Internal Troubles, External Threats +

It is hard to believe that given China's current economic superiority in the world, that it has had a very tumultuous relationship with a variety of countries. In a way, it is like just about every hollywood movie:

The movie opens with China as a young kid playing around with the other countries. Europe is the biggest and soon starts to pick on the other countries, taking their lunch money and beating them up when they resist. Soon the other victimized countries start to pick on any country smaller than them, and China is near the bottom of this hierarchy. Two opium wars, internal rebellions, and a dependent economy later, and China is in pretty bad shape. This is where the music winds up and we get a montage of China starting to rebuild itself. The movie ends with China as a huge superpower in the world, while most of the other countries are suffering from large economic depressions. But is this really a happy ending?

As I read about the problems that China faced, I see many of them still in their current country. The textbook talked about massive wealth disparity between the ruling elite and the huge numbers of farmers living in poverty. Even today, wealthy as China is, the majority of it's people are still living in that abject poverty. The textbook talked about the rebellions of the masses against ineffective and oppressive governments. While I would definitely not categorize the government as ineffective over-all, it is in certain aspects such as providing a decent standard of living for the masses. In terms of oppressive, I would absolutely say it fits the bill. So I guess while for the country of China, the movie seems to have a happy ending, for the people it might be considered something else. I guess we'll have to wait for the sequel to find out.



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Reading the plea from the Queen of Hawai'i, I was touched by how eloquently she managed to use many of the Christian concept that the U.S. was touting so highly to serve as arguments against the United States. Her letter is a particularly strong appeal to the United States, as it suggests similar arguments to those that the US made against England, such as dignity and the right to have their own form of government.

You say you want a revolution...: WW Chapter 17

The ideas of revolution were...well... revolutionary in the 18th and 19th centuries, if not in their concept (for the idea of revolt had existed long before then) then in their execution. I have learned about the American revolution at different stages in my education and each time I feel I learn something new. This time, the new tidbit of information came in the form of the idea that America's break from England came not so much in order to establish new freedoms, but instead to preserve the freedoms that they had already been enjoying and which England now threatened to take away. This actually makes a lot of sense, as people are even more likely to value something that they already have in the face of losing it than they are to strive to get something they don't yet have.

I also found it interesting that the French revolution was in part inspired by the American revolution. I know that the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau were also important in challenging the concept that man's natural state is one of subjectivity to government. I have read many books by Rousseau, and I see numerous concepts that have found their way into our government. Examples are his idea that the public should revisit the government every so often to ask two questions: Is this form of government working for us? and Are these the people we want running this government? These are questions which we now essentially revisit every election year at the ballot box.

Another interesting development which the book attributes in part to the Atlantic revolutions is the idea of nationalism. Many good things came out of these revolutions, such as a resurgence in the rights of the previously marginalized, and also the beginning of the end of slavery. Nationalism, however, I would argue has actually been a pretty dangerous thing, and I had never before thought that it would have risen out of developments which on the whole I consider positive. After all, I think that there exist numerous examples, especially in the 20th century, of nationalism being a negative thing. Would Hitler have been as successful at rallying Germany to commit such atrocities without the help of a very strong nationalistic fervor in Germany at that time? Likewise, I would argue that many of our military missteps of the last few decades have at least some basis in America's own nationalistic tendencies.

Intro to Chapter 5 and Chapter 18: Industry Cometh

I was surprised at how well the intro to chapter 5 was written. It is not often that I see a piece of writing in a history textbook that strikes me, but that first paragraph did an excellent job of capturing the strange relationship that now exists between the teachings of Confucius (I have read The Analects, and liked it very much) and the full-circle the Chinese government has come regarding their views of them. It also lays the groundwork for the unique relationship that now exists in China between a communist government and a capitalist society. This in turn, is a great segue to chapter 18, which deals primarily with the industrial revolution.

In reading about the industrial revolution, I was very interested in the book's angle regarding why Brittan was the country where it really took-off. It mentions a number of factors that affected various countries' abilities (or lack thereof) to really embrace the industrial revolution. I thought the most interesting, though, was something which is talked about a lot in the politics of America today. It is the idea of the "free market".

Of course, the book doesn't use that language, but as I saw the gist of it's argument for why Brittan was so successful between 1800 and 1900, the themes were pretty clear. "Brittish commercial life encouraged commercialization and economic innovation", "checks on royal authority...provided a freer arena for private enterprise than elsewhere", "Small groups of merchants capitalists might be granted special privileges...European merchants and other innovators from the fifteenth century onward gained an unusual degree of freedom from state control."

In the name of full disclosure, I tend to lean pretty far to the left, and a disagree with many of the pro-business arguments from the right which say that less government is better and that taxes only stifle growth, money trickles down, free market works, etc. This was an interesting read for me, then, because it gave me some insight into the other side. Sure evidence for my arguments are in the book as well (the lower class working conditions grew awful, the exploitation of natural resources grew, etc). But it does raise the question that unless the mechanics of today's society are fundamentally different that those of the 1800's (and thus the situations are not anaologous), should the government of America really back off a little and let the corporations do their thing if we want to remain a leader in terms of technological development?