g45 midterm 2

Humoral Theory

Definition: A medical belief dating back to ancient Greece that illness came from imbalances in four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Significance:

• Dominated Western medicine for centuries.

• Shows how premodern medicine relied on tradition, not evidence.

• Helps explain why early public health responses were ineffective.

Decaying Matter (Miasma Theory)

Definition: Before germ theory, many people believed disease came from “bad air” released by rotting organic matter, especially in crowded or dirty cities. This idea shaped early public health efforts in the 18th and 19th centuries, leading governments to clean streets, remove waste, and improve sanitation even though they misunderstood the true cause of illness.

Significance:

• First major use of epidemiology.

• Proved waterborne transmission.

• Marked the beginning of modern public health and germ theory acceptance.

Broad Street Pump

Definition: In 1854, John Snow mapped cholera cases in London and traced the outbreak to a contaminated water pump.
Significance:

helped overturn miasma theory and laid the foundation for public‑health science.

• Proved waterborne transmission.

• Marked the beginning of modern public health and germ theory acceptance.

Caesalpinia pulcherrima (Peacock Flower)

Definition: A plant used by enslaved women in the Caribbean to induce abortions, documented by Maria Sibylla Merian.
Significance:

• Shows enslaved women’s medical knowledge and agency.

• Reveals how reproductive control was a form of resistance to slavery.

• Connects medicine to empire, gender, and violence

Cottage System

Definition: A pre‑industrial system where families produced goods at home using hand tools.
Significance:

• Shows how labor was family‑based and decentralized.

• Industrialization destroyed this system, moving work into factories.

• Helps explain social disruption and urban migration.

Steam Engine

Definition: A machine that converted heat into mechanical power, used in factories, mines, and transportation.
Significance:

• Core driver of the Industrial Revolution.

• Enabled mass production, railroads, and global trade.

• Gave industrial nations military and economic advantages.

“What hath God wrought?”

Definition: This was the first official telegraph message ever sent in the United States. It marked the beginning of long‑distance electronic communication, shortening space and time in a way that transformed business, news, diplomacy, and empire.

Significance:

• Symbolizes the communication revolution.

• Shrunk distances; accelerated globalization.

• Allowed empires to coordinate across continents.

Green Revolution

Definition: 20th‑century agricultural transformation using fertilizers, pesticides, and high‑yield crops.
Significance:

• Shows long‑term effects of industrial science.

• Increased food production but deepened dependency on Western technology.

• Connects to neocolonialism and global inequality.

Hannah Brown

Definition: An enslaved woman whose life reveals how plantation slavery relied on the constant exploitation of Black women’s labor, both domestic and agricultural. Her experiences show how enslaved women were essential to the functioning of the plantation economy yet denied recognition, autonomy, and protection.

Significance:

• Shows how slavery and industrial capitalism were connected.

• Reveals racial hierarchies in labor systems.

Jacob Riis

Definition: Photojournalist who documented tenement poverty in How the Other Half Lives.
Significance:

• Exposed harsh conditions of industrial urban life.

• Influenced social reform movements.

Favela

Definition: Informal settlements in Brazil were created by rapid urban migration as poor rural migrants and formerly enslaved people moved to cities seeking work during industrialization

Significance:

• Global example of industrial‑era inequality.

• Shows how urbanization outpaced infrastructure.

Sarah Grosvenor

Definition: A young woman who died from a coerced abortion in colonial America.
Significance:

• Shows lack of reproductive rights and unsafe medical practices.

• Connects gender, medicine, and inequality.

“Barbarities in the West Indies”

Definition: An abolitionist text exposing the extreme violence, torture, and cruelty inflicted on enslaved Africans in Caribbean plantations.
Significance:

• Helped mobilize British public opinion against slavery.

• Demonstrates how abolitionist movements used emotional and moral appeals.

• Shows the brutality of plantation economies that fueled European wealth.

Abolition Act of 1833

Definition: British law that ended slavery across the British Empire, though it forced formerly enslaved people into “apprenticeships” that kept them working for their former masters.

Significance:

• Major turning point in imperial labor systems.

• Shows abolition was gradual and incomplete.

• Demonstrates how empire adapted rather than disappeared.

Hogsheads

Definition: Huge wooden barrels used to transport sugar from Caribbean plantations to Europe.

Significance:

• Symbol of the plantation economy.

• Shows how slavery was tied to global trade networks.

• Represents the economic foundation of empire.

Seven Years’ War

Definition: A global conflict between European empires, especially Britain and France, fought across North America, the Caribbean, Europe, and India. Britain’s victory gave it huge new territories and control over profitable trade routes, helping it become the world’s leading imperial and naval power. The war’s outcome strengthened Britain’s empire but also increased its debts, which later pushed it to tax the American colonies and helped spark the American Revolution.

Significance:

• Britain gained massive territorial control.

• Expanded plantation economies and slave labor.

• Set the stage for British dominance in the 19th century.

Canton System

Definition: A Qing Dynasty policy restricting foreign trade to one port (Canton/Guangzhou) and limiting contact with Western merchants.

Significance:

• Europeans saw it as restrictive and unfair.

• Contributed to tensions leading to the Opium Wars.

• Shows China’s attempt to control trade before imperial intrusion.

Treaty of Nanjing

Definition: This treaty ended the First Opium War after Britain defeated China, forcing the Qing Empire to open ports to British trade, pay a large indemnity, and give up Hong Kong.

Significance:

• First of the “unequal treaties.”

• Marked the beginning of China’s “Century of Humiliation.”

• Demonstrates how industrial powers used military force to reshape global trade.
  Essay use:

Company Rule

Definition: ritish East India Company — a private trading corporation — governed large parts of India before the British Crown took direct control in 1858. During this time, the Company acted like a government: it collected taxes, ran courts, maintained an army, and extracted wealth through monopolies and coercive policies.

Significance:

• Shows how corporations acted as imperial powers.

• Extracted wealth through taxation, monopolies, and military force.

• Set the stage for direct British Crown rule after 1857.

“The West”

Definition: refers to the group of industrialized, mostly democratic nations of Western Europe and North America that gained global power through empire, capitalism, and technological dominance. During the Cold War, it became a political identity meaning the U.S.‑led bloc opposed to the Soviet Union and communism.

Significance:

• Used to justify imperialism as a “civilizing mission.”

• Created racial and cultural hierarchies.

• Became a Cold War ideological category.

Maxim Gun

Definition: The first automatic machine gun, invented in 1884.
Significance:

• Gave Europeans overwhelming military superiority.

• Enabled small European forces to conquer large African armies.

• Symbol of technological domination.

Quinine

Definition: Anti‑malarial drug derived from cinchona bark.
Significance:

• Allowed Europeans to survive in tropical regions.

• Made deeper African colonization possible.

• Shows how medicine supported empire.

“The Charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman”

This refers to a famous moment in the Battle of Omdurman, when a British cavalry unit charged Sudanese fighters during Britain’s reconquest of Sudan. Although the charge looked heroic, the real outcome of the battle was decided by British machine guns and modern weapons, which killed thousands of Sudanese soldiers with very few British losses.

Significance: symbolizes the extreme military imbalance of the age and how industrial technology made European imperial conquest brutally one‑sided.

Berlin Conference

Definition: Meeting where European powers divided Africa without African input.
Significance:

• Formalized the Scramble for Africa.

• Established rules like “effective occupation.”

• Shows imperialism as a competitive, bureaucratic system.

Samuel Cartwright

Definition: Pro‑slavery physician who invented racist “diseases” like drapetomania (the “disease” causing enslaved people to run away).
Significance:

• Shows how pseudoscience justified slavery.

• Demonstrates how medicine was used to enforce racial hierarchy.

“The Mongolian Octopus”

Definition: 1886 Australian cartoon portraying Chinese immigrants as a monstrous threat.
Significance:

• Shows racial fear and xenophobia.

• Influenced anti‑Chinese immigration laws.

• Connects nationalism to racial exclusion.

Der Judenstaat

Definition: Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet arguing that Jews needed a sovereign state to escape European antisemitism.
Significance:

• Foundational text of Zionism.

• Shows nationalism as a response to exclusion.

My Def: Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet arguing that Jews need a place of independence to get away from European discrimination

Otto Benga (Ota Benga)

Definition: A Congolese man exhibited in a human zoo at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.
Significance:

• Extreme example of scientific racism.

• Shows how empire dehumanized colonized peoples.

Hong Xiuquan

Definition: Leader of the Taiping Rebellion who believed he was Jesus’s younger brother.
Significance:

• Led one of the deadliest uprisings in history.

• Blended Christianity with anti‑Qing nationalism.

• Shows religious + political millenarianism.

Russian Revolution

Definition: Collapsed during World War I due to military defeats, food shortages, and anger at Tsar Nicholas II, leading to the February Revolution that overthrew the monarchy. Later that year, the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution and created the world’s first communist state.

Significance:

• Introduced communism as a global ideology.

• Inspired anti‑imperial and anti‑capitalist movements worldwide.

Haile Selassie

Definition: Ethiopian emperor who appealed to the League of Nations (an international organization following World War I to promote international cooperation and achieve peace and security) after Italy invaded in 1935.
Significance:

• Exposed the failure of international diplomacy.

• Became a symbol of anti‑imperial resistance.

An African Soldier Speaks

Definition: A text describing African soldiers’ experiences in WWII and their rising expectations afterward.
Significance:

• Shows how military service radicalized colonized peoples.

• Helped fuel postwar decolonization.

Suez Crisis

Definition: When Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel invaded to try to regain control, but the United States and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw.

Significance:

• Marked the end of European imperial dominance.

• Showed the rise of the U.S. and USSR as superpowers.

Bretton Woods Conference

Definition: Meeting that created the IMF, World Bank, and a dollar‑based global financial system. It was designed to rebuild the post-WWII economy, ensure currency stability, and foster global economic cooperation to avoid the economic chaos that fueled the war.
Significance:

• Established U.S. economic leadership.

• Shaped global development for decades.

Sputnik

Definition: First satellite launched by the USSR.
Significance:

• Triggered the space race.

• Showed Soviet technological capability.

• Intensified Cold War competition.

The End of History (1992)

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued after the Cold War that liberal democracy and free‑market capitalism had “won” and would become the final, universal form of government.
Significance:

• Reflected U.S. triumphalism.

• Assumed unipolar dominance.

Qiaopi

Definition: Remittance (transfer of money) letters sent by Chinese migrants to families back home.
Significance:

• Show transnational family networks.

• Reveal emotional and economic ties across borders.

Bhagat Singh Thind

Definition: Sikh immigrant whose 1923 Supreme Court case ruled he was not “white” and therefore ineligible for U.S. citizenship.
Significance:

• Shows racialized definitions of citizenship.

• Demonstrates how nationalism and race intersected.

The West (destination)

Definition: Industrialized nations attracting migrants.

Significance: Migration shaped modern multicultural societies.

Favela

Definition: Informal urban settlements in Brazil created by poor migrants.
Significance:

• Shows consequences of rapid urbanization.

• Reflects global patterns of inequality.

Neocolonialism

Definition: Indirect control of a country through economic, financial, or political pressure rather than direct rule.
Significance:

• Replaced formal empire after WWII.

• Maintains global inequality.

Bretton Woods Institutions (IMF/World Bank)

Definition: Created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, were designed to stabilize the global economy after World War II and prevent another Great Depression.

Significance:

• Often imposed austerity on developing nations.

• Reinforced dependency on Western capital.

Suez Crisis

Definition: Moment when the U.S. blocked European imperial ambitions.
Significance:

• Marked shift from colonialism → neocolonialism.

Green Revolution

Definition: Agricultural modernization in Global South.

Significance: Reduced famine but increased dependency on Western technology.