My Notes on Massive Open Online Course:
A History of the World since 1300
The professor Jeremy Adelman is very pleasant to listen to, and very organized and competent. Good course which stresses a less European-centered view of world history, and more of a centralized topic of the "road to globalization".
Notes on 66 Lectures I Watched in This Course:
 Columbus and the New World |  1500-1700 Indian Ocean Trading system |  Da Gama, Pepper and World History |
 Portuguese Indian Ocean Empire |  16th Century Colonialism Fueling European Violence |  Global Food: European Sugar, Caribbean Plantations, African Slaves |
 16th and 17th Century Merchant Trading Companies |  17th Century Interdependence of Trade and Investment |  Francis Drake and Mercantilist Wars |
 The Apex and Erosion of the Mughal Empire |  The Treaty of Westphalia as the Hinge of Modern History |  The Influence of Silver on the Ming Dynasty |
 Political Reverberations of Ming Consolidation |  18th China Resurgent as Qing Dynasty |  18th Century Tea Trade, Leisure Time, and the Spread of Knowledge |
 Cook and Clive: Discoverers, Collectors and Conquerors of the Enlightenment |  Strains on the Universality of the Enlightenment |  The Enlightenment, Empire, and Colonization: Burke vs. Hastings |
 Enlightenment or Empire |  18th Century Land Grabbing |  The Industrial Revolution and the Transition of Non-Renewable Energy |
 The Seven Years' War and Colonial Revolutions |  Napoleon, Spain, the Colonies, and Imperial Crises |  Human Rights and the Meaning of Membership within Societies |
 Napoleon, New Nations, and Total War |  The Ottoman Empire's 19th Century Tanzimat Reform |  The Early 19th Century Market Revolution |
 The Global Upheavals of the Mid-19th Century |  The Train, the Rifle, and the Industrial Revolution |  Transition in India: Last of the Mughals |
 The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and Its Ramifications |  Darwin's Effect on 19th Century Ideas |  Factors Which Led to the Solidifying of Nation States |
 1868 Japan: The Meiji Restoration |  1871: Germany Becomes a Nation |  North American Nation-Building |
 19th Century Changing Concepts of Labor |  The Benefits of Comparative Advantage |  Migration after the Age of Revolutions |
 Creating 19th Century Global Free Trade |  The Expanding 19th Century Capitalist System |  The Second Industrial Revolution |
 The Closing of the American Frontier |  Africa's Second Imperial Wave |  Early 20th Century American Imperialism |
 1894-1905: Japan's Imperial Wave in Asia |  Rashid Rida and 19th Century Islamic Modernization |  19th Century Pan-Islam and Zionism Movements |
 19th Century Global Export-Led Growth |  Indian Wars and Mass Slaughter of Bison |  The Suez Canal's Effect on the Malayan Tiger |
 1890-1914: Savage Wars of Peace |  1900-1909: Russian and Turkish Dynasties |  1899-1911 The End of the Qing Dynasty |
 The 1910 Mexican Revolution |  The Panic of 1907 |  Turn-of-the-Century Civilization and its Discontents |
 20th Century Questioning of Reason |  Late 19th Century Anxieties of Race |  The First World War |
 The End of WWI and the Attempt at Global Peace |  The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 |  The Wilson-Lenin Moment |
 1919 Self-Determination Movements in India |  Post-WWI European Peace and Global Colonial Upheaval |  1929 Economic Collapse |
12 People I Have Learned About in this Course:
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Akbar (1542-1605) Mughal Emperor from 1556 to 1605 - the third and greatest ruler of the Mughal Dynasty in India
- greatly expanded
- established a centralized system of administration
- adopted policies that won him the support of his non-Muslim subjects
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Wang Yangming (1472-1529) A Chinese idealist Neo-Confucian philosopher, official, educationist, calligraphist and general during the Ming dynasty - believed each moral virtue is naturally embedded within each person, but they have to be cultivated
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James Cook (1728-1779) British explorer, navigator, cartographer, achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian islands - captain in the Royal Navy
- three voyages
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Robert Clive (1725-1774) British officer who established the military and political supremacy of the East India Company in Bengal - credited with securing India, and the wealth that followed, for the British crown
- together with Warren Hastings he was one of the key early figures in the creation of British India
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Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) Eighteenth-century English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights, best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) - wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book
- she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men, but appeared to be so only because they lack education
- she suggested that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason
- she died at the age of thirty-eight, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, an accomplished writer herself, as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein
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Edmund Burke (1729-1797) Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons remembered for his support of the American Revolutionaries and opposition to French Revolution - his opposition to the French Revolution led him to become the leading figure within conservative faction of the Whig party
- attempted to impeach Warren Hastings of the East India Company for personal corruption
- praised by both conservatives and liberals of the 19th century, today he is viewed as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism
- "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
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Marquis de Pombal (1699-1782) 18th-century Portuguese statesman and de facto head of government, notable for his swift and competent leadership in the aftermath of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, he implemented sweeping economic policies in Portugal to regulate commercial activity and standardize quality throughout the country - was instrumental in weakening the grip of the Inquisition
- introduced many fundamental administrative, educational, economic, and ecclesiastical reforms justified in the name of the Enlightenment and instrumental in advancing secularization
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Warren Hastings (1732-1818) The first Governor-General of Bengal, from 1772 to 1785, was accused of corruption and impeached in 1787, but after a long trial he was acquitted in 1795 - the letters and journals of Jane Austen and her family, who knew Hastings, show that they followed the trial closely
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Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) A Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar who wrote "A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies", a chronicle of the first decades of colonization of the West Indies which focused particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples - became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians
- as one of the first European settlers in the Americas, he participated in the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists
- in 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives
- In 1522, he attempted to launch a new kind of peaceful colonialism on the coast of Venezuela, but this venture failed, causing Las Casas to enter the Dominican Order and become a friar, leaving the public scene for a decade
- he continued lobbying for the abolition of the encomienda (a grant of a specified number of natives of a specific community to a specific Spanish colonizer), gaining an important victory by the passing of the New Laws in 1542
- the remainder of his life was spent at the Spanish court where he held great influence over Indies-related issues
- in 1550, he participated in the Valladolid debate in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda argued that the Indians were less than human and required Spanish masters in order to become civilized. Las Casas maintained that they were fully human and that forcefully subjugating them was unjustifiable
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Guillaume Raynal (1713-1796) French writer and iconoclastic Jesuit who in 1770 wrote the popular and controversial "L'Histoire des deux Indes", which examined commerce, religion, slavery, and other popular subjects from the perspective of the French Enlightenment - it indicated that empires, especially the Spanish and the Portuguese, in colonizing the East and West Indies, were turning their backs on their fundamental purpose of the Enlightenment and were thus eventually doomed to corruption and decline
- the book principally examines the East Indies, South America, the West Indies, and North America
- the full title of the book was "L'Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes" and was a ten-volume set and one of the first global histories of the world
- the final chapter comprises theory around the future of Europe as a whole
- it was translated into the principal European languages
- its publication in France was forbidden in 1779
- the book was burned by the public executioner, and an order was given for the arrest of the author
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Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) A prominent African in London, freed slave who supported the British movement to end the slave trade - known in his lifetime as Gustavus Vassa
- his autobiography, published in 1789 and attracting wide attention, was considered highly influential in gaining passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807, which ended the African trade for Britain and its colonies
- his last master was Robert King, an American Quaker merchant who allowed Equiano to trade on his own account and purchase his freedom in 1766
- he settled in England in 1767 and worked and traveled for another 20 years as a seafarer, merchant, and explorer in the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, South and Central America, and the United Kingdom
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José Enrique Rodó (1871-1917) Uruguayan essayist who called for the youth of Latin America to reject materialism, to revert to Greco-Roman habits of virtuous thought and self enrichment, and to develop and concentrate on their culture - exchanged letters with important Hispanic thinkers of the time such as Leopoldo Alas in Spain
- Rodó is today considered the preeminent theorist of the modernista school of literature
- is best known for his essay Ariel (1900), drawn from The Tempest, in which Ariel represents the positive, and Caliban represents the negative tendencies in human nature, and they debate the future course of history
- Rodó intended Ariel to be a secular sermon to Latin American youth, championing the cause of the classical western tradition
- spoke out against debilitating effect of working individuals' limited existence doing the same work, over and over again, never having time to develop the spirit
- denounced pragmatic utilitarianism, i.e. the philosophical movement that considered utility as the way to bring the most happiness to all those affected by it
- argued that utilitarianism causes individuals to become specialized in very specific fields and as an effect of such specialization, they end up receiving an incomplete, deformed education
- warns against nordomanía, or the attraction of North America and argues for the importance of regional identity and how it should be rooted deeply into every country
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18 Vocabulary Words I Learned in this Course:
 Daimyo, n. [DIGHM-yo] the powerful territorial lords in pre-modern Japan who ruled most of the country from their vast, hereditary land holdings, but subordinate to the shogun, the Daimyo era came to an end in 1871 ⇒ "Seventeenth century Japan was similar to 17th century Europe in which you had a large land area beset with civil wars, regional warlords and ruling households called Diamyos struggling for power." |
| argot, n. [AR-go] a characteristic language of a particular group, as among thieves ⇒ "It was argued that they were "uplifting the native" and "bringing inferior peoples into civil society" even if they didn't want to as it was for their own good, this was the political argot of the time." |
| brackish, adj. (of water) slightly salty, as in river estuaries. ⇒ ""In the hollows of the plains are ponds or lakes of fresh and brackish water."" |
| disarticulate, v. to separate, disjoint, divide, sunder the joints of, or disrupt the logic of ⇒ "Nineteenth century steam, canals, and railroads functioned importantly as instruments to connect up parts of societies which were previously disarticulated from each other." |
| entrepôt, n. [EHN-treh-poh] a place where goods are stored or deposited and from which they are distributed ⇒ "Throughout the 19th century, merchant bankers played an increasingly important role in mediating the relationship between the supply of capital and demand for capital, and the most important entrepôt for capital was London." |
| equipoise, n. balance of forces or interests ⇒ "As the bison were slaughtered and removed from the Great Plains, they were replaced by cattle and cattle ranching, and cities began to emerge on the plains to induct them into a national economic system, Chicago becoming in a sense the bovine capital of the world defining a new balance in the relationship between the city and the country each specializing in a task in relationship to other regions. Humans had coexisted with this macrofauna for centuries if not millennia, but the intensification of land use for commodity production upset this delicate equipoise." |
| eschew, v. to avoid or shun ⇒ "Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic state identity, Akbar strived to unite far-flung lands of his realm through loyalty, expressed through a Persianised culture, to himself as an emperor who had near-divine status." |
| feral, adj. in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication ⇒ "There was a careful, managed balance of forces between Indian peoples and native, feral herds" |
 galleon, n. a large, multi-decked sailing ship used primarily by European states from the 16th to 18th centuries ⇒ "With the opening of trade through Manila and the arrival of the Manila galleon from the New World, we begin to see the direct tie from the mines of the Andes and Mexico to Chinese demand." |
| ineluctable, adj. unable to be resisted or avoided, inescapable ⇒ "Some parts of the world still had empires which were in a steady but ineluctable state of long disintegration." |
| intervisible, adj. mutually visible, within sight of each other |
 jute, n. a long, soft, shiny vegetable fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads, grown in East India and used for making mats, paper, gunny cloth ⇒ "Even though many mining and cotton businesses in India were, in fact, Indian owned, cotton was not the only major export: the production and export of jute and tea from Bengal were also becoming larger markets, in part due to the penetration of of railroads into the Indian continent beginning in the 1840s, and these were dominated by British businessmen." |
 lacquerware, n. objects decoratively covered with a clear or colored wood finish that dries by solvent evaporation or a curing process that produces a hard, durable finish, sometimes inlaid or carved ⇒ "With the increased use of silver and the growing economy, the Ming upper-class took an interest in new products such as lacquerware from Japan." |
 politico, n. a politician whose conduct is guided by considerations of policy rather than principle ⇒ "Otto von Bismarck, a shrewd and calculating politico who was the strong man of the strongest, single regimes of the German confederation of states, Prussia, was able to promote the idea of a Kaiser, an imperial ruler who would issue his dominion over all of German-speaking peoples from a capital, a national capital, in Berlin." |
 porphyry, n. a hard igneous rock containing crystals of feldspar in a fine-grained groundmass ⇒ ""Towards the Andes, the shingle gives place to porphyry, granite, and basalt lavas, animal life becomes more abundant and vegetation more luxuriant."" |
| redoubt, n. small, often temporary defensive fortification ⇒ "Especially in the areas of the world where old villagers were used to their subsistant, communally oriented livelihoods, these are the last redoubts of that system." |
 sepoy, n. derived from the Persian word sepāhī, was formerly the designation given to an Indian soldier in the Mughal Empire, yet its most common application historically was the term used by the British East India Company for an infantry private, special trained Indian native British units at the service of the East India Company to service as the local agents of control for the firm, their uprising in 1850s led to what is known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857. |
| venal, adj. showing or motivated by susceptibility to bribery ⇒ "The U.S. press painted Spain as a venal and corrupt Old World empire." |
1 Flashcards I Recorded in this Course:
what was the last shogunate of Japan
Tokugawa shogunate (1600–1868)
Daimyo, n. [DIGHM-yo] the powerful territorial lords in pre-modern Japan who ruled most of the country from their vast, hereditary land holdings, but subordinate to the shogun, the Daimyo era came to an end in 1871 ⇒ "Seventeenth century Japan was similar to 17th century Europe in which you had a large land area beset with civil wars, regional warlords and ruling households called Diamyos struggling for power."
galleon, n. a large, multi-decked sailing ship used primarily by European states from the 16th to 18th centuries ⇒ "With the opening of trade through Manila and the arrival of the Manila galleon from the New World, we begin to see the direct tie from the mines of the Andes and Mexico to Chinese demand."
jute, n. a long, soft, shiny vegetable fiber that can be spun into coarse, strong threads, grown in East India and used for making mats, paper, gunny cloth ⇒ "Even though many mining and cotton businesses in India were, in fact, Indian owned, cotton was not the only major export: the production and export of jute and tea from Bengal were also becoming larger markets, in part due to the penetration of of railroads into the Indian continent beginning in the 1840s, and these were dominated by British businessmen."
lacquerware, n. objects decoratively covered with a clear or colored wood finish that dries by solvent evaporation or a curing process that produces a hard, durable finish, sometimes inlaid or carved ⇒ "With the increased use of silver and the growing economy, the Ming upper-class took an interest in new products such as lacquerware from Japan."
politico, n. a politician whose conduct is guided by considerations of policy rather than principle ⇒ "Otto von Bismarck, a shrewd and calculating politico who was the strong man of the strongest, single regimes of the German confederation of states, Prussia, was able to promote the idea of a Kaiser, an imperial ruler who would issue his dominion over all of German-speaking peoples from a capital, a national capital, in Berlin."
porphyry, n. a hard igneous rock containing crystals of feldspar in a fine-grained groundmass ⇒ ""Towards the Andes, the shingle gives place to porphyry, granite, and basalt lavas, animal life becomes more abundant and vegetation more luxuriant.""
sepoy, n. derived from the Persian word sepāhī, was formerly the designation given to an Indian soldier in the Mughal Empire, yet its most common application historically was the term used by the British East India Company for an infantry private, special trained Indian native British units at the service of the East India Company to service as the local agents of control for the firm, their uprising in 1850s led to what is known as the Indian Mutiny of 1857.