Chapter 23 Tem – Flashcards

1. The first and most important of the Great Reforms in Russia was Tsar Alexander II's abolishing of serfdom in 1861. 22 million peasants received citizenship rights and the chance to purchase about half of the land they cultivated. They still had to pay fairly high prices and collective ownership of the land made it difficult for individual peasants to improve their agricultural methods.

2. The Russian zemstvo was a new institution of local government that the government established in 1864. This local assembly's members were elected by a three-class system of townspeople, peasant villagers, and noble landowners. A zemstvo dealt with local problems. The zemstvos remained subordinate to the bureaucracy and the local nobility, much to the dismay of the Russian liberals who had hoped it would result in an elected national parliament.

3. The Tanzimat ("Reorganization") was a set of reforms intended to remake the Ottoman Empire on a western European model. Liberal-minded sultan, Abdul Mejid, issued the Imperial Rescript of 1856 which called for equality before the law regardless of religious faith, a modernized administration and army, and private ownership of land. Ottoman leaders adopted free trade policies, removed tariffs on foreign imports, and permitted foreign merchants to operate freely throughout the empire. The bulk of profits went to foreign investors rather than Ottoman subjects. The elimination of traditional state-controlled monopolies cut imperial revenues. Indebtedness eventually led to bankruptcy for the Ottoman Empire. The Tanzimat intended to bring revolutionary modernization, and although it permitted partial recovery, it fell short of its goals. It also failed to halt the growth nationalism. Also, equality before the law regardless of religion actually increased religious disputes.

4. The disaster of the Crimean War (1853-1856), which revealed how far behind Russia was from Western Europe. Russia's leaders became convinced that they had fallen too far behind. It initiated reform of railroads, armaments, and the military. The war had also encouraged massive peasant rebellion, which made reform of serfdom inevitable.

5. Sergei Witte, tough Russian finance minister (1892-1903), believed that industrial backwardness threatened Russia's greatness. Under his leadership, the government doubled the network of state-owned railways, established high protective tariffs to support Russian industry, and he put the country on the gold standard to strengthen Russian finances. His greatest idea was to use Westerners to catch up with the West. He encouraged foreigners to build factories in Russia.

6. Muhammad Ali's, ruler of Egypt from 1805-1848 in the name of the Sultan, implemented modernizing reforms of agriculture, industry, and the military that helped turn Egypt into the most powerful state in the East Mediterranean. His growing strength directly challenged the Ottoman sultan and Istanbul's ruling elite. Egyptian troops under the leadership of Ali's son occupied and governed the Ottoman province of Syria and Palestine, and threatened to remove the Ottoman sultan Mahmud II from power.

7. The October Manifesto was a Russian decree that granted full civil rights and promised a popularly elected parliament (Duma) with legislative power. It followed a paralyzing general strike that culminated the revolutionary surge in Russia in 1905.

8. The Young Turks were fervent patriots who seized power in a 1908 coup in the Ottoman Empire, forcing the conservative sultan to implement reforms. Consisted of multiethnic reformist groups from across the empire under the banner of Committee of Union and Progress.

1. Bismarck's Kulturkampf was an attack on the Catholic Church from 1870-1878. It was a response to Pius IX's declaration of papal infallibility in 1870, aiming to make the Catholic Church subject to government control.

2. The major states of western Europe adopted constitutions of some sort, and universal male suffrage was granted in Britain, France, and Germany and elsewhere, at least in voting for the lower houses of parliament. New political parties representing a broad spectrum of interests and groups from workers and liberals to Catholics and conservatives engaged in hard-fought election campaigns to provide benefits to their constituencies. Conservatives and moderate leaders began to fear the support that socialism got from workers as they began voting socialist.

3. In 1878 Bismarck abandoned his attack on the church and instead courted the Catholic Center Party by enacting high tariffs on grain imports, which won over both the Catholic Center and the Protestant Junkers, nobles with large landholdings.

4. Bismarck pushed through several social security laws to help wage earners, establishing national sickness and accident insurance, old-age pensions, and retirement benefits. Bismarck did this in an attempt to give workers what they wanted so they would not join the Socialist movement, as he feared Socialism and the ideas it gave workers to revolt.

5. The moderate republicans sought to preserve their creation by winning the hearts and minds of the next generation. A series of laws between 1879 and 1886 greatly expanded the state system of public, tax-supported schools and established free compulsory elementary education for both boys and girls. Free compulsory education became secular republican education. Not only in France, but throughout the Western world, the expansion of public education served as a critical nation-building tool in the late 1800s.

6. While the House of Commons was drifting toward democracy, the House of Lords tried to reassert itself by ruling against labor unions and vetoing several measures passed by the Commons, including the People's Budget, which was designed to increase spending on social welfare services. The Lords finally ceased to resist when the king threatened to create enough new peers to pass the bill, and aristocratic conservatism yielded to the popular democracy.

7. The Magyars gained virtual independence of Hungary after Austria's dual monarchy was established. The Magyar nobility resorted the constitution of 1848 and used it to dominate both the Magyar peasantry and the minority populations, alienating those minorities, especially the Croatians and the Romanians, by enacting laws promoting the use of the Magyar language in schools and government. While Magyar extremists campaigned for total separation from Austria, the radical leaders of the subject nationalities dreamed of independence from Hungary. Unlike most major countries, which harnessed the nationalism to strengthen the state after 1871, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was weakened by it.

8. Both Bismarck and William II attempted to get workers to renounce socialism, but neither were very successful. Social Democrats won more and more seats in the Reichstag, becoming Germany's largest single party in 1912. The revolutionary socialists had become less radical in Germany, and eventually adopted a more patriotic tone, allowing for greater military spending and imperialist expansion.

9. The Dreyfus affair gained the support of republicans and intellectuals, and in 1898 and 1899, the case split France apart.On one side was the army, joined by anti-Semites and most of the Catholic establishment. On the other side stood civil libertarians and most of the more radical republicans. The case also revived republican animosity toward the Catholic Church.

1. Theodore Herzl was a leading Zionist, which was a movement dedicated to building a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. Some Jews believed that Christian Europeans would never overcome their anti-Semitic hatred, so a Jewish homeland was necessary.

2. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was a falsified account of a secret meeting supposedly had at the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897. The "Protocols", written by the Russian secret police, suggest that Jewish elders planned to dominate the globe. This among other things popularized feelings of anti-Semitism.

3. In his book On the Inequality of the Human Races (1854), Gobineau divided humanity into the white, black, and yellow races and championed the "Aryan race" for its supposedly superior qualities.

1. Marxist socialist parties eventually were linked together in an international organization. Marx himself played an important role in founding the First International of socialists (the International Working Men's Association), which was an organization he battled successfully to control and used as a means of spreading his doctrines of socialist revolution. In 1889, as the individual parties in different countries grew stronger, socialist leaders formed the Second International, a federation of national socialist parties whose delegates met every three years to interpret Marxist doctrines and plan coordinated action.

2. As workers gained the right to vote and to participate politically in the nation-state, they focused their attention more on elections than on revolutions. Most importantly, as workers' standard of living rose gradually but substantially after 1850 and the quality of life in urban areas improved dramatically, workers became more moderate. The growth of labor unions reinforced this trend toward moderation, as unions concentrated on winning better wages and hours through collective bargaining and compromise.

3. German unions did not receive basic rights until 1869, and until the Anti-Socialist Laws were repealed in 1890, they were frequently harassed by the government as socialist fronts. As a result, in 1895 Germany only had about 270,000 union members in a male industrial workforce of nearly 8 million. Then, with almost all legal harassment eliminated, union membership skyrocketed, reaching roughly 3 million in 1912.

4. The growth of socialist parties after 1871 was phenomenal. Neither Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws nor his extensive social security system checked the growth of the Social Democratic Party, which espoused radical Marxism even though it sought reform through legal parliamentary politics. By 1912 the SPD had millions of followers, mostly people from the working classes, and was the largest party in Reichstag. Socialist parties grew in other countries as well, and these countries eventually linked together in the First and Second International. After 1914, when the Second International ended, socialism began to become more moderate.