World History: Early Modern Era to Modern Revolutions and Imperialism

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the Protestant Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Atlantic Revolutions, Industrial Revolution, and global Imperialism based on course lecture notes.

Ninety-Five Theses

The document authored by Martin Luther that exposed corruption within the Catholic Church, catalyzed the Protestant Reformation, and was widely disseminated across Europe through the printing press.

Thirty Years' War

A European conflict fought between Catholics and Protestants that fractured the European political landscape and culminated in the Pact of Westphalia.

Virgin of Guadalupe

A syncretic religious symbol in Mexico that combined Mesoamerican and Spanish concepts of Divine Motherhood.

Wahhabi movement

An eighteenth-century Islamic renewal movement founded by Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and politically backed by Muhammad Ibn Saud, which argued that external difficulties arose from deviations from the true Islamic faith.

Wang Yangming

A Chinese thinker during the Ming and Qing eras who maintained that introspection and contemplation were the keys to a virtuous life, rather than traditional Confucian lifestyle and formal education.

Kaozheng

A Chinese cultural practice emphasizing conclusions based on facts and analysis, predominantly utilized for the recovery and critical examination of ancient historical documents.

Bhakti movement

A devotional religious movement in Mughal India that bridged Hinduism and Islam by disregarding the caste system and prioritizing personal spiritual experience.

Sikhism

A religious tradition founded in the Punjab region that blended elements of Islam and Hinduism, eventually transforming from a peaceful movement into a skilled military community due to regional hostility.

Council of Trent

A series of Catholic Reformation assemblies that addressed corruption by forbidding the sale of indulgences and mandating seminaries to properly train priests.

Nicolaus Copernicus

The astronomer who developed the heliocentric theory in 1543, positing that the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun.

Deists

Enlightenment-era thinkers who believed in a remote deity that created the universe but did not meddle in human affairs.

Popular sovereignty

The political principle popular during the Atlantic revolutions stating that the authority to govern derives from the people rather than from God or tradition.

Estates General

An assembly convened by King Louis XVI in May 1789 consisting of the three estates of French society (clergy, nobility, and commoners) to address an impending fiscal bankruptcy.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

A French revolutionary text adopted by the National Assembly stating that 'men are born free and remain equal in rights.'

The Terror

The radical phase of the French Revolution under Maximilien Robespierre's leadership in which tens of thousands of suspected political adversaries were guillotined.

Toussaint Louverture

The former slave and military leader who spearheaded the Haitian Revolution in Saint Domingue, defeating internal opponents and French forces under Napoleon.

Creoles

Native-born elites of European descent in Spanish and Portuguese America who were insulted by imperial taxes and led independence movements while striving to maintain control over lower classes.

Nativism

A mobilization ideology used during Latin American independence struggles that categorized all individuals born in the Americas as 'Americanos' and cast those born in Spain or Portugal as the enemy.

Stamp Act

A British taxation policy that required American colonists to purchase government stamps for documents and printed items, including wills, newspapers, and playing cards.

Sons of Liberty

A colonial secret society organized primarily in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia that enforced boycotts of British goods to resist parliamentary tax acts.

Guano

Seabird excrement discovered in Peru that served as a potent nineteenth-century commercial fertilizer, revitalizing global agricultural yields during the Industrial Revolution.

Reform Bill of 1832

British legislation that granted middle-class men the legal right to vote, reflecting the social power shift toward urban industrialists.

Karl Marx

The social theorist who studied British class structures and concluded that industrial capitalism was an inherently unstable system destined to culminate in revolution and a classless society.

Zaibatsu

Large, privately owned industrial business conglomerates around which Japan's state-guided industrialization was structured during the Meiji era.

Porfirio Díaz

The Mexican dictator whose oppressive policies and support for wealthy landowners triggered a decadelong nationwide revolution that claimed 10% of Mexico's population.

Cultivation system

A Dutch colonial labor regime in Indonesia requiring peasants to cultivate at least 20% of their land in cash crops like sugar or coffee to satisfy tax debts.

Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858

A major uprising of Indian soldiers (sepoys) sparked by religious offenses, land deprivations, and overtaxation, which led the British Parliament to strip the British East India Company of power and assume direct rule over India.

Taiping Uprising

A massive Chinese rebellion between 1850 and 1864 led by figures advocating a unique form of Christianity, land redistribution, gender equality, and the abolition of private property, which resulted in about 20 million deaths.

Treaty of Nanking

The agreement concluding the First Opium War that ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five Chinese ports to foreign trade, assessed a $6 million penalty for confiscated opium, and restricted import tariffs on British goods.

Boxer Uprising

An anti-foreigner and anti-Christian rebellion in northern China that killed Western and Chinese Christians before being suppressed by Western powers and Japan.

Tanzimat reforms

A series of state-led defensive modernization initiatives in the Ottoman Empire from 1839 to 1868 that instituted legal equality for non-Muslims and expanded educational access.

Young Turks

A reform movement in the Ottoman Empire that seized power through a 1908 military coup, advocating a militantly secular public life, secular law codes and courts, and a Turkish national identity.

Meiji Restoration

The political transformation in Japan marked by young samurai seizing power following Western intrusion, resulting in the dismantling of the shogunate, legal equality for subjects, and state-led industrialization.

Berlin Conference

The meeting where European powers partitioned the African continent among themselves without the presence or consent of any African representatives.

Amritsar Massacre

A 1919 event in British India where soldiers fired upon a peaceful assembly of protesters, inflicting 1,516 casualties and galvanizing the Indian independence movement under Mahatma Gandhi.

Sir Isaac Newton

The English scientist whose formulation of the universal laws of motion and mechanics marked the culmination of the Scientific Revolution.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The English author whose 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, provided a foundational philosophical text for modern feminist movements.

Tennis Court Oath

The June 1789 pledge taken by representatives of the French Third Estate promising to continue assembling until they established a new written constitution.

Tupac Amaru Rebellion

An eighteenth-century indigenous insurrection in Peru that heightened Creole fear of violent social upheaval from below during Latin American independence struggles.

King Leopold II

The Belgian monarch whose personal regime over the Congo Free State subjected millions of native inhabitants to brutal forced labor to harvest rubber.

Young Ottomans

A group of nineteenth-century intellectuals who advocated for parliamentary government and Western scientific adoption while maintaining Islamic moral and cultural foundations.

Scientific racism

A nineteenth-century European ideology that used pseudoscientific theories and Social Darwinism to claim biological superiority and justify colonial conquest.

Russo-Japanese War

A 1904–1905 conflict resulting in the first defeat of a major European power by an Asian state, solidifying Japan's status as a global imperial power.

British East India Company

The commercial joint-stock enterprise that governed colonial India until Parliament assumed direct imperial control following the Rebellion of 1857–1858.

Salt March

A famous 1930 nonviolent campaign of civil disobedience led by Mahatma Gandhi to defy the British government's colonial salt monopoly.

Pact of Westphalia

The 1648 peace treaties concluding the Thirty Years' War that recognized the sovereign authority of European states over their domestic and religious affairs.

Predestination

The core theological doctrine of Calvinism stating that God has already determined which individuals are granted salvation before birth.

Storming of the Bastille

The July 14, 1789 attack on a royal fortress and armory in Paris by Third Estate commoners, serving as a symbolic blow against royal absolutism.

Seneca Falls Convention

The 1848 gathering in New York that produced the first organized political expression of the feminist movement in the United States.

Independence debt

The massive financial indemnity demanded by France from post-revolutionary Haiti in exchange for diplomatic recognition, severely crippling the island's economic development.

Self-Strengthening Movement

A late nineteenth-century Chinese reform policy aimed at adopting Western industrial and military technology while preserving Confucian political and social traditions.

Capitulations

Agreements between European powers and the Ottoman Empire that exempted European residents and traders from Ottoman legal jurisdiction and tax obligations.

Commodore Matthew Perry

The American naval officer whose 1853 arrival in Edo Bay used gunboat diplomacy to force Tokugawa Japan to terminate its isolationist foreign policy.

Boer Wars

Conflicts fought between Great Britain and Dutch-descended Afrikaners over control of southern Africa, culminating in British victory and a unified state dominated by a white minority.

Indian National Congress

An association founded in 1885 that gave western-educated Indian elites an organized venue to petition for greater autonomy before developing into a mass independence movement.

Russian Revolution of 1905

A wave of mass strikes, mutinies, and peasant revolts across the Russian Empire sparked by defeat in the Russo-Japanese War that coerced Tsar Nicholas II to establish a constitution and elected parliament.

Dependent development

A pattern of economic growth in postcolonial Latin America driven by foreign capital investment and export of raw materials rather than self-sustaining domestic industrialization.

Martin Luther

The German monk and theologian whose public critique of Catholic Church corruption launched the Protestant Reformation and established the doctrine of salvation through faith alone.

King Henry VIII

The English monarch who severed ties with the Catholic Church and created the Church of England in order to obtain an annulment of his marriage.

John Calvin

The French Protestant theologian based in Switzerland whose reformed theology centered on the sovereign authority of God and the doctrine of predestination.

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab

The eighteenth-century religious reformer in Arabia who established a strict renewal movement dedicated to purging syncretic innovations and restoring original monotheism.

Akbar

The Mughal emperor who instituted policies of broad religious tolerance, incorporated Hindu elites into governance, and promoted syncretic cultural exchange between Islam and Hinduism.

Mirabai

The sixteenth-century upper-caste Hindu poet who challenged conventional social and caste hierarchies through ecstatic devotional poetry dedicated to Krishna.

Charles Darwin

The English naturalist whose scientific formulation of biological evolution by natural selection challenged religious traditions and was later distorted into Social Darwinism.

John Locke

The English Enlightenment philosopher who argued that political sovereignty resides in the consent of the governed and that all individuals possess inherent natural rights.

Thomas Paine

The English-born political writer whose 1776 pamphlet Common Sense widely popularized Enlightenment ideas and inspired colonists to seek total independence from Britain.

Thomas Jefferson

The American statesman who incorporated Enlightenment philosophy into the primary draft of the Declaration of Independence.

King Louis XVI

The French monarch whose inability to resolve severe fiscal deficits forced the summoning of the Estates General, precipitating the revolution that led to his execution.

Marie Antoinette

The French queen whose court extravagance made her a primary target of revolutionary discontent prior to her execution during the Reign of Terror.

Maximilien Robespierre

The Jacobin leader of the Committee of Public Safety who directed the Reign of Terror, executing thousands of alleged anti-revolutionaries before being guillotined himself.

Napoleon Bonaparte

The French general who seized power in a 1799 coup, instituted civil equality in law while building an authoritarian empire, and conquered much of mainland Europe.

Mahatma Gandhi

The Indian nationalist leader who organized mass nonviolent civil disobedience and satyagraha campaigns against British colonial rule, including nationwide salt protests.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The leader of the All-India Muslim League who championed political protections for South Asian Muslims and directed the founding of the independent state of Pakistan.

Capitalism

An economic system characterized by private property, free enterprise, competitive markets, and the profit motive, leading to diverse consumer goods alongside unequal wealth distribution.

Socialism

An intermediate political and economic system between free-market enterprise and total state control that advocates for collective regulation of production, strong public welfare, and reduced class inequality.

Communism

A socioeconomic system in which the state owns all property and resources, eliminating private profit, market competition, and social classes in pursuit of equal distribution.