michelleloyasportfolio

Chapter 20 discussed the many tragedies that occurred in the early 1900s-late 70s. Some of the biggest events were the World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Rebalancing of Global Power. As discussed in class, the 'collapse of the center' was the decline of religion and power coming from Western Europe. Europe was known as the center of the world, everything began to fall apart and people realized that the ways and traditions don't have to revolve around Europe. Europe asserted its superiority in the areas of religion, politically, democracy, economically, militarily, and technology. Another great moral collapse was the Holocaust, many people were brutally tortured at the time. World War I and World War II were failures of the government to avert war, it was seen as a world war because of the system of alliances and colonial relationships, this, in turn, caused the European diplomacy to fail in stopping this. Lastly, the Great Depression challenged the idea t...

Chapter 19 discussed the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and China. The Ottoman Empire controlled South East Europe, African, and Asia. One goal of the Ottoman Empire's attempts at modernization was to better integrate the empire's many non-Muslim communities. In China, they were known to be a dependent, semi-colonial country, which they strived to change and become more independent. During the 1860s and 1870s, China developed a self-strengthening plan that sought to uplift the traditional Chinese culture while including ideas from the west. This turned out to be a failure due to the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901). The outcome of the Boxer Rebellion was that foreign occupation of Bejing and large reparation from China's government. In Japan, they used its newfound industrial, economic, and military power to begin building its own empire in East Asia.

Chapter 18 discussed colonial encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Through this chapter, we see how slavery affected different parts of the world. Strayer states, "Many of the new ways of working that emerged during the colonial era derived directly from the demands of the colonial state. The most obvious was required and unpaid labor on public projects, such as building railroads, constructing government buildings and transporting goods." These are just some of the few things slaves encountered, in some places in Europe it was required for "native" African Americans to have ten to twelve days of labor over a year period. When it comes to Asian countries, they kept most of their trade and slave trade between their countries, which is much different from European and African countries.