1750-1914

What students are expected to know:

Major Developments

1. Questions of periodization

Continuities and breaks; causes of changes from the previous period and within this period

2. Changes in global commerce, communications, and technology

Changes in patterns of world trade

Industrial Revolution (transformative effects on and differential timing in different societies; mutual relation of industrial and scientific developments; commonalities)

3. Demographic and environmental changes (migrations; end of the Atlantic slave trade; new birthrate patterns; food supply)

4. Changes in social and gender structure (Industrial Revolution; commercial and demographic developments; emancipation of serfs/slaves; tension between work patterns and ideas about gender)

5. Political revolutions and independence movements; new political ideas

Latin American independence movements

Revolutions (United States? France, Haiti. Mexico, China)

Rise of nationalism, nation-states, and movements of political reform

Overlaps between nations and empires

Rise of democracy and its limitations: refo~m, women, racism

6. Rise of Western dominance (economic, political, social, cultural and artistic; patterns of expansion; imperialism and colonialism) and different cultural and political reactions (reform, resistance, rebellion, racism, nationalism)

Impact of changing European ideologies on colonial administrations

7. Patterns of cultural and artistic interactions among societies in different parts of the world ~African and Asian influences on European art; cultural policies of Meiji Japan)

8. Diverse interpretations

What are the debates over the utility of modernization theory as a framework for interpreting events in this period and the next?

What are the debates about the causes and effects of serf and slave emancipation in this period, and how do these debates f~t into broader comparisons of labor systems?

What are the debates over the nature of women's roles in this period; how do these debates apply to industrialized areas, and how do they apply in colonial societies?

Major Comparisons and Snapshots

Compare the causes and early phases of the Industrial Revolution in western Europe and Japan

Compare the Haitian and French Revolutions

Compare reaction to foreign domination in the Ottoman Empire, China, India, and Japan

Compare nationalism, e.g., China and Japan, Cuba and the Philippines, Egypt and Nigeria

Compare forms of Western intervention in Latin America and in Africa

Compare the roles and conditions of women in the upper/middle classes with peasantry/working class in western Europe