CH22 & CH23

(CH22)

• The struggle for independence and decolonization continues into the last decade of the 20th century.
• Mobilization of the masses around a nationalist ideology.
• The ideal of national self-determination was profoundly at odds with the possession of colonies that were denied any opportunity to express their own national character.
• Nationalist leaders did not seek to restore a vanished past, rather they looked forward to joining the world of independent nation-states, to membership in the UN, and to the wealth and power that modern technology promised.
• British colonial rule of India promoted a growing sense of Indian identity.
• South Africa - economically dominant: British settlers/politically dominant:Afrikaners(Dutch settlers)
• The official policy of apartheid (1948): attempted to separate blacks from whites in every conceivable way while retaining African's labor power in the white-controlled economy. An enormous apparatus of repression enforced the system. extreme forms of social segregation.

(inspried by Gandhi's non-violence movement. With the police brutality on minority issues in US, I wish the protests could be carried out more peacefully, no more violence or dying of either side.)

(CH23)

• Globalization - an increasingly dense web of political relationships, economic transactions, and cultural influences cut across the world's many peoples, countries and religions, binding them together more tightly, but also more contentiously in the 20th century.
• The world Bank and the International Monetary Fund organized in 1944. This "Bretton Woods system" negotiated the rules for commercial and financial dealings among the major capitalist countries, while promoting relatively free trade, stable currency values linked to the US dollar, and high levels of capital investment.
• Foreign direct investment, transnational corporations (TNCs)
• By 2000, 51 of the world's 100 largest economic units were TNCs, not countries.
• Large movements of peoples, labor migrants. 
• In the absence of global regulation, Us's inflated housing market clashed and triggered  a global reactions in the market.
• Debt crisis in Greece, Italy and Spain.
• Calls for protectionism and greater regulations.
• US'd refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, its refusal to ratify the Kyoto protocol on global warming, its doctrine of preemptive war and its apparent use of torture.
• 
  

CH20 &CH21

(CH20)

• WWI, essentially a European civil war with a global reach, provoked the Russian Revolution and the beginnings of world communism. it was followed by the economic meltdown of the Great Depression, by the rise of Nazi Germany and the horror of the Holocaust, and by an even bloodier and more destructive WWII .
• Schools, mass media, and military service had convinced millions of ordinary Europeans that their national identities were profoundly and personally meaningful.
• Trench warfare resulted in enormous casualties while gaining or losing only a few yards of muddy, blood-soaked ground.
• Germany-"war socialism"
• The war seemed to mock the Enlightenment values of progress, tolerance and rationality.
• Enormous causalities promoted social mobility, allowing the less exalted to move into positions previously dominated by the upper class.
• As the war ended, suffrage movements revived and women received the right to vote in Britain, US, Germany, the Soviet Union, Hungary and Poland.
• New states - "national self-determination"
• The Treaty of Versailles, which formally concluded the war in 1919, proved in retrospect to have established conditions that contributed to a second world war only twenty years later.
• Conflicting British promises to both Arabs and Jews regarding Palestine set the stage for an enduring struggle over the holy land.
• During the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was as high as 30% in Germany and US (in 1932).
• "import substitution industrialization"
• In Britain and France and Scandinavia, the Depression energized a "democratic socialism" that sought greater regulation of the economy and a more equal distribution of wealth through peaceful means and electoral politics.
• New Deal - government actions and spending programs could moderate the recessions and depressions to which capitalist economies were prone. social security system, minimum wage and various welfare programs. also supported unions, subsidies for farmers.
• Fascists condemned individualism, liberalism, feminism, parliamentary democracy, and communism.
• Fascism - one-man rule, state-controlled parties, youth organizations or militia, a rhetoric of national renewal, anti-Semitic measures and revolutionary features.
• Holocaust - a genocide, the attempted elimination of entire peoples.

(CH21)

• The growing disbelief in the ability or willingness of the communist regime to provide a decent life for its people was a important factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of communist in the land of its birth.
• The communist revolutions of the 20th century took place in largely agrarian societies, despite the prerequisite of an advanced industrial capitalism that Karl Marx had envisioned.
• The Warsaw Pact
• Communist's Marxist ideology - committed to an industrialized future, pursued economic, political and gender equality, and sought the abolition of private property.
• The CCP frontally addressed both of China's major problems - foreign imperialism and peasant exploitation. It expressed Chinese nationalism as well as a demand for radical social change.
• Communist countries pioneered forms of women's liberation that only later were adopted in the West. 

CH16, CH17, CH18 & CH19

(Intro)

• 1750-1914: "modern" era emerged from the intersection of the Scientific, French, and Industrial revolutions, all of which took shape initially in Western Europe.
• Transformative new ideas:
• movement toward social equality and the end of poverty
• ordinary people may participate in political life
• nations might trump empires
• women could be equal to men
• slavery was no longer necessary
• Western Europe and their North America offspring collectively achieved global dominance by 20th century.
• "Anthropocene", or the age of man - a new era in the history of the planet Earth.
• Countering Eurocentrism:
• to remind ourselves how recent and how brief the European moment in world history has been
• to remember that the rise of Europe occurred within an international context. It was the withdrawal of the Chinese naval fleet that allowed Europeans to enter the Indian Ocean in the 16th century, while Native Americans' lack of immunity to European diseases and their own divisions and conflicts greatly assisted the European takeover if the Western Hemisphere.
• The rise of Europe to a position of global dominance was not an easy or automatic process. Frequently it occurred in the face of ferocious resistance and rebellion, which often required Europeans to modify their policies and practices.
• peoples the world over made active use of Europeans and European ideas for their own purposes, seeking to gain advantage over local rivals or to benefit themselves in light of new conditions. To recognize that Asian and African peoples remained active agents, pursuing their own interests even in oppressive conditions. What was borrowed from Europe was always adapted to local circumstances.
• To recognize that although Europeans gained an unprecedented prominence on the world stage, they were not the only game in town, nor were they the sole preoccupation of Asian, African, and Middle Eastern peoples.

(CH16)

• A century of series of revolutions worldwide, occurred in the context of expensive wars, weakening states, and destabilizing processes of commercialization.
• A radical notion that human political and social arrangements could be engineered, and improved, by human action.
• Conventional and long-established ways of living and thinking - the divine right of kings, state control of trade, aristocratic privilege, the authority of a single church - were no longer sacrosanct and came under repeated attack.
• New ideas of liberty, equality, free trade, religious tolerance, republicanism, and human rationality.
• "Popular sovereignty" in politics - the authority to govern derived from the people rather than from God or from established tradition.
• The ideals that animated the Atlantic revolutions inspired efforts in many countries to abolish slavery, to extend the right to vote, to develop constitutions, and to secure greater equality for women.
• After the French Revolution, women demanded equal political and social rights to men, but were met by resistance of men, and rejected.
• The American Revolution inspired others as the example of its revolution and its constitution; the French Revolution spread through conquest by Napoleon Bonaparte.
• Moral virtue and economic success were joined to motivate the abolition of slavery. secular, religious, economic and political.
• British public opinions towards slavery: morally wrong, economically inefficient & politically unwise.

(CH17)

• Industrial Revolution changed humankind's life as drastically as Agricultural Revolution. It began in the Great Britain, and spread rapidly worldwide though unevenly.
• "Culture of innovation": things could be endlessly improved.
• Two factors in Industrial Revolution began in Europe: rivalry between its small and highly competitive states provided an "insurance against economic and technological stagnation," & The relative newness of these European states and their monarchs' desperate need for revenue in the absence of an effective tax-collecting bureaucracy pushed European royals into an unusual alliance with their merchant classes; it was in the interest of the governments to actively encourage commerce and innovation.
• The intersection of new, highly commercialized, competitive European societies with the novel global network of their own making -> IR

(CH18)

• Europeans viewed the culture and achievements of Asian and African peoples through the prism of a new kind of racism, expressed now in terms of modern science.
• The second wave of European empires' colonial rule's reading became such emotional reading, feeling too overwhelmed to take notes.
• Large scale immigration to plantations, mines and factories.

(CH19) 

• More equality between women and men was one of the ideals the Taiping Uprising held, Hakka people.
• The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 was the first of the "unequal treaties" that seriously eroded China's independence.
• By the beginning of the 20th century, both China and the Ottoman Empire have become "semi-colonies" within the "informal empires" of Europe, although they retained sufficient independence for their governments to launch catch-up efforts of defensive modernization.
• In the second half of 19th century, Japan undertook a radical transformation of its society -  a "revolution from above"- turning it into a powerful, modern, united, industrial nation. It was an achievement that neither China nor the Ottoman Empire was able to duplicate.
• In building a society that was both modern and distinctively Japanese, Japan demonstrated that modernity was not a uniquely European phenomenon.
• Following the elimination of shogunate, the young samurais from southern japan who led the Meiji restoration made their goals to save Japan from foreign domination not by futile resistance, but by s thorough transformation of Japanese society drawing on all that the modern West had to offer.
• Both the idea of Japan as a liberator of Asia from the European yoke and the reality of Japan as an oppressive imperial power in its own right derived from the country's remarkable modern transformation and its distinctive response to the provocation of Western intrusion.

CH13, CH14 & CH15

(Intro)

• 1450-1750
• The beginning of genuine globalization: the oceanic journeys of European explorers and the European conquest and colonial settlement of the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade.
• The silver trade allowed Europeans to use New World precious metals to buy their way into ancient Asian trade routes.
• The Columbian exchange: the massive transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people.
• Stronger and more cohesive sates represented yet another global pattern as they incorporated various local societies into larger units while actively promoting trade, manufacturing and a common culture within their borders: France, the Dutch Republic, Russia, Morocco, the Mughal Empire, Vietnam, Burma, Siam and Japan.
• In 1750, Europe, India and China were comparable in their manufacturing output.
• For majority of mankind, the 3 centuries marked less an entry into the modern era than the continuing development of older agrarian societies.

(CH13)

• Motivated Europeans to gain more land for economic development, access to trade.
• Advantages for Europeans: closeness to the Americas compared to the Asian countries, seafaring technologies built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses, divisions within and between local societies provided allies for the determined European Invaders. Germs and diseases. 
• To Americas:wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, horses, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep.
• To Europe and Asia: potato, corn and cassava. supported rapid population growth in the regions.
• Russian Empire in the making: oath of eternal submission the the grand tsar; yasak(tribute); intermittent pressure to convert to Christianity.
• The Russian Empire represented the final triumph of an agrarian civilization over the hunting societies of Siberia and over the pastoral peoples of the grasslands.
• The Russians were the first of many peoples to measure themselves against the West and to mount major "catch-up" efforts.

(CH14)

• Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama's deliberate, systematic, century-long effort to explore a sea route to the East, by creeping slowly down the West African coast, around the tip of South Africa, up the East African coast, and finally across the Indian Ocean to Calicat in Southern India in 1498.
• Cinnamon, nutmeg, made, cloves and pepper.
• Trading deficit, Europeans did not have much valuable products in exchange for Eastern goods. They had to pay with cash, gold or silver.
• "Trading post empire": aimed to control commerce, not large territories or populations by force of arms. Although their overall economy lagged behind that of Asian producers, Europeans had more than caught up in the critical area of naval technology and naval warfare. This military advantage enabled the Portuguese to quickly establish fortified bases at several key locations within the Indian Ocean world. By 1600, the Portuguese trading post empire was in steep decline.
• The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company received charters from their respective governments granting them trading monopolies and the power to make war and to govern conquered peoples.
• The British were unable to practice "trade by warfare" as the Dutch did in Indonesia. 
• Dutch and English traders also began to deal in bulk goods for a mass market - pepper, textiles, tea and coffee - rather than luxury goods for an elite market.
• Between 1500 and 1866, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, deposited 10.7 million of them in the Americas; about 1.8 million (14.4%) died during the transatlantic crossing.
• how slavery was different in the Americas: large scale and number, largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, slave status inherited across generations, no hope for eventual freedom and distinctive racial dimension "blackness"
• In 1452 the pope formally granted to the kings of Spain and Portugal "full and free permission to invade. search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers ... and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery."

(CH15)

• The Reformation began in 1517: Martin Luther, publicly invited debate about various abuses within the Roman Catholic Church by issueing a document, know as the Ninety-five Theses. Critical of the luxurious life of the popes, the corruption and immorality of some clergy, the Church's selling of indulgences (to remove the penalties for sin).
• Salvation comes through faith alone.
• The protestant breakaway, combined with reformist tendencies within the Catholic Church itself, provoked a Catholic or Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563).
• Efforts to accommodate Chinese culture contrast sharply with the frontal attacks on Native American religions in the Spanish Empire.
• Europe's Scientific Revolution (mid-16th to early-18th centuries): knowledge acquired through a combination of careful observations, controlled experiments, and the formulation of general laws, expressed in mathematical terms.
• Europe's historical development as a reinvigorated and fragmented civilization arguably gave rise to conditions uniquely favorable to the scientific enterprise. Europeans had evolved a legal system that guaranteed a measure of independence for a variety of institutions. The autonomy of its emerging universities. Europe was in a position to draw extensively on the know ledge of other cultures, especially of Islamic world: Arab medical texts, astronomical research and translations of Greek classics.
• Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
• Observation, deduction and experimentation.
• European enlightenment thinkers shared the belief in the power of knowledge to transform human society.
• Deists and Pantheists.
• The idea of progress: human society was not fixed by tradition or divine command but could be changed, and improved, by human action guided by reason.
• The Romantic movement in art and literature appealed to emotion, intuition, passion, and imagination rather than cold reason and scientific learning.

CH9, CH11&CH12

(CH9)

• For a thousand years (600-1600), ppls claiming allegiance to Islam represented a highly successful, prosperous, and expansive civ., encompassing parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While Chinese culture and Buddhism provided the cultural anchor for East Asia during the third-wave millennium and Christianity did the same for Europe, the realm of Islam touched on both of them and decisively shaped the history of the entire Afro-Eurasian world.
• Islam thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history.
• Submission to Allah was the primary obligation of believers and the means of achieving a God-conscious life in this world and a place in paradise after death.
• The message of the Quran challenged not only the ancient polytheism of Arab religion and the social injustice of Mecca but also the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society, which was so prone to war, feuding, and violence.
• The 5 Pillars of Islam: "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God"; ritual prayer performed 5 times a day; almsgiving; fasting during Ramadan; the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). 
• "greater jihad" and "lesser jihad"
• Muhammad was not only a religious figure but also, unlike Jesus or Buddha, a political and military leader able to implement his vision of an ideal Islamic society.

(CH11)

• 4,000B.C.E. beginning of pastoral economies.
• 1,000B.C.E. beginning of horseback riding.
• 1209-1368 Mongol rule in China
• 1237-1480 Mongol rule in Russia
• Pastoral societies' generally less productive economies and their need for large grazing areas meant that they supported far smaller populations than did agricultural societies.Kin-ship based groups/clans,and tribes. Nomadic societies generally offered women a higher status, fewer restrictions, and a greater role in public life. Mongol women frequently served as political advisers and active in military affairs as well.
• Pastoral people could not depend solely on their own production; they actively sought access to the foodstuffs, manufactured goods, and luxury items from farming communities.
• The fierce independence of widely dispersed pastoral clans and tribes as well as their internal rivalries made any enduring political unity difficult to achieve. Charismatic leaders, such as Chinggis Khan, were periodically able to weld together a series of tribal alliances that for a time became powerful states. In doing so, they often employed the device of "fictive kinship," designating allies as blood relatives and treating them with a corresponding respect.
• The Xionnu Confederacy.
• In Anatolia, formerly ruled by Christian Byzantium, Muslim Turks brought both Islam and a massive infusion of Turkic culture, language, and people even as they created the Ottoman Empire, which by 1500 became one of the great powers of Eurasia.
• For all of its size and fearsome reputation, the Mongol Empire left a surprisingly modest cultural imprint on the world it had briefly governed. Unlike the Arabs, the Mongols bequeathed to the world no new language, religion, or civilization.

(CH12)

• Is Columbus a hero, a pioneer of progress and enlightenment? or a perpetrator of genocide, a slave trader, a thief, and a pirate?
• Significant events of 15th century world history:
• Timur, a Central Asian Turkic warrior, launched the last major nomadic invasion of adjacent civilizations.
• Russia emerged from two centuries of Mongol rule to begin a huge empire-building project across northern Asia.
• A new European civilization was taking shape in the Renaissance.
• In 1405 an enormous Chinese fleet, dwarfing that of Columbus, set out across the entire Indian Ocean basin, only to voluntarily withdraw 28 years later.
• The Islamic Ottoman Empire put a final end to Christian Byzantium with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453
• Spanish Christians completed the "reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims in 1492.
• The Aztec and Inca Empires gave a final and spectacular expression to Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations before they were both swallowed up in the burst of European imperialism that followed the arrival of Columbus.
• 
  
•  

CH7, CH8 & CH10

500-1500

• Swahili civilization, the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, Songhay stimulated and sustained by long-distance trade across the Sahara.
• Another new civilization known as Kievan Rus in the area of Ukraine and western Russia took shape with a good deal of cultural borrowing from Mediterranean civilization.
• Those in Japan, Korea and Vietnam were strongly influenced by China.
• the most prominent and influential of the new third wave civs. was Islam. Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, West Africa, the coast of East Africa, Spain, and southern Europe.
• More globalized, exchanging ideas, goods, diseases, etc.
• Peoples with a recent history of a nomadic or herding way of life entered the stage of world history as empire builders: Arabs, Berbers, Turks, Mongols, Aztecs, ruling over agricultural poeples and established civs.

(CH7)

• Merchants often became a distinct social group, viewed with suspicion by others because of their impulse to accumulate wealth without actually producing anything themselves. In some societies, trade became a means of social mobility, as Chinese merchants, for example, were able to purchase landed estates and establish themselves within the gentry class.
• Trade also had the capacity to transform political life. Should trade be left in private hands, as in the Aztec Empire, or should it be controlled by the state, as in the Inca Empire?
• Trade became the vehicle for the spread of religious ideas, technological innovations, disease-bearing germs, and plants and animals to regions far from their place of origin.
• The Silk Roads, from China, linking pastoral and agricultural peoples to India, Persia, and eventually reaching Mediterranean Sea.
• The movement of pastoral ppls for thousands of years also served to diffuse Indo-European languages, bronze metallurgy, horse-based technologies, and more all across Eurasia.
• Silk Road trading networks prospered most when large and powerful states provided security for merchants and travelers. Roman and Chinese empires in the second wave era, the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim Abbasid dynasty and Tang dynasty China during the 7th and 8th centuries, the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries.
• Chinese monopoly on the most desired goods, silk for centuries. Although the silk trade itself was largely in the hands of men, women figured hugely in the process both in terms of supply and demand. Foe many centuries, Chinese women, mostly in the rural areas, were responsible for every step of the ingenious and laborious enterprise of silk production.
• By the 6th century, Koreans, Japanese, Indians and Persian learned how to produce silk.
• In Central Asia, silk was used as currency and as a means of accumulating wealth. In both China and the Byzantine Empire, silk became a symbol of high status, and governments passed laws that restricted silk clothing to members of the elite. Silk became  associated with the sacred in the expanding world religions of Buddhism and Christianity.
• Buddhism spread widely throughout Central and East Asia, owing much to the activities of merchants along the Silk Roads.
• Scholars have found thousands of Buddhist texts in the city of Dunhuang, where several branches of the Silk Roads joined to enter western China, together with hundreds of cave temples, lavishly decorated with murals and statues.
• Smallpox and measles devastated the populations of Roman Empire and Han dynasty China.
• The most well-known dissemination of disease, the Black Death that killed up to half of the population of Europe between 1346 and 1348, was associated with the Mongol Empire.
• Paralleling the Silk Road trading network, a sea based commerce in the Indian Ocean basin connected the many ppls between China and East Africa.
• Unlike Confucian culture, which was quite suspicious of merchants, Islam was friendly to commercial life.
• The Malay kingdom of Srivijaya connected the sea trading between China and India.
• Elements of Indian cultural and religious influences took hold in Srivijaya and other Southeast Asia regions.
• Women in Southeast Asia had fewer restrictions and a greater role in public life.
• The far more extensive commercial life of the western Indian Ocean trading following the rise of Islam stimulated the growth of Swahili cities.
• Swahili civ. quickly became Islamic.
• Sand Roads, connecting ppls between West Africa and North Africa & Mediterranean world through the Sahara. Turning point: introduction of camels. 

(CH8)

• Conditions of disunity, unnatural in the eyes of many thoughtful Chinese, discredited Confucianism and opened the door to a greater acceptance of Buddhism and Daoism among the elite.
• Unlike the fall of the western Roman Empire, where political fragmentation proved to be a permanent condition, China regained its unity under the Sui dynasty (589-618). Sui build a canal system stretching some 1,200 miles in length, connecting northern and southern China economically.
• Tang dynasty and Song dynasty are regarded as a "golden age" of arts and literature, setting standards of excellence in poetry, landscape painting and ceramics.
• A political system that would endure for a thousand years: six major ministries: personnel, finance, rites, army, justice and public works, accompanied by the Censorate, an agency that exercised surveillance over the rest of the government, checking on the character and competence of public officials. To staff this bureaucracy, the examination system was revived and made more elaborate, facilitated by the ability to print books for the first time in world history. 
• Invention of printing and gunpowder. Leading technologies in navigation and shipbuilding (China).
• The most compelling expression of a tightening patriarchy lay in foot binding.
• Known as the "tribute system", it was a set of practices that required non-Chinese authorities to acknowledge Chinese superiority and their own subordinate place in a Chinese-centered world order.
• This tribute system did not always work in the favor of China. Some stronger nomads were able to extort large amount of "gifts" from China in exchange of peace.
• In Korea, the Silla, Koryo, and Yi dynasties generally maintained its political independence while participating in China's tribute system. Its leaders actively embraced the connection with China, and especially during the Silla dynasty sought to turn their small state into a miniature version of Tang China.
• Great influences of Chinese culture: Confucianism, arts, bureaucracy, Chinese texts, Chinese Buddhism...
• Still, Korea remained Korean. In the 1400s, developed a phonetic alphabet, known as hangul, for writing the Korean language replacing writing in Chinese characters.
• As in Korea, the elite culture of Vietnam borrowed heavily from China, adopting Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, administrative techniques, the examination system, artistic and literary styles, even as its popular culture remained distinctive.
• The cultural heartland of Vietnam in the Red River valley was fully incorporated into the Chinese state for more than a thousand years.Vietnam retained a greater role for women in social and economic life, despite heavy Chinese influence.
• During 7th to 9th centuries, a unified Japanese state deliberately and systematically set out to transform Japan into a centralized bureaucratic state on the Chinese model.
• Missions sent out to learn Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, Chinese-style court rituals, a system of court rankings for officials, Chinese calendar, two capital cities ( Heian/Kyoto and Nara) modeled on the Chinese capital of Chang'an, art, literature, education, medicine, Chinese writing system, calligraphy and poetry.
• Over many centuries, the Japanese combined what they had assimilated from China into a distinctive Japanese civ., which differed from Chinese culture in many ways.

(CH9)

• For a thousand years (600-1600), ppls claiming allegiance to Islam represented a highly successful, prosperous, and expansive civ., encompassing parts of Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While Chinese culture and Buddhism provided the cultural anchor for East Asia during the third-wave millennium and Christianity did the same for Europe, the realm of Islam touched on both of them and decisively shaped the history of the entire Afro-Eurasian world.
• Islam thrust the previously marginal and largely nomadic Arabs into a central role in world history.
• Submission to Allah was the primary obligation of believers and the means of achieving a God-conscious life in this world and a place in paradise after death.
• The message of the Quran challenged not only the ancient polytheism of Arab religion and the social injustice of Mecca but also the entire tribal and clan structure of Arab society, which was so prone to war, feuding, and violence.
• The 5 Pillars of Islam: "There is ni god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God"; ritual prayer performed 5 times a day; almsgiving; fasting during Ramadan; the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). 
• "greater jihad" and "lesser jihad"
• Muhammad was not only a religious figure but also, unlike Jesus or Buddha, a political and military leader able to implement his vision of an ideal Islamic society.
• 
  

CH3, CH4, CH5 & CH6

Things I learned from the reading:

(CH 3)

• The second and third civilizations were not that different from the first civilizations.
• Monarchs continued to rule most of the new civilizations; women remained subordinate to men in all of them; a sharp divide between the elite and everyone else presisted almost everywhere, as did the practice of slavery.
• no technological or economic breakthrough occurred to create new kinds of human societies as the Agricultural Revolution had done earlier or as the Industrial Revolution would do much later.
• Distinctive "wisdom traditions"; the great philosophical /religious systems of Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Greek rationalism in the Mediterranean; and Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle East have provided the moral and spiritual framework within which most of the world's peoples have sought to order their lives and define their relationship to the mysteries of life and death.
• Technological innovations from China includes: piston bellows, the draw-loom, silk-handling machinery, the wheelbarrow, a better harness for draft animals, the crossbow, iron-chain suspension bridge, gunpowder, firearms, the magnetic compass, paper, printing and porcelain.
• India pioneered the crystallization of sugar and techniques for the manufacture of cotton textiles.
• Roman technological achievements are construction, civil engineering and the art of glassblowing.

• What is an empire: empires are simply states, political systems that exercise coercive power; the term, however, is reserved for larger and more aggressive states, those that conquer, rule, and extract resources from other states and peoples; thus empires have generally encompassed a considerable variety of peoples and cultures within a single political system, and they have often been associated with political or cultural oppression.
• Empires of the second-wave era -- Persia, Greece under Alexander the Great, Rome, China during the Qin and Han dynasties, India during the Mauryan and Gupta dynasties.
• For the most part, the second-wave civilizations in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, and China did not directly encounter one another, as each established its own political system, cultural values and ways of organizing society. Physically adjacent to each other, the emerging Persian Empire and Greek civilization experienced a century long interaction and clash.
• A system of imperial spies, known as the "eyes and ears of the King," of Persian Empire.
• The infrastructure of Persia: a system of standardized coinage, predictable taxes levied on each province, and a newly dug canal linking the Nile with the Red Sea, a "royal road' of 1,700 miles in length.
• The Greeks called themselves Hellenes.
• The political system of the Greeks were small city-states, the idea of "citizenship," of free people managing the affair of state, of equality for all citizens before the law.
• Athenian democracy is different from modern democracy. Women, slaves, and foreigners, together far more than half of the population, were wholly excluded from political participation.
• The Greco-Persian Wars
• The chief significance of Alexander's conquests lay in the widespread dissemination of Greek culture during the Hellenistic era (322-30 B.C.E.) to Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India.

• The values of early Roman republic: rule of law, the rights of citizens, the absence of pretension, upright moral behavior and keeping one's word - were later idealized as 'the way of ancestors.'
• Roman's army was well-trained, well-fed, and well-rewarded.
• In acquiring an empire, Rome had betrayed and abandoned its republican origins.
• During the first two centuries C.E., the Empire provided security, granduer, and relative prosperity for the Mediterranean world. It's called the pax Romana, the Roman peace, the era of imperial Rome's greatest extent and greatest authority.

• Qin Shihuandi reunited the warring states of China, with its effective bureaucracy, subordinate aristocracy, army equipped with iron weapons, rapidly rising agricultural output and a growing population. 
• Qin adopted a political philosophy called Legalism, which advocated clear rules and harsh punishments as a means of enforcing the authority of the state.
• Shihuandi imposed a uniform system of weights, measures, and currency and standardized the length of axles for carts and the written form of the Chinese language.
• The Han dynasty that followed retained the centralized features of Shihuandi's creation, although it moderated the harshness of his policies, adopting a milder and moralistic Confucianism in place of Legalism as the governing philosophy of the states.

• Both Rome and the Chinese state invested heavily in public works - roads, bridges, aqueducts, canals, protective walls - all designed to integrate their respective domains militarily and commercially.
• Christianity in Rome and Buddhism in China.
• The various peoples from the Roman empire were able to maintain their separate cultural identities far more that was the case in China.
• What makes good government? Rome: good laws. China: good men.

• Political fragmentation and vast cultural diversity of Indian civilization.
• Ashoka of Mauryan India, conversion to Buddhism.
• Culture in art, literature, temple building, science, mathematics and medicine flourished in the Gupta era.

(CH4)

• Around 500 B.C.E., Confucianism and Daoism in China, Upanishads gave expressions to the classical philosophy of Hinduism and Buddhism in India, Zoroastrianism and Judaism in the Middle East, and a rational and humanistic tradition found expression in the writings of Socrates, Plato Aristotle and others in Greece. Jewish religious outlook later became the basis for Christianity and Islam.
• Chinese and Greek thinkers focused more on the affairs of this world and credited human rationality with the power to understand that reality.
• Indian, Persian, and Jewish intellectuals explored the unseen realm of the divine and the relationship of God or the gods to human life.
• The notion of the Mandate of Heaven in China.
• To Legalist thinkers, the solution to China's problems lay in rules or laws, clearly spelled out and strictly enforced through a system of rewards and punishments.
• Confucian answer to solving the problems was not laws and punishments, but the moral example of superior was the key to restore social harmony. In both political and family life, the cultivation of ren - translated as human-heartedness, benevolence, goodness, nobility of heart - was the essential ingredient of a tranquil society.
• Believing that people have a capacity for improvement, Confucius emphasized education as the key to moral betterment.
• Daoists urged withdrawal into the world of nature and encouraged behavior that was spontaneous, individualistic, and natural.
• Indian elite culture embraced the divine and all things spiritual with enthusiasm and generated elaborate philosophical visions about the nature of ultimate reality.
• The Vedas and the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad Gita. Atman, moksha, samsara, karma. Bhakti moement: devotion to a particular deity.
• Buddha's teaching: suffering and the end of suffering.
• Theravada and Mahayana (the Great Vehicle). Bodhisattvas, spiritually developed people who are postponing their own entry into nirvana to assist those who are still suffering.
• Zoroastrianism of Persian Empire. Did not last in its birth place. Some elements of Zoroastrianism were incorporated into Judaism: the conflict of God and an evil counterpart (Satan); the notion of a last judgement and resurrected bodies; a belief in the final defeat of evil; the arrival of a savior (Messiah); and the remaking of the world at the end of time, and the concept of heaven and hell.
• The Jews came to understand their relationship to Yahweh as a contract or a covenant.
• The Greek way of knowing: its emphasis on argument, logic, and the relentless questioning of received wisdom; its confidence in human reason; its enthusiasm for puzzling out the world without much reference to the gods.
• As Christianity spread within the Roman Empire and beyond, it developed a hierarchical organization, with patriarchs, bishops, and priests - all men - replacing the house churches of the early years, in which women played a more prominent part.
• Doctrinal differences: the nature of Jesus, his relationship to God (equal or inferior), and the concept of Trinity.

(CH5)

• The examination system in China provided a modest measure of social mobility in an otherwise quite hierarchical society.
• Hard conditions provoked periodic peasant rebellions, which have punctuated Chinese history for over 2,000 years.
• In India, birth determined social status for most people; little social mobility was available for the vast majority; sharp distinctions and great inequalities characterized social life; and religious traditions defined these inequalities as natural, eternal and ordained by the gods. The caste system.
• Jati, occupationally based groups, blended with the varna system to create India's unique caste-based society.
• Marriage and eating together were permitted only within an individual's own jati. Each jati was associated with a particular set of duties, rules, and obligations, which defined its members'unique and separate place in the larger society.
• India's social system gave priority to religious status and ritual purity, whereas China elevated political officials to the highest of elite positions.
• Virtually all civilizations practiced some form of slavery. Although, the second-wave civilizations differed considerably in the prominence and extent of slavery in their societies. In China, it was a minor element, amounting to 1% of the population. Indian slavery was more restrained than that of other ancient civilizations. 
• The Greco-Roman world society was based on slavery. In Athens, about one-third of the total population was slaves. By the time of Christ, the Italian heartland of the Roman Empire had some 2 to 3 million slaves, representing 33 to 40% of the population. The vast majority of Roman slaves had been prisoners captured in the many wars that accompanied the creation of the empire. Unlike American slavery of later times, Roman practice was not identified with a particular racial or ethnic group. Egyptians, Syrians, Jews, Greeks, Gauls, North Africans... 

(CH6)

• The Mesoamerican Maya and the Andean Tiwanaku civilizations and several sub-Saharan civilizations such as Meroe, Axum and the Niger river valley thrived during the secon-wave civilization era.
• The absence of most animals capable of domestication meant that no pastoral societies developed in the Americas, and apart from llamas and alpacas in the Andes, no draft animals were available to pull plows or carts or to carry heavy loads for long distances.
• Civilization in the Niger River valley region, such as the city of Jenne-jeno, has very little archeological evidence of centralized state structures.
• The cosmic calendar of the Maya.
• The Maya political system: no central authority. Various centers of Maya civilization rose and fell.
• Because none of the civilizations from the Andes developed writing, historians are largely dependent on archaeology for an understanding of these civilizations.
• Moche was governed by warrior-priests.
• There advantages of farming people, as seen in the Bantu poeple:1)numerical, as agriculture generated a more productive economy, enabling larger numbers to live in a smaller area than was possible with a gthering and hunting way of life, 2) disease, for tje farmers brought with them both parasitic and infectious diseases - malaria... - to which foraging people had little immunity, 3)iron, so useful for tools and weapons, which Bantu migrants brought to many of their interactions with peoples still operating with stone-age technology.
• Pueblos of the North America. Among the Chaco elite were highly skilled astronomers.
• The Mound Builders of the eastern woodlands of North America. The Hopewell culture. 

Intro, Ch1 & Ch2

Important Facts & What I learned:

• Big bang, 13.7 billions years ago.
• First human-like creatures born on the last day of Cosmic Calendar, 2.7 million years ago.
• 90 percent or more of the total mass of the universe is made of invisible substance know as "dark matter."
• Human history has great impact on, not ourselves alone, but also the earth and many other living creatures.
• Three big context: change, comparison and connections (interactions, encounters, cross-cultural connections).
• A distinguishing feature of the modern era, the growing depth and significance of such cross-cultural relationships, is know as globalization.

(CH1)

• Homo Sapiens diverged from that leading to chimpanzees, our closest primate relatives, some 5 to 6 million years ago, and it happened in eastern and southern Africa.
• Homo Sapiens, emerged no more than 250,000 years ago (debatable) has a remarkable capacity for symbolic language that permitted the accumulation and transmission of learning.
• Paleolithic era: a food-collecting or gathering and hunting way of life, lasting till 11,000 years ago, representing 95% of the time that human beings have inhabited the earth, although only accounting for 12% of the total number of people who have lived on the planet.
• Agricultural/Neolithic Revolution, 10.000 to 12,000 years ago. Agricultural era: domesticating animals and farming. Root crops, bananas and wild grains.
• Pastoralists/nomads: moving frequently and in regular patterns to search for pasturelands.
• "Civilizations": more complex societies that were based in bustling cities and governed by formal states.
• Although without writing records, a great deal can be learned about Paleolithic and Neolithic people through their material remains: stones and bones, fossilized seeds, rock painting, and engravings...
• The first 150,000 years or more of human experience was an exclusively African story. Tools: stone blades and points, hand axes, bones, grindstones.Body ornaments. Patterns of exchange over a distance of 200 miles indicate lager networks of human communication. Planned burials. Social and symbolic behaviors. The earliest evidence comes form the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dates back to 100,000 years ago.
• 16,000 to 10,000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended and more resources became available. People started to settle down and lived in villages.
• Gobekli Tepe, a ceremonial site, in Turkey, build 11,600 years ago. World's oldest temple. It represents a kind of monumental constructions long associated only with agricultural societies and civilizations.
• One of the most significant aspects of the Agricultural Revolution is that human began to actively change nature and consciously "directing" the process of evolution for the benefit of humankind.
• The most extraordinary feature of the Neolithic/Agricultural Revolution was that it occurred, separately and independently, in many widely scattered parts of the world: the Fertile Crescent of Southwest Asia, Several places in sub-Saharan Africa, China, New Guinea, Mesoamerica, the Andes, and eastern North America, all roughly around the same time, between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. 
• broad-spectrum diet: the use of a large number of plants and both small and large animals, since Paleolithic time.
• While the process of Agricultural Revolution only took 500 years, it took 3,500 years in Mesoamerica because of the environment and the kinds of crops it yield.
• Two ways of how agriculture spread: diffusion and slow colonization and migration of agricultural peoples.
• Indo-European languages, which probably originated in Turkey and are widely spoken even today from India to Europe, reflect this movement of culture associated with the spread of agriculture. In a similar process, the Chinese farming system moved into Southeast  Asia and elsewhere, and with it a number of related language families developed.
• Some peoples in certain regions resisted adopting agriculture, wither because unsuited for farming or abundance in resources.
• New technologies: use of vessels such as pots, the weaving of textiles and the age of metals. 
• The "secondary products revolution", new use for domesticated animals: milk thier animals, harvest their wool, enrich their soil with animal manure, ride horses and camels, and hitch various animals to plows and carts.
• Wine and beer. In Iran, around 5400 B.C.E. and in China, around 4000 B.C.E.
• Pastoral societies, conflicts with agricultural societies, relative equality of men and women.
• Early agricultural societies still maintained equality of men and women since the time of gathering and hunting. Some such societies traced their descent through the female line and practiced marriage patterns in which men left their homes to live their wives' families. 
• Chiefdoms: not by force, by relied on their generosity, or gift-giving, their ritual status, or their charisma.
• Horticultural societies, using a hoe or a digging stick for farming.

(CH2)

• Three earliest civilizations: Middle Eastern Civilization from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, Egyptian Civilization from the Nile River valley in Africa, and the less-known one called Norte Chico Civilization from the central coast of Peru, all roughly emerged from 3500 B.C.E. to 3000 B.C.E.
• Indus Valley Civilization in the Indus and Saraswati river valleys in Pakistan from 2000 B.C.E.
• Chinese Civilization from 2200 B.C.E.
• Oxus Civilization in the Oxus or Amu Darya river valley in the Central Asia from 2200 B.C.E.
• Olmecs Civilization along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico took shape around 1200 B.C.E.
• Cities of the first civilizations were political/administrative capitals; they functioned as centers for the production of culture, including art, architecture, literature, ritual, and ceremony; they served as marketplaces for both local and long-distance exchange; and they housed most manufacturing activity. 
• Alongside the occupational specialization of the first civilizations lay their vast inequalities, in wealth, status and power. As the fist civilizations took shape, inequality and hierarchy soon came to be regarded as normal and natural. This transition represents one of the major turning points in the social history of humankind. 
• In all of the first civilizations, slaves - derived from prisoners of war, criminals, and debtors - were available for sale; for work in the fields, mines, homes, and shops of their owners; or on occasion for sacrifice.
• Since the emergence of the first civilizations, gender systems have been patriarchal, meaning that women have been subordinate ti men in the family and in society generally. The patriarchal ideal regarded men as superior to women and sons preferable to daughters. Men had legal and property rights unknown to most women. Public life in general was associated with masculinity, which defined men as rulers, warriors, scholars and heads of households.
• Better ability at farming and warfare mainly contributed to men's higher status.
• "The motion of the goddess": in some places, the powerful goddesses of earlier times were gradually relegated to the home and hearth. They were replaced in the public arena by dominant male deities, who now were credited with power of creation and fertility and viewed as the patrons of wisdom and learning.
• Egypt, while clearly a patriarchal, afforded its women greater opportunities than did most other first civilizations.
• The necessity of "state". To organize, to manage , to mediate and to protect.
• Invention of writing.
• Comparing Mesopotamia and Egypt
• Mosopotamia was far more vulnerable to invasion than the much more protected space of Egypt.
• Elite literate culture in Egypt, developing in a more stable, predictable, and beneficent environment, produced a rather more cheerful and hopeful outlook on the world.
• Deforestation of Mesopotamia depicted in the mythology, which eventually resulted in sharply decreased crop yields. Log-term result of intense irrigation also led to salinization of the soil added to the disaster.
• Egypt, by contrast, created a more sustainable agricultural system, which lasted for thousands of years and contributed to the remarkable continuity of its civilization.
• Mesopotamia civilization, Sumer, was organized in a dozen or more separate and independent city-states. Egyptian civilization began with the nerger of several earlier states, or chiefdoms into a unified territory that stretched some 1,000 miles along the Nile.
• Cities in Egypt were less important than in Mesopotamia, although political capitals, market centers, and major burial sites gave Egypt an urban presence as well.
• The focus of the Egyptian state resided in the pharaoh, believed to be a god in human form.
• They also interacted frequently with each other and with both near and more distant neighbors.
• Goods, cultures were exchanged. In the Hebrew sacred writing, the Old Testament, a Mesopotamia principle of "eye for an eye" can be found. (in the story that destroyed the world)
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First Post

yay - I'm done!