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Fossil Fuel
Hydrocarbon deposits, especially coal, crude oil, and natural gas, derived from the remains of once-living plant and animal organisms; these deposits are burned to produce heat energy.
Energy Revolution
The massive increase of useful heat energy made available to humans by extracting and burning fossil fuels.
Industrial Revolution
The technological and economic processes whereby industrialization based on fossil-fuel energy, steam engines, and complex machines led to world-wide economic, social and environmental transformation.
Biological Old Regime
Human history before the nineteenth century, when economic production depended almost entirely on capturing flows of energy from the sun.
Putting-Out System
A productions method in which employers distributed raw materials to individuals or families, who then made finished goods, typically woolen or cotton yarn or cloth, and returned these goods to the employer for payment.
Luddites
Is colloquial English for anyone who dislikes new technology and cannot get the hang of it. A masked band of laborers that began breaking into mills at night to demolish the newfangled machines that had taken their jobs.
Free Trade
An economic doctrine contending that trade among states should be unrestricted, principally by lowering or eliminating, tariffs or duties, on imported goods; factors of supply and demand should mainly determine price.
Liberalism
A set of economic and political doctrines advocating individual freedom, unrestricted market competition, free trade, constitutional government and confidence in human progress; sometimes called "classical liberalism".
First Anglo-Chinese War (Opium War)
The Qing decided to try and eradicate Opium due to the high social costs of addiction and drug fueled crime. The East India Company saw this as the best time to force China into the free-trade era. In 1839 the company dispatched a squad of battleships and steamers triggering the Opium War…
Capitalism
An economic and political system in which trade is controlled by private owners rather than by state.
American Civil War
(1861-1865) Internal revolt in America against central state authority over the issue of slavery.
Neo-Europe
A region outside of Europe, predominantly in temperate latitude, where people of European descent came to make up a large majority. Indigenous societies retreated, shrank in size, or died.
Potato Famine
The Irish famine of 1845-1852, a catastrophe caused by loss of potato crops to a devastating fungus. It washed the poorest of the poor onto foreign shores, about 1.8 million by 1855.
Pogrom
In the 1880s pogroms in Russia, that is, organize massacres or ethnic cleansing of Jews, triggered mass flight.
Revolutions of 1848
Lead to a wave of migrants headed to America in fear of political reprisals.
Secular
Has no religious basis
Socialism
The word socialism originally evoked the idea of a society founded on cooperation and mutual concern rather than on individual self-interest. A variety of ideologies that advocate social equality and justice and the community's collective control and management of economic institutions; i…
Burgeoisie
The urban middle class; in Marxist thought the property owning class that oppresses the working class.
Proletariat
The working class; in Marxist thought the class that must overthrow the capitalist bourgeoisie to achieve control of the means of production.
Communism
A dimension of socialist thought that advocates revolution to eradicate capitalism and establish the universal triumph of the proletariat. It is the existence of society without class or private property.
Tanzimat
Under Sultan Mahmud II initiated the Tanzimat or reorganization reforms in the Ottoman Empire. It was a modernizing experiment initiating military, administrative, and political reforms.
Mexican-American War
Mexico under Santa Anna loses half of its territory to the United States. (1846-1848)
Caudillos
Autocratic political bosses or dictators, especially in the post-independence period in Latin America (1830-1860).
Evangelism
The practice of propagating the Christian gospel by preaching, personal witnessing and missionary work.
Crimean War
(1853-1856) It pitted on sovereign state against another. Russia deployed its land army to expand its boarders pushing in the west against the Ottoman Empire. Conflict between Russia and the Ottoman Empire triggered the war. The following year Britain and France joined with the Ottoman s …
War of the Triple Alliance
1864-1870) it pitted one sovereign state against another. It was a war between Paraguay and its three neighbors (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay). Lopez declared war on Brazil after Brazil invaded Uruguay sparking Lopez's fear that the two countries in collaboration with Argentina would res…
Taiping Rebellion
(1851-1864) it was an internal revolt in China against central state authority. Grew out of peasant grievances over land shortages, price inflations and government negligence. The chinese saw the weakness of its government. Hong Xiuquan was the leader of the Taiping movement and advocated…
Great Indian Rebellion
(1857-1856) it was an internal revolt in South Asia against central state authority. Indian garrison troops or sepoys refused to load rifles that British officers had issued them because the cartridges were smeared in either pig fat, which Muslim soldiers would not touch, or beef tallow, …
British Raj
This was a long-term consequence of the Great Indian Rebellion. Parliament dissolved the East India Company and assumed direct rule over the colony known as the British Raj or "Rule". British governors initiated many reforms to strengthen colonial authority.
Trans-Siberian Railway
The Russian government initiated a comprehensive industrialization plan. Under Witte's direction the trans-Siberian railway was built which opened Siberia to large-scale farm and mineral exploitation.
Meiji Restoration
A rebel coalition of daimyo and samuri abolished the shogunate and restored an emperor, Meiji, and an aristocratic fraction. From 1868 to 1882 rulers began to centralize the state. They wanted to imitate the Europeans industrial technology and government models, By 1875 more than 500 fore…
Informal Empire
A situation in which a powerful state protects its interests in a foreign society by exerting political and economic influence but without assuming the costs of territorial control. (Britain, France, Germany, United States, and Japan). Used inequitable tariffs, large bank loans and displa…
Deindustrialization
An economic process in which a state or region loses at least part of the capability it previously had to manufacture goods especially owing to foreign competition or intervention. European merchants bough raw materials, shipped it home to factories, and then sold the final good back to S…
Suez Canal
It's opening in 1869 slashed trade costs by shrinking the travel time between Asia and European ports. What used to take two years now only took four weeks.
Debt Peon
A laborer, usually on a farm or plantation, who works under obligation to repay a loan. This was the fate of many small cotton farmers after the civil war. Men and women destined to preform agricultural or other wage work to make regular debt payments for the rest of their lives.
Business Cycle
A sequence of economic activity typically characterized by recession, recovery, growth, and repeated recession.
The Origin of Species
It was published in 1859, Charles Darwin proposed that life forms are not fixed but evolving and that evolution occurs through the process of natural selection. Darwin argued that animal and plant species exhibit subtle differences and that competition for survival among species selects f…
New Imperialism
The campaigns of colonial empire building that several European empires plus Japan and the United States undertook in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in Africa and South Asia.
Protectorate
A type of colonial relationship in which a foreign power takes control of the top levels of government in the colonized territory but permits it to retain formal, if largely fictional sovereignty.
Spanish-American War
The United States went to war with Spain in declared solidarity with Cuban nationalists, who had launched an insurrection against their Spanish rulers in 1895. The US intervenes, easily ejected Spain, then set up a military occupation and disbanded rebel forces. Cuba became formally indep…
Social Darwinism
They contended that dependent and debased elements of society (poor people, illiterates, criminals, women) occupy their inferior positions because over time they have exhibited less biological fitness than those who had greater success in life (respectable property-owning, white males).
Maji Maji Rebellion
A popular resistance drawing from religious ideas in Tanganika. The German led forces has barley established a colony in 1905 when Africans representing diverse ethnic groups rose together in resistance. German commanders suppressed the rebellion with great brutality but it took a year to…
Gold Standard
The industrialized states took steps after 1870 to join Britain in pegging the value of their national currencies to a gold standard, to a fixed price for an ounce of gold. Once the value of the currency was set relative to gold it also became fixed relative to other currencies. This stab…
Fordism
A system of technology and organization, named after Henry Ford, which aims to produce goods at minimal cost through standardization and mass production and to pay wageworkers rates that allow them to consume the products the make.
Soviets
Revolutionary workers council that served during the Russian Revolution as local units of government and civil order. The term was applied later to legislative bodies within the communist regime. In industrialized cities workers organized their own elected political action councils known …
Russian Revolution of 1905
After Russian was defeated by Japan in both navy and army there were waves of protest in Moscow and other cities. In January 1905 150,000 workers demonstrated in front of the tsar's winter palace petitioning "breakdown the wall between yourself and you people". In response imperial troops…
Young Turks
An umbrella organization for groups demanding restoration of constitution, military modernization and an end to economic dependence on foreign companies and banks.
Treaty Ports
Sea or river ports in China where, as a consequence of diplomatic and military pressure, foreigners gained special privileges to engage in trade and enjoy exemptions from Chinese laws and courts.
Boxers
A secret society devoted to martial arts rituals believed to convey special powers. They sought an explanation for the massive monsoon floods that hit China and targeted foreigners as the source of China's misfortune.
Mexican Revolution
It was initially aimed to replace a long established republic. Mexico's republic was a dictatorship that made sure that elections were decided in advance. Porfirio Diaz headed the republic. Liberals founded associations pledged to individual rights, fair elections, freedom from foreign do…
The Great War (World War I)
Assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand. The domino effect of allied countries. (1914-1918). Central power: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. Allied powers: France, Britain, and Russia.
Total War
Warfare, especially characteristic of World War I and II, in which the opposing states mobilize their civilian populations and all available resources to achieve victory. It is also a wartime policy intended to destroy both the enemy's military forces and its economic infrastructure and s…
Bolshevik
A communist faction (in Russia) that demanded strict party discipline, dedicated activism, and unbending commitment to proletariat government that would exclude capitalist bourgeoisie. Lead by Lenin.
The October Revolution (Bolshevik Revolution)
In October 1917 Bolshevik militants seized power of St. Petersburg and disbanded the provincial regime. This coup brought more socialist groups into Lenin's camp. The rapidly assembled Congress of Soviets under Bolshevik leadership claimed supreme political authority in the mane of all wo…
Self-Determination
The idea put forth during and after World War I that a society sharing common language, history, and common traditions should have the right to decide its own political future and its own government.
Reparations
The act of making amends or giving satisfaction for an injustice or injury; payment of compensation by a defeated state for presumed damages influenced on another state as a result of war between them.
Fourteen Points
Wilson's set of goals for new world order that emphasized the commitment of sovereign states to collective security and the rights of ethnically based national communities to political self determination.
League of Nations
The first formal organization of sovereign states dedicated to worldwide collective security through open negotiation.
Comintern
Also known as communist international. Lenin sponsored comintern to support socialist revolutionary parties around the globe. The international revolutionary arm of the communist movement.
Modernism
The movement in the arts and humanities that embraces innovation and rejects adherence of traditional forms and values.
Demographic Transition
The stabilization of populations level in society resulting from the decline in both fertility rates and death rates.
New Economic Policy (NEP)
In 1921 Lenin initiated NEP, a plan to fulfill socialist goals by stages. It allowed peasants to sell surplus crops to local markets as long as they paid the government a fixed percentage of harvest yields.
Autarky
It is a country that aims to achieve economic independence and self-sufficiency especially freedom from dependence on external trade or assistance. Stalin aimed to make the state free of all dependence on foreign commerce.
Guomindang
Also known as the Nationalist People's Party. It was organized by Sun Zhongshan. He planned to restore unity and advocate parliamentary government and democratic programs to improve workers lives. They allied with the Chinese Communist Party to overpower northern warlords.
Fascism
A political ideology that advocates authoritarian leadership, intense national loyalty, cultural renewal, and rejection of both liberal democracy and socialism. An example is Stalin in Russia.
Totalitarianism
A political ideology and governing policies that mandates strong central control and regulation of both public and private thought and behavior. An example is Mussolini in Italy.
League of Nation Mandates
Germany's four colonies in Africa that went to Britain or France. These powers ruled the colonies until they might be ready to rules themselves.
Metropole
The colonizers home country and seat of supreme imperial authority.
Indirect Rule
Theory and practice of colonial government favoring the appointment of local leaders as political intermediaries between the colonizer and the indigenous population.
Great Depression
World wide economic depression. (1929-late 1930s)
Isolationism
The national policy or political doctrine of avoiding complex political economic relations with foreign countries.
Black Thursday
On October 24th 1929 the market bubble exploded.
Keynesianism
Economic theories of John Keynes that promote government monetary and financial policies aimed at increasing employment and stimulating economic growth. He was a British economist. He argues government had to get business moving again.
New Deal
Programs initiated by FDR to help increase employment.
Nazi
(National Socialist German Workers Party)Right wing (view some social inequalities as normal or inevitable) authoritarian party ruled by Hitler.

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