Courses[]
Astrogeography (Astrology and the cities)
World History[]
Unit 5 - The First Global Age (1200-1750 Ad)
Unit 6 - The long 19th Century (1750-1914 AD)
Unit 7 - The Great Convergence and Divergence (1800 AD to the future)
Gallery[]
Notes[]
The North American English colonies had been pretty autonomous from England. They had been making their own local laws and taxes in each of the thirteen colonies. England allowed this because they didn't really see them as all that important—the real money came from sugar plantations in the Caribbean, using the labor of enslaved people. Most settlers in the North American colonies were generally happy with being part of the British Empire— they had access to British markets, protection in wartime, and still considered themselves "English." However, after the expensive Seven Years’ War, the British government decided to pay off their debt by taxing the colonies directly and putting tariffs on the colonial goods. The British also announced that they would base a large army in North America—without colonial consent. The colonists, who were rather proud of their autonomy and economic achievement, pushed back. The Stamp Act of 1765—the first of several attempts to tax the North American colonies—invited protests, rioting, and boycotts against the British. It was eventually repealed, but the damage was done. Opinion in the colonies had shifted, and the British were now the enemy.
unit 6.1.6
Wealthy Atlantic merchants, many of them women, in Gorée. Public domain. In West Africa, as well, Atlantic trade had similarly enriched some and impoverished others. Particularly in ports like Gorée Island and coastal states like Benin, the ruler and a few merchants and aristocrats grew wealthy by trading with Europeans. These groups were less powerful in the West African interior, although they emerged there as well. The wealthy sold gold, gum Arabic,1start superscript, 1, end superscript and enslaved people in exchange for European luxury goods. West African rulers collected taxes from their people to fund wars, which they waged to expand their territory and to capture neighboring people to sell to European slavers.
Throughout the eighteenth century, France, Britain, and other European states were also increasing taxes to wage war on each other. This matters to our analysis of revolution. Remember, it was increased taxation that helped spark both the French and American Revolutions.
The fiscal-military state system caused even deeper problems in West Africa than in Europe, because this sort of trade and taxation was particularly bad for the economies of West African countries. You see, West Africans tended to export commodities like gold and copper that were important for keeping economies strong. So, West Africa ended up with fewer of those commodities, while Europe was building up their supply of them, partly by importing them from their American colonies. More important, West African societies were losing people, their most important resource, to the Atlantic slave trade. In exchange, wealthy West African rulers and aristocrats imported luxuries such as alcohol, which were not good for growing the local economy. So, West African economies were gradually losing strength against European economies, which caused even more suffering.
unit 6.1.7 nationalism[]
What is a nation? What is nationalism? We often think our nation is an important part of our identity—I am "American," "Indian," "Italian," "Chinese," and so on. But what does that really mean? How are you part of your country/nation? Well, nationalism begins with the idea that the whole of human society is divided into distinct, autonomous groups called nations. What is nation? A nation is a group of people speaking a common language, sharing a common culture, a sense of a common destiny, and sharing a common history. So, nationalism is also a term to describe the common bonds that hold people together within a nation, creating a new type of community.
Nationalism bonds people together in a way that is not genetic, not biological, and not based on even having a personal connection with other members of your nation. In some ways the idea of a nation is actually an imaginary relationship and nations could be considered imagined communities because so much of the making of a nation is about creating unity and loyalty in our minds. It is not enough to just have a common government to make a nation—we must have shared cultural symbols like flags, national anthems, a shared idea of the history of our nations to create and build a community of a nation.
Before seeking independence, what did most people in the North American English colonies like about being part of the British Empire?
They liked being considered British people, having British protection during wartimes, and having access to British markets.
These were indeed the items in “pro” column. The “con” column would start to populate in 1765, beginning with The Stamp Act.
Britain wanted to keep secret how its machines were made. But visitors soon learned about them and took the techniques back home. Sometimes they smuggled machines out in rowboats while others memorized factory and machine plans. The first countries after Britain to develop factories and railroads were Belgium, Switzerland, France, and the states that became Germany, all between the 1830s and 1850s. Building a national railroad system was an essential part of industrialization, as trains could transport raw materials and coal to factories at an accelerated rate.
Children working in a mill in Macon, Georgia, 1909. By Lewis Hine, Public Domain. Industrialization came to the United States in 1789. That was the year Samuel Slater left Britain for Rhode Island, where he set up the first textile factory on U.S. soil. He couldn't bring any notes or plans from Britain, so he had to set up the factory from memory. Once factories were built, railroad construction in America boomed from the 1830s to 1870s. The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the first truly industrial war in that factories mass-produced supplies and weapons for the war effort, troops were transported by rail, and the telegraph was used to send remarkably fast communications. The increasingly urbanized and factory-based North was fighting against the agriculture-based South. After the war, industrialization grew explosively and by 1900, the United States had overtaken Britain in manufacturing, producing 24 percent of the world's output.
viewing a major historical event at only one scale can lead us to false conclusions. Looking at it from two or more scales can help us to develop a more complex, and likely more accurate, understanding of what really happened.
Sugardump[]
You've read about how Europeans brought sugarcane to the Caribbean from Southeast Asia. They forced enslaved people to harvest and refine that sugar. The world got addicted to the sweet stuff and demanded more. Then, at the start of the nineteenth century, the British government outlawed the slave trade, and enforced that law with gunboats roaming the Atlantic on the lookout for slavers. This meant that sugar plantations—which relied on forced labor—became less profitable. In response, European colonizers and financiers took their business to Southeast Asia, where sugar got its start. The Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) were especially productive. The Dutch forced colonized peoples to turn farms toward sugar production. The Dutch built sugar factories on an industrial scale. Farmers became wage laborers, and farms became sugar factories. Forcing people in the Indian Ocean to grow sugar didn't just hurt those people; it also devastated Caribbean societies that relied on sugar. Enslaved people in some Caribbean islands may have been freed, but they still needed cash crops like sugar to sell on the global market. The rise of industrial sugar production in the Indian Ocean drove prices down and devastated Caribbean economies.
Double consciousness[]
After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, the Teuton and the Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. DuBois
In 1952 the concept of dual consciousness was raised again, in a book called Black Skin, White Masks by French Caribbean psychologist Frantz Fanon. In this work Fanon attempted "to discover the various mental attitudes the black man adopts in the face of white civilization." Like DuBois, Fanon recognized that people of color had a divided sense of self. "The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man. There is no doubt whatsoever that this fissiparousness3cubed is a direct consequence of the colonial undertaking." The very idea of "blackness," of being black, Fanon argued, was a product of white minds: "Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery4start superscript, 4, end superscript the white man has fabricated for him."
He discussed how people of color tried to position themselves along a scale of race, culture, or civilization that was actually invented by dominant groups.
Transformation of Labor[]
The abolition (ending) of slavery over the course of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth marked an important moment in world history, especially in the Atlantic. In 1800, plantations worked by enslaved people, particularly Africans, stretched across the Americas. These plantations were sustained by a murderous system that brought tens of thousands of captives every year from Africa to the Americas in the most horrendous conditions. Their initial capture and enslavement and journey across the Atlantic posed so many dangers that many died before leaving the boat. Those who survived suffered a life of harsh labor, atrocious (terrible) living conditions, and an almost complete lack of rights or security until their deaths. Slavery existed elsewhere in the world—particularly in South Asia and the Islamic World—but nowhere was it as extensive or deep-rooted as in the Americas. Then, beginning in 1803, slavery and the slave trade were outlawed in many parts of the world, beginning with the European and American countries that benefited most from these institutions. In 1803, Denmark made it illegal for its citizens to participate in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1807-1808, both the United States and Britain criminalized the importation of slaves into their territory. (But they continued to enslave the people they had already imported, as well as their descendants.) Independent Haiti became the first country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1804, followed by Cuba in 1823, Mexico in 1829, and much of Latin America soon after. The United States would not follow suit until after the Civil War in 1865. Meanwhile, the major European slave-trading powers gradually abolished the trade—the Netherlands in 1814, followed by Portugal, Spain and France by 1820. Of course, enslaved people were still smuggled into the Americas, in particular to Cuba and Brazil, where it remained legal until quite late in the nineteenth century. But the tide had definitely turned, and slavery would be outlawed in many other regions of the world in the years that followed.
One of Britain's largest companies, Lloyd's of London, insured almost every slave trading voyage between Africa and the Americas.
But undoubtedly the biggest leap toward ending slavery was the Haitian Revolution. A dramatic uprising of enslaved people suddenly stopped slavery in what had been the largest plantation colony in the French Empire. It was only by overthrowing the whole system, and fighting off the French army, that the enslaved population gained its freedom. Next, by removing France's largest slave colony from the empire entirely, they created conditions for empire-wide change. Although France allowed slavery to continue in its remaining colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, by 1848 it would be abolished across the French Empire. As historian Sylviane Diouf notes, "It is now recognized that without the impulsion [force] of the revolt in Saint-Domingue, the French Revolution would not have decreed [ordered] the abolition. The Haitian Revolution had radicalized the French Revolution on the question of slavery."
In 1791, during the French Revolution and its call for human rights, there was a major slave revolt in the enormously wealthy French Caribbean colony of Saint Domingue. It created the first, large-scale, post-abolition society of the modern world. The successful revolt by enslaved people against their owners and the French government led to the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804. But Western nations, such as Britain, France, and the United States, punished this rebelliousness by keeping Haiti isolated.
The problem that we cqnfront in this chapter is this: The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately w:hiter -that is, he will come closer to being a real human being -in direct ratio to his mastery of the French language. I am not unaware that this is one of man's attitudes face tO face with Being. -A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language. What we are getting at becomes plain: Mastery of language affords remarkable power. Paul Valery knew this, for he called language "the god gone astray in the Besh."
Civil war end 1861[]
When the US Civil War began in 1861, it was not with the intention of ending slavery. Yet, abolition was one result of the war. The process of abolition began when enslaved people liberated themselves by running away in the chaos of the war. Northern Union forces also purposefully weakened the Confederacy by encouraging enslaved people to run away. The short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau (formally entitled the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) was established during the war, under the control of the Union Army. Its initial purpose was to track this escaped property, or “contraband” as runaways were called. Full legal freedom did not come until months after the war ended. By December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment received votes from enough states to add it to the Constitution. It states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” This freedom had an important exception: people who had been convicted of a crime could still essentially be treated as slaves.
Reconstruction Era
White society kept African Americans under near constant scrutiny. Police, employers, and the general population all participated in this system. Local southern governments enacted laws to limit African American freedom and control their labor. Remember that part of the Thirteenth Amendment that allowed people convicted of a crime to be treated as if they were slaves? Well, companies who wanted cheap labor found ways to use that clause for their own profit. Many African Americans were imprisoned for the smallest reasons and sent to prison labor camps. Methods of controlling African Americans also took more violent forms. Murder and lynching were commonly used to create fear and ensure submission. Lynchings often drew audiences of southern or midwestern whites, who viewed them as entertainment. Poverty, imprisonment, and government-sponsored violence developed in the late nineteenth century marked the relationship between African Americans and the rest of the nation—and in some ways the pattern continues today.