s America Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.
e. Whitfield, Stephen. The Culture of the Cold War. 2nd. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
3. The Korean and Vietnam Wars
Sources:
a. Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. 3rd. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.
b. Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. rev. ed. New York: Viking, 1991.
c. Merrill, John. Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.
d. Wainstock, Dennis D. Truman, MacArthur, and the Korean War. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
e. Zhai, Qiang. China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
f. Zhang, Shu Guang. Mao's Military Romanticism: China and the Korean War, 1950–1953. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
4. The Arab-Israeli Conflict
Sources:
a. Bickerton, Ian J. and M.N. Pearson. The Arab-Israeli Conflict: a History. 2nd. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1990.
b. Dupuy, Trevor N. Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947–1974. New York: Harper & Row, 1978
c. Louis, William Roger. The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
d. Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
e. Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
5. Strategies for Nation Building in the People’s Republic of China Under Mao
Sources:
a. Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine. London: John Murray, 1996.
b. Joseph, William A., Christine P.W. Wong, and David Zweig, ed. New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University: 1991.
c. Meisner, Maurice. Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic. 3rd. New York: The Free Press, 1986.
d. Naughton, Barry. “The Pattern and Legacy of Economic Growth in the Mao Era.” Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquyar and Frederic Wakeman, Jr., ed. Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1991.
PAPER TOPICS
1. Compare the challenges and the processes of nation building in two African, Asian, or Latin American nations of your choice.
2. On page 861the authors ask: “Was world domination by the superpowers good or bad for the rest of the world?” State and justify your position on this question.
3. What were the causes of Japan’s emergence as an economic superpower in the 1970s?
4. How did the Cold War affect the development of weapons technology?
INTERNET RESOURCES
The following Internet sites contain written and visual material appropriate for use with this chapter. A more extensive and continually updated list of Internet resources can be found on The Earth and Its Peoples web site. Refer to The Earth and Its Peoples Web Site section located at the beginning of this manual for information on how to locate the text homepage.
Soviet Union and the United States (Library of Congress)
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Experimental/soviet.exhibit/intro2.html
For European Recovery, the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Marshall Plan (Library of Congress)
http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/marshall/mars0.html
Battlefield Vietnam: A Brief History
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/
Modern History Sourcebook: Decolonization (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook51.html
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 31
Striving for Independence: Africa, India, and Latin America, 1900–1949
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should:
1. Be able to describe the effects of colonial rule on Africa between 1900 and 1949 and to analyze the relationship between the effects of colonial rule, the World Wars, and the Depression, and the beginnings of the independence movement in Africa.
2. Understand the development of the Indian Independence Movement from 1905 to 1947 and be able to explain the roles of Mohandas Gandhi and of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
3. Understand the broad outlines of the Mexican Revolution and the economic policies of the Lazaro Cardenas.
4. Be able to discuss the economic and political evolution of Argentina and Brazil from 1900 to 1949, and to compare these two countries to Mexico.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Sub-Saharan Africa, 1900–1945
A. Colonial Africa: Economic and Social Changes
1. Outside of Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa, few Europeans lived in Africa. However, the very small European presence dominated the African economy and developed Africa as an exporter of raw materials in such a way that brought benefit to Europeans but to very few Africans.
2. Africans were forced to work in European-owned mines and plantations under harsh conditions for little or no pay. Colonialism provided little modern health care, and many colonial policies worsened public health, undermined the African family, and gave rise to large cities in which Africans experienced racial discrimination.
B. Religious and Political Changes
1. During the colonial period many Africans turned toward Christianity or Islam. Missionaries introduced Christianity (except in Ethiopia, where it was indigenous). Islam spread through the influence and example of African traders.
2. The contrast between the liberal ideas imparted by Western education and the realities of racial discrimination under colonial rule contributed to the rise of nationalism. Early nationalist leaders and movements such as Blaise Diagne in Senegal, the African National Congress in South Africa, and Pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey from America had little influence until after World War II, when Africans who had served in the Allied war effort came back with new, radical ideas.
II. The Indian Independence Movement, 1905–1947
A. The Land and the People
1. Despite periodic famines due to drought, India’s fertile land allowed the Indian population to increase from 250 million in 1900 to 389 million in 1941. Population growth brought environmental pressure, deforestation, and a declining amount of farm land per family.
2. Indian society was divided into many classes: peasants, wealthy property owners, and urban craftsmen, traders, and workers. The people of India spoke many different languages; English became the common medium of communication of the Western-educated middle class.
3. The majority of Indians practiced Hinduism. Muslims constituted one-quarter of the people of India and formed a majority in the northwest and in eastern Bengal.
B. British Rule and Indian Nationalism
1. Colonial India was ruled by a viceroy and administered by the Indian Civil Service. The few thousand members of the Civil Service manipulated the introduction of technology into India in order to protect the Indian people from the dangers of industrialization, to prevent the development of radical politics, and to maximize the benefits to Britain and to themselves.
2. At the turn of the century, the majority of Indians accepted British rule, but the racism and discrimination of the Europeans had inspired a group of Hindus to establish a political organization called the Indian National Congress in 1885. Muslims, fearful of Hindu dominance, founded the All-India Muslim League in 1906, thus giving India not one, but two independence movements.
3. The British resisted the idea that India could or should industrialize, but Pramatha Nath Bose of the Indian Geological Service and Jamseji Tata, a Bombay textile magnate, established India’s first steel mill in Jamshedpur in 1911. Jamshedpur became a powerful symbol of Indian national pride.
4. In 1918 and 1919 several incidents contributed to an increase in tensions between the British and the Indian people. These incidents included a too-vague promise of self-government, the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, and the incident in which a British general ordered his troops to fire into a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators.
C. Mahatma Gandhi and Militant Nonviolence
1. Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948) was an English-educated lawyer who practiced in South Africa before returning to India and joining the Indian National Congress during World War I. Gandhi’s political ideas included ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha (the search for truth).
2. Gandhi dressed and lived simply; his affinity for the poor, the illiterate, and the outcasts made him able to transform the cause of Indian independence from an elite movement to a mass movement with a quasi-religious aura.
3. Gandhi’s brilliance as a political tactician and master of public relations gestures was demonstrated in acts such as his eighty mile “Walk to the Sea” to make salt (in violation of the government’s salt monopoly), in his several fasts “unto death,” and in his repeated arrests and prison sentences.
D. India Moves Toward Independence
1. In the 1920s the British slowly and reluctantly began to give Indians control of areas such as education, the economy, and public works. High tariff barriers were erected behind which Indian entrepreneurs were able to undertake a degree of industrialization; this helped to create a class of wealthy Indian businessmen who looked to Gandhi’s designated successor in the Indian National Congress–Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)–for leadership.
2. The Second World War divided the Indian people; Indians contributed heavily to the war effort, but the Indian National Congress opposed the war, and a minority of Indians joined the Japanese side.
E. Partition and Independence
1. In 1940 the Muslim League’s leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) demanded that Muslims be given a country of their own, to be named Pakistan. When World War II ended, Britain’s new Labour Party government prepared for independence, but mutual animosity between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League led to the partition of India into two states: India and Pakistan.
2. Partition and independence were accompanied by violence between Muslims and Hindus and by massive flows of refugees as Hindus left predominantly Muslim areas and Muslims left predominantly Hindu areas.
III. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940
A. Mexico in 1910
1. Mexico’s geographical location made it subject to numerous foreign invasions and interventions. Upon independence in 1821 Mexican society was deeply divided; a few wealthy families of Spanish origin owned 85 percent of the land, while the majority of Indians and mestizos were poor peasants.
2. Concentration of land ownership increased after independence as wealthy families and American companies used bribery and force to acquire millions of acres of good agricultural land in southern Mexico, forcing peasants into wage labor, debt, and relocation. In northern Mexico, American purchase of land, the harsh living conditions, and the unequal distribution of wealth also caused popular resentment.
3. In 1910 General Porfirio Diaz (1830–1915) had ruled for thirty-four years. Diaz’s policies had made Mexico City a modernized showplace and brought wealth to a small number of businessmen, but his rule was also characterized by discrimination against the nonwhite majority of Mexicans and a decline in the average Mexican’s standard of living.
B. Revolution and Civil War, 1911–1920
1. The Mexican Revolution was not the work of one party with a well-defined ideology; it developed haphazardly, led by a series of ambitious but limited men, each representing a different segment of Mexican society.
2. Francisco I Madero (1873–1913) overthrew Diaz in 1911, only to be overthrown in turn by General Victoriana Huerta in 1913. The Constitutionalists Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon emerged as leaders of the disaffected middle class and industrial workers and they organized armies that overthrew Huerta in 1914.
3. Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) led a peasant revolt in Morelos, south of Mexico City, while Francisco (Pancho) Villa organized an army in northern Mexico. Neither man was able to rise above his regional and peasant origins to lead a national revolution; Zapata was defeated and killed by the Constitutionalists in 1919, and Villa was assassinated in 1923.
4. The Constitutionalists took over Mexico after years of fighting, an estimated 2 million casualties, and tremendous damage. In the process, the Constitutionalists adopted many of their rivals’ agrarian reforms and proposed a number of social programs designed to appeal to workers and the middle class.
C. The Revolution Institutionalized, 1920–1940
1. The Mexican Revolution lost momentum in the 1920s, but it had given representatives of rural communities, unionized workers, and public employees a voice in government.
2. After President Obregon’s assassination in 1928 his successor Plutarco Elias Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party, which was renamed the Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM) by President Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Cardenas removed generals from government, redistributed land, replaced church-run schools with government schools, and expropriated the foreign-owned oil companies that had dominated Mexico’s petroleum industry.
3. When Cardenas’s term ended in 1940 Mexico was still a land of poor farmers with a small industrial base. Nonetheless, the Mexican Revolution had established a stable political system, tamed the military and the Catholic Church, and laid the foundations for the later industrialization of Mexico.
IV. Argentina and Brazil, 1900–1949
A. The Transformation of Argentina
1. At the end of the nineteenth century the introduction of railroads and refrigerator ships transformed Argentina from an exporter of hides and wool to an exporter of meat. The introduction of Lincoln sheep and Hereford cattle for meat production led Argentine farmers to fence, plow, and cultivate the pampas, transforming pampas into farmland which, like the North American Midwest, became one of the world’s great producers of meat and wheat.
2. Argentina’s government represented the interests of the oligarquia, a small group of wealthy landowners. This elite had little interest in anything other than farming; they were content to let foreign companies, mainly British, build the railroads, processing plants, and public utilities, while Argentina exported agricultural goods and imported almost all its manufactured goods.
B. Brazil and Argentina, to 1929
1. Brazil’s elite of coffee and cacao planters and rubber exporters resembled the Argentine elite: they used their wealth to support a lavish lifestyle, allowed the British to build railroads, harbors, and other infrastructure, and imported all manufactured goods. Both Argentina and Brazil had small but outspoken middle classes that demanded a share in government and looked to Europe as a model.
2. The disruption of European industry and world trade in World War I weakened the land-owning classes in Argentina and Brazil so that the urban middle class and the wealthy landowners shared power at the expense of the landless peasants and urban workers.
3. During the 1920s peace and high prices for agricultural exports allowed both Argentina and Brazil to industrialize, but the introduction of new technologies left them again dependent on the advanced industrial countries. Aviation and radio communications were introduced to Argentina and Brazil during the 1920s, but European and United States’ companies dominated both sectors.
C. The Depression and the Vargas Regime in Brazil
1. The Depression hit Latin America very hard and marks a significant turning point for the region. As the value of their exports plummeted and their economies collapsed, Argentina and Brazil, like many European countries, turned to authoritarian regimes that promised to solve their economic problems.
2. In Brazil Getulio Vargas (1883–1953) staged a coup and practiced a policy called import substitution industrialization. Increased import duties and promotion of national firms and state-owned enterprises brought industrialization and all of the usual environmental consequences: mines, urbanization, slums, the conversion of scrubland to pasture, and deforestation.
3. Vargas instituted reforms that were beneficial to urban workers, but because he did nothing to help the landless peasants, the benefits of the economic recovery were unequally distributed. In 1938 Vargas staged a second coup, abolished the constitution, made Brazil a fascist state, and thus infected not only Brazil but also all of South America with the temptations of political violence. He himself was overthrown in a military coup in 1954.
D. Argentina After 1930
1. Economically, the Depression hurt Argentina almost as badly as it did Brazil, but the political consequences were delayed for years. In 1930 General Jose Uriburu overthrew the popularly elected president and initiated thirteen years of rule by generals and the oligarquia.
2. In 1943 Colonel Juan Peron (1895–1974) led another coup and established a government that modeled itself on Germany’s Nazi regime. As World War II turned against the Nazis, Peron and his wife Eva Duarte Peron appealed to urban workers to create a new base of support that allowed Peron to win the presidency in 1946 and to establish a populist dictatorship.
3. Peron’s government sponsored rapid industrialization and spent lavishly on social welfare projects, depleting capital that Argentina had earned during the war. Peron was unable to create a stable government, and soon after his wife died in 1952 he was overthrown in a military coup.
E. Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil: a Comparison
1. Until 1910 Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil shared a common history and similar cultures. In the first half of the twentieth century their economies followed parallel trajectories, but their political histories diverged radically.
2. Mexico underwent a traumatic and profound social revolution. Argentina and Brazil remained under the leadership of conservative regimes that were devoted to the interests of the wealthy landowners and which were periodically overturned by military coups and populist demagogues.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How and why did the economies and societies of sub-Saharan Africa change during the period 1900 to 1945? Are these changes best explained in terms of internal or external causes?
2. What factors led to the emergence of a popular independence movement in India, and why did this movement lead to the establishment of two states, India and Pakistan, rather than to a single India?
3. Describe and explain the historical causes of the social structures of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
4. How and why did the political evolution of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil differ from each other?
5. Compare both the roles of India, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil in the global economy and the ways in which each region approached the question of industrialization.
6. How and why did nationalist movements in Africa resemble or differ from the nationalist movements in India?
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Colonialism in Africa
Sources:
a. Boahen, Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
b. Herskovits, Melville. The Human Factor in Changing Africa. New York: Knopf, 1962.
c. Maddox, Gregory, ed. The Colonial Epoch in Africa. New York: Garland, 1993.
d. UNESCO General History of Africa, vols. 7 and 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
2. The Indian Independence Movements
Sources:
a. Allen, Charles. Plain Tales from the Raj: Image of British India in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.
b. Brown, Judith M. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
c. Fay, Peter Ward. The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle For Independence, 1942–1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
d. Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
e. Spear, Percival. A History of India. Vol. Two, From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
3. Zapata and Villa
Sources:
a. Brunk, Samuel. Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
b. Clemens Clendenen, Clarence Clemens. The United States and Pancho Villa; A Study in Unconventional Diplomacy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961.
c. Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
d. Machado, Manuel. Centaur of the North: Francisco Villa, the Mexican Revolution, and Northern Mexico. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1988.
4. Economic Development in Brazil and Argentina
Sources:
a. Adelman, Jeremy. Frontier Development: Land, Labour and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
b. Burns, D. Bradford. A History of Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
c. Jefferson, Mark. Peopling the Argentine Pampa. New York, American Geographical Society, 1971.
d. Topik, Steven. The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.
e. Weinstein, Barbara. The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.
5. Populist Demagogues: Vargas and the Peróns
Sources:
a. Crassweller, Robert D. Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
b. Levine, Robert M. Father of the Poor? Vargas and his Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
c. Taylor, J.M. Eva Perón, The Myths of a Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
d. Turner, Frederick C. and José Enrique Miguens, eds. Juan Perón and the Reshaping of Argentina. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983.
PAPER TOPICS
1. Compare the effects of the World Wars on Africa, India, and Latin America.
2. Did British colonialism lay a sound foundation for the new states of India and Pakistan? State and justify your position.
3. Write a research paper on the economic history of Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil from about 1900 to 1949.
4. Compare the goals and the careers of Mohandas Gandhi and Emiliano Zapata.
INTERNET RESOURCES
The following Internet sites contain written and visual material appropriate for use with this chapter. A more extensive and continually updated list of Internet resources can be found on The Earth and Its Peoples web site. Refer to The Earth and Its Peoples Web Site section located at the beginning of this manual for information on how to locate the text homepage.
India: The Struggle for Independence
http://www.indembassyhavana.cu/culture/culture-history-independencestruggle.htm
Great Epics Newsletter Archive
http://www.greatepicbooks.com/epics/
African History Sourcebook: The Fight for Independence (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/africa/africasbook.html#The Fight for Independance
Modern History Sourcebook: Twentieth Century Latin America (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook55.html
Striving for Independence: Africa, India, and Latin America, 1900–1949
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter students should:
1. Be able to describe the effects of colonial rule on Africa between 1900 and 1949 and to analyze the relationship between the effects of colonial rule, the World Wars, and the Depression, and the beginnings of the independence movement in Africa.
2. Understand the development of the Indian Independence Movement from 1905 to 1947 and be able to explain the roles of Mohandas Gandhi and of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
3. Understand the broad outlines of the Mexican Revolution and the economic policies of the Lazaro Cardenas.
4. Be able to discuss the economic and political evolution of Argentina and Brazil from 1900 to 1949, and to compare these two countries to Mexico.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Sub-Saharan Africa, 1900–1945
A. Colonial Africa: Economic and Social Changes
1. Outside of Algeria, Kenya, and South Africa, few Europeans lived in Africa. However, the very small European presence dominated the African economy and developed Africa as an exporter of raw materials in such a way that brought benefit to Europeans but to very few Africans.
2. Africans were forced to work in European-owned mines and plantations under harsh conditions for little or no pay. Colonialism provided little modern health care, and many colonial policies worsened public health, undermined the African family, and gave rise to large cities in which Africans experienced racial discrimination.
B. Religious and Political Changes
1. During the colonial period many Africans turned toward Christianity or Islam. Missionaries introduced Christianity (except in Ethiopia, where it was indigenous). Islam spread through the influence and example of African traders.
2. The contrast between the liberal ideas imparted by Western education and the realities of racial discrimination under colonial rule contributed to the rise of nationalism. Early nationalist leaders and movements such as Blaise Diagne in Senegal, the African National Congress in South Africa, and Pan-Africanists like W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey from America had little influence until after World War II, when Africans who had served in the Allied war effort came back with new, radical ideas.
II. The Indian Independence Movement, 1905–1947
A. The Land and the People
1. Despite periodic famines due to drought, India’s fertile land allowed the Indian population to increase from 250 million in 1900 to 389 million in 1941. Population growth brought environmental pressure, deforestation, and a declining amount of farm land per family.
2. Indian society was divided into many classes: peasants, wealthy property owners, and urban craftsmen, traders, and workers. The people of India spoke many different languages; English became the common medium of communication of the Western-educated middle class.
3. The majority of Indians practiced Hinduism. Muslims constituted one-quarter of the people of India and formed a majority in the northwest and in eastern Bengal.
B. British Rule and Indian Nationalism
1. Colonial India was ruled by a viceroy and administered by the Indian Civil Service. The few thousand members of the Civil Service manipulated the introduction of technology into India in order to protect the Indian people from the dangers of industrialization, to prevent the development of radical politics, and to maximize the benefits to Britain and to themselves.
2. At the turn of the century, the majority of Indians accepted British rule, but the racism and discrimination of the Europeans had inspired a group of Hindus to establish a political organization called the Indian National Congress in 1885. Muslims, fearful of Hindu dominance, founded the All-India Muslim League in 1906, thus giving India not one, but two independence movements.
3. The British resisted the idea that India could or should industrialize, but Pramatha Nath Bose of the Indian Geological Service and Jamseji Tata, a Bombay textile magnate, established India’s first steel mill in Jamshedpur in 1911. Jamshedpur became a powerful symbol of Indian national pride.
4. In 1918 and 1919 several incidents contributed to an increase in tensions between the British and the Indian people. These incidents included a too-vague promise of self-government, the influenza epidemic of 1918–1919, and the incident in which a British general ordered his troops to fire into a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators.
C. Mahatma Gandhi and Militant Nonviolence
1. Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi (1869–1948) was an English-educated lawyer who practiced in South Africa before returning to India and joining the Indian National Congress during World War I. Gandhi’s political ideas included ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha (the search for truth).
2. Gandhi dressed and lived simply; his affinity for the poor, the illiterate, and the outcasts made him able to transform the cause of Indian independence from an elite movement to a mass movement with a quasi-religious aura.
3. Gandhi’s brilliance as a political tactician and master of public relations gestures was demonstrated in acts such as his eighty mile “Walk to the Sea” to make salt (in violation of the government’s salt monopoly), in his several fasts “unto death,” and in his repeated arrests and prison sentences.
D. India Moves Toward Independence
1. In the 1920s the British slowly and reluctantly began to give Indians control of areas such as education, the economy, and public works. High tariff barriers were erected behind which Indian entrepreneurs were able to undertake a degree of industrialization; this helped to create a class of wealthy Indian businessmen who looked to Gandhi’s designated successor in the Indian National Congress–Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)–for leadership.
2. The Second World War divided the Indian people; Indians contributed heavily to the war effort, but the Indian National Congress opposed the war, and a minority of Indians joined the Japanese side.
E. Partition and Independence
1. In 1940 the Muslim League’s leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) demanded that Muslims be given a country of their own, to be named Pakistan. When World War II ended, Britain’s new Labour Party government prepared for independence, but mutual animosity between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League led to the partition of India into two states: India and Pakistan.
2. Partition and independence were accompanied by violence between Muslims and Hindus and by massive flows of refugees as Hindus left predominantly Muslim areas and Muslims left predominantly Hindu areas.
III. The Mexican Revolution, 1910–1940
A. Mexico in 1910
1. Mexico’s geographical location made it subject to numerous foreign invasions and interventions. Upon independence in 1821 Mexican society was deeply divided; a few wealthy families of Spanish origin owned 85 percent of the land, while the majority of Indians and mestizos were poor peasants.
2. Concentration of land ownership increased after independence as wealthy families and American companies used bribery and force to acquire millions of acres of good agricultural land in southern Mexico, forcing peasants into wage labor, debt, and relocation. In northern Mexico, American purchase of land, the harsh living conditions, and the unequal distribution of wealth also caused popular resentment.
3. In 1910 General Porfirio Diaz (1830–1915) had ruled for thirty-four years. Diaz’s policies had made Mexico City a modernized showplace and brought wealth to a small number of businessmen, but his rule was also characterized by discrimination against the nonwhite majority of Mexicans and a decline in the average Mexican’s standard of living.
B. Revolution and Civil War, 1911–1920
1. The Mexican Revolution was not the work of one party with a well-defined ideology; it developed haphazardly, led by a series of ambitious but limited men, each representing a different segment of Mexican society.
2. Francisco I Madero (1873–1913) overthrew Diaz in 1911, only to be overthrown in turn by General Victoriana Huerta in 1913. The Constitutionalists Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon emerged as leaders of the disaffected middle class and industrial workers and they organized armies that overthrew Huerta in 1914.
3. Emiliano Zapata (1879–1919) led a peasant revolt in Morelos, south of Mexico City, while Francisco (Pancho) Villa organized an army in northern Mexico. Neither man was able to rise above his regional and peasant origins to lead a national revolution; Zapata was defeated and killed by the Constitutionalists in 1919, and Villa was assassinated in 1923.
4. The Constitutionalists took over Mexico after years of fighting, an estimated 2 million casualties, and tremendous damage. In the process, the Constitutionalists adopted many of their rivals’ agrarian reforms and proposed a number of social programs designed to appeal to workers and the middle class.
C. The Revolution Institutionalized, 1920–1940
1. The Mexican Revolution lost momentum in the 1920s, but it had given representatives of rural communities, unionized workers, and public employees a voice in government.
2. After President Obregon’s assassination in 1928 his successor Plutarco Elias Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party, which was renamed the Mexican Revolutionary Party (PRM) by President Lazaro Cardenas in 1934. Cardenas removed generals from government, redistributed land, replaced church-run schools with government schools, and expropriated the foreign-owned oil companies that had dominated Mexico’s petroleum industry.
3. When Cardenas’s term ended in 1940 Mexico was still a land of poor farmers with a small industrial base. Nonetheless, the Mexican Revolution had established a stable political system, tamed the military and the Catholic Church, and laid the foundations for the later industrialization of Mexico.
IV. Argentina and Brazil, 1900–1949
A. The Transformation of Argentina
1. At the end of the nineteenth century the introduction of railroads and refrigerator ships transformed Argentina from an exporter of hides and wool to an exporter of meat. The introduction of Lincoln sheep and Hereford cattle for meat production led Argentine farmers to fence, plow, and cultivate the pampas, transforming pampas into farmland which, like the North American Midwest, became one of the world’s great producers of meat and wheat.
2. Argentina’s government represented the interests of the oligarquia, a small group of wealthy landowners. This elite had little interest in anything other than farming; they were content to let foreign companies, mainly British, build the railroads, processing plants, and public utilities, while Argentina exported agricultural goods and imported almost all its manufactured goods.
B. Brazil and Argentina, to 1929
1. Brazil’s elite of coffee and cacao planters and rubber exporters resembled the Argentine elite: they used their wealth to support a lavish lifestyle, allowed the British to build railroads, harbors, and other infrastructure, and imported all manufactured goods. Both Argentina and Brazil had small but outspoken middle classes that demanded a share in government and looked to Europe as a model.
2. The disruption of European industry and world trade in World War I weakened the land-owning classes in Argentina and Brazil so that the urban middle class and the wealthy landowners shared power at the expense of the landless peasants and urban workers.
3. During the 1920s peace and high prices for agricultural exports allowed both Argentina and Brazil to industrialize, but the introduction of new technologies left them again dependent on the advanced industrial countries. Aviation and radio communications were introduced to Argentina and Brazil during the 1920s, but European and United States’ companies dominated both sectors.
C. The Depression and the Vargas Regime in Brazil
1. The Depression hit Latin America very hard and marks a significant turning point for the region. As the value of their exports plummeted and their economies collapsed, Argentina and Brazil, like many European countries, turned to authoritarian regimes that promised to solve their economic problems.
2. In Brazil Getulio Vargas (1883–1953) staged a coup and practiced a policy called import substitution industrialization. Increased import duties and promotion of national firms and state-owned enterprises brought industrialization and all of the usual environmental consequences: mines, urbanization, slums, the conversion of scrubland to pasture, and deforestation.
3. Vargas instituted reforms that were beneficial to urban workers, but because he did nothing to help the landless peasants, the benefits of the economic recovery were unequally distributed. In 1938 Vargas staged a second coup, abolished the constitution, made Brazil a fascist state, and thus infected not only Brazil but also all of South America with the temptations of political violence. He himself was overthrown in a military coup in 1954.
D. Argentina After 1930
1. Economically, the Depression hurt Argentina almost as badly as it did Brazil, but the political consequences were delayed for years. In 1930 General Jose Uriburu overthrew the popularly elected president and initiated thirteen years of rule by generals and the oligarquia.
2. In 1943 Colonel Juan Peron (1895–1974) led another coup and established a government that modeled itself on Germany’s Nazi regime. As World War II turned against the Nazis, Peron and his wife Eva Duarte Peron appealed to urban workers to create a new base of support that allowed Peron to win the presidency in 1946 and to establish a populist dictatorship.
3. Peron’s government sponsored rapid industrialization and spent lavishly on social welfare projects, depleting capital that Argentina had earned during the war. Peron was unable to create a stable government, and soon after his wife died in 1952 he was overthrown in a military coup.
E. Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil: a Comparison
1. Until 1910 Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil shared a common history and similar cultures. In the first half of the twentieth century their economies followed parallel trajectories, but their political histories diverged radically.
2. Mexico underwent a traumatic and profound social revolution. Argentina and Brazil remained under the leadership of conservative regimes that were devoted to the interests of the wealthy landowners and which were periodically overturned by military coups and populist demagogues.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How and why did the economies and societies of sub-Saharan Africa change during the period 1900 to 1945? Are these changes best explained in terms of internal or external causes?
2. What factors led to the emergence of a popular independence movement in India, and why did this movement lead to the establishment of two states, India and Pakistan, rather than to a single India?
3. Describe and explain the historical causes of the social structures of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.
4. How and why did the political evolution of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil differ from each other?
5. Compare both the roles of India, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil in the global economy and the ways in which each region approached the question of industrialization.
6. How and why did nationalist movements in Africa resemble or differ from the nationalist movements in India?
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Colonialism in Africa
Sources:
a. Boahen, Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
b. Herskovits, Melville. The Human Factor in Changing Africa. New York: Knopf, 1962.
c. Maddox, Gregory, ed. The Colonial Epoch in Africa. New York: Garland, 1993.
d. UNESCO General History of Africa, vols. 7 and 8. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
2. The Indian Independence Movements
Sources:
a. Allen, Charles. Plain Tales from the Raj: Image of British India in the Twentieth Century. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.
b. Brown, Judith M. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
c. Fay, Peter Ward. The Forgotten Army: India's Armed Struggle For Independence, 1942–1945. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.
d. Jalal, Ayesha. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
e. Spear, Percival. A History of India. Vol. Two, From the Sixteenth Century to the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin Books, 1978.
3. Zapata and Villa
Sources:
a. Brunk, Samuel. Emiliano Zapata: Revolution and Betrayal in Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
b. Clemens Clendenen, Clarence Clemens. The United States and Pancho Villa; A Study in Unconventional Diplomacy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961.
c. Knight, Alan. The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
d. Machado, Manuel. Centaur of the North: Francisco Villa, the Mexican Revolution, and Northern Mexico. Austin, Tex.: Eakin Press, 1988.
4. Economic Development in Brazil and Argentina
Sources:
a. Adelman, Jeremy. Frontier Development: Land, Labour and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.
b. Burns, D. Bradford. A History of Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
c. Jefferson, Mark. Peopling the Argentine Pampa. New York, American Geographical Society, 1971.
d. Topik, Steven. The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889–1930. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987.
e. Weinstein, Barbara. The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983.
5. Populist Demagogues: Vargas and the Peróns
Sources:
a. Crassweller, Robert D. Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.
b. Levine, Robert M. Father of the Poor? Vargas and his Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
c. Taylor, J.M. Eva Perón, The Myths of a Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
d. Turner, Frederick C. and José Enrique Miguens, eds. Juan Perón and the Reshaping of Argentina. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983.
PAPER TOPICS
1. Compare the effects of the World Wars on Africa, India, and Latin America.
2. Did British colonialism lay a sound foundation for the new states of India and Pakistan? State and justify your position.
3. Write a research paper on the economic history of Mexico, Argentina, or Brazil from about 1900 to 1949.
4. Compare the goals and the careers of Mohandas Gandhi and Emiliano Zapata.
INTERNET RESOURCES
The following Internet sites contain written and visual material appropriate for use with this chapter. A more extensive and continually updated list of Internet resources can be found on The Earth and Its Peoples web site. Refer to The Earth and Its Peoples Web Site section located at the beginning of this manual for information on how to locate the text homepage.
India: The Struggle for Independence
http://www.indembassyhavana.cu/culture/culture-history-independencestruggle.htm
Great Epics Newsletter Archive
http://www.greatepicbooks.com/epics/
African History Sourcebook: The Fight for Independence (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/africa/africasbook.html#The Fight for Independance
Modern History Sourcebook: Twentieth Century Latin America (P. Halsall, Fordham University)
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/modsbook55.html
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