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This article includes people like

Itagaki Taisuke, Saigo Takamori, Yamagata Aritomo who were politicians, heroes, ministers who greatly influenced Japan.

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Famous Japanese People

See a listing of famous Japanese people in the world of art, film, literature, politics and sport plus famous Japanese people from history.

This list of well-known Japanese includes historical figures such as Sakamoto Ryoma, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Lafcadio Hearn.

From the world of art, music, literature and design read biographies of Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Yukio Mishima, Ayumi Hamasaki, Tadao Ando, Issey Miyake, Sakamoto Ryuichi and Taro Okamoto.

Giants of Japanese industry and technology include Konosuke Matsushita and Soichiro Honda. Sports stars' biographies include baseball's Ichiro Suzuki and Sadaharu Oh, golfer Ryo Ishikawa and soccer player Hidetoshi Nakata.

Film directors Akira Kurosawa, Shohei Imamura and more recently anime director Hayao Miyazaki are among the most famous Japanese celebrities known or once known overseas for their movies.

Politians include Junichiro Koizumi and Kakuei Tanaka.

Japanese Historical Figures

William Adams 1564-1620 - the first Englishman in Japan.

Emperor Hirohito 1901-1989 - the Emperor Showa.

Fukuzawa Yukichi 1835-1901 - founder of the prestigious Keio University and the man pictured on the 10,000 yen note.

Honda Tadakatsu 1548-1610 - famous warrior and general for Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Itagaki Taisuke 1837-1919 - Meiji-era politician and civil rights campaigner.

Kato Kiyomasa 1562-1611 - feared general of Hideyoshi and builder of Kumamoto Castle.

Kukai 774-835 - aka Kobo Daishi, polymath founder of Shingon Buddhism.

Lafcadio Hearn 1850-1904 - influential poet and writer on Japan.

Maeda Toshiie 1538-1599 - famous samurai warrior, feudal lord and vassal of Nobunaga.

Oda Nobunaga 1534-1582 - medieval warlord renowned for his cruelty and artistic sense.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi 1536-1598 - second in the trio of the great unifiers of Japan.

Tokugawa Ieyasu 1543-1616 - began the Tokugawa dynasty that was to rule Japan for over 250 years during the Edo Period.

Saigo Takamori 1828-1877 - one of the most famous tragic heroes of Japanese history.

Sakamoto Ryoma 1836-1867 - political activist in the Bakumatsu Period from Kochi, murdered in Kyoto.

Sesshu Toyo 1420-1506 - one of Japan's greatest artists and garden designers.

Yamagata Aritomo 1838-1922 - influential Meiji-era genro and arch-conservative politician.

Statue of Sakamoto Ryoma at Katsurahama Beach, Kochi

Yayoi Kusama on the cover of Tokyo's Big Issue

Japanese Artists & Designers

Tadao Ando 1941 - Japan's architect of space and light.

Fumio Asakura 1883-1964 - prolific sculptor known for his fabulous bronzes of people.

Kawai Kanjiro 1890-1966 - ceramic artist an a leader in the mingei (folk art) movement.

Yayoi Kusama 1929- - artist and sculptor.

Suehiro Maruo 1956 - one of Japan's leading ero-guro manga artists.

Issey Miyake 1938 - a pioneering Japanese fashion designer.

Ninomiya Chuhachi 1866-1936 - Japan's aircraft pioneer.

Taro Okamoto 1911-1996 - Art is Magic.

Yoko Ono 1933 - - wife of John Lennon and avant garde musician.

Kenzo Tange 1913-2005 - visionary post-war architect and urban planner.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi 1935 - - manga artist accredited as one of the architects of a new kind of realism in manga known as gekiga ("dramatic pictures").

Japan Film / Movies

Masao Adachi 1939 - revolutionary, scriptwriter, and director.

Shozin Fukui b. 1961 - rock musician and cyberpunk movie director.

Takahiko Iimura 1937 - experimental movie director most famous for his films in the 1960's and 70's.

Shohei (Shouhei) Imamura 1926-2006 - film writer, producer, and director.

Akira Kurosawa 1910-1998 - Japan's pre-eminent movie director.

Yoshihiko Matsui 1956 - one of Japan's most respected cult directors famous for the classic Noisy Requiem.

Hayao Miyazaki b.1941 - renowned director of such films as Princess Mononoke and Castle in the Sky.

Watanabe Ken b. 1959 - actor famous for his roles in The Last Samurai, Batman Begins and Godzilla.

Business & Industry

Soichiro Honda 1906-1991 - founder of Honda Motor Corporation.

Konosuke Matsushita 1894-1989 - giant of Japanese electronics.

Minoru Mori 1934-2012 - mega-rich international property developer.

Japanese Literature

Osamu Dazai 1909-1948 - one of Japan's most famous 20th century writers.

Lafcadio Hearn 1850-1904 - author of such works as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan and Kwaidan.

Yukio Mishima 1925-1970 - controversial novelist, effete and rightist.

Music in Japan

Ayumi Hamasaki 1978 - J.Pop diva.

Ryuichi Sakamoto 1952 - musician, actor and record producer.

Toru Takemitsu 1930-1996 - Japanese composer.

Japanese Politics & Politicians

Charles E. Jenkins b. 1940 - US deserter, North Korean captive, now a greeter on Sado Island.

Junichiro Koizumi b.1942 - Prime Minister of Japan 2001-2006

Kakuei Tanaka 1918-1993 - highly effective though tainted politician.

Japanese Sports

Ryo Ishikawa b.1991 - young starlet of Japanese golf.

Masanori Murakami b.1944 - the first Japanese player in the US baseball major leagues.

Hidetoshi Nakata b.1977 - well-traveled Japanese soccer player.

Sadaharu Oh b.1940 - Japan's Babe Ruth.

Ichiro Suzuki b.1973 - the greatest Japanese export to MLB.

Famous People From Portugal
Famous Portuguese People

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See a listing of famous Japanese people in the world of art, film, literature, politics and sport plus famous Japanese people from history. This list of well-known Japanese includes historical figures such as Sakamoto Ryoma, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu and Lafcadio Hearn.

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This passage tells about how the german empire was founded in the year of 1871. German empire consisted Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Darmstdt, and Wüttemberg.

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The German Empire was founded on January 18, 1871, in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia. Within a seven-year period Denmark, the Habsburg monarchy, and France were vanquished in short, decisive conflicts. The empire was forged not as the result of the outpouring of nationalist feeling from the masses but through traditional cabinet diplomacy and agreement by the leaders of the states in the North German Confederation, led by Prussia, with the hereditary rulers of Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Württemberg. Prussia, occupying more than three-fifths of the area of Germany and having approximately three-fifths of the population, remained the dominant force in the nation until the empire's demise at the end of another war in 1918.

At its birth Germany occupied an area of 208,825 square miles (540,854 square km) and had a population of more than 41 million, which was to grow to 67 million by 1914. The religious makeup was 63 percent Protestant, 36 percent Roman Catholic, and 1 percent Jewish. The nation was ethnically homogeneous apart from a modest-sized Polish minority and smaller Danish, French, and Sorbian populations. Approximately 67 percent lived in villages and the remainder in towns and cities. Literacy was close to universal because of compulsory education laws dating to the 1820s and '30s.

Domestic concerns

From its origins in 1871, the empire was governed under the constitution designed four years earlier by Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian prime minister, for the North German Confederation. This constitution reflected the predominantly rural nature of Germany in 1867 and the authoritarian proclivities of Bismarck, who was a member of the Junker landowning elite. There were two houses: the Reichstag, to represent the people, and the Bundesrat, to represent the 25 states. The former comprised 397 members elected by universal manhood suffrage and a secret ballot. The constituencies established in 1867 and 1871 were never altered to reflect population shifts, and rural areas thus retained a vastly disproportionate share of power as urbanization progressed. In theory the Reichstag's ability to reject any bill seemed to make it an important reservoir of power; in practice, however, the power of the lower house was circumscribed by the government 's reliance on indirect taxes and by the parliament's willingness to approve the military budget every seven (after 1893, every five) years. Most legislative proposals were submitted to the Bundesrat first and to the Reichstag only if they were approved by the upper house. Although members of the Reichstag could question the chancellor about his policies, the legislative bodies were rarely consulted about the conduct of foreign affairs. Imperial ministers were chosen by and were responsible to the emperor rather than to the legislature.

A problem that was to plague the empire throughout its existence was the disparity between the Prussian and imperial political systems. In Prussia the lower house was elected under a restricted three-class suffrage system, an electoral law that allowed the richest 15 percent of the male population to choose approximately 85 percent of the delegates. A conservative majority was always assured in Prussia, whereas the universal manhood suffrage resulted in increasing majorities for the political centre and left-wing parties in the imperial parliament. William I was both German emperor (1871-88) and king of Prussia (1861-88). Apart from two brief instances the imperial chancellor was simultaneously prime minister of Prussia. Thus, the executives had to seek majorities from two separate legislatures elected by radically different franchises. A further problem was that government ministers were generally selected from the civil service or the military. They often had little experience with parliamentary government or foreign affairs.

The constitution had been designed by Bismarck to give the chancellor and monarch primary decision-making power. Universal manhood suffrage had been proposed because of Bismarck's belief that the rural population would vote for either the Conservative or Free Conservative parties. (Female suffrage had not been proposed because politics was considered a male preserve at the time.) The Progressives, a left-wing liberal party, were expected to do poorly in the two-thirds of Germany that was rural in 1867. Bismarck had not counted on new parties such as the Centre Party, a Roman Catholic confessional party, or the Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands; SPD), both of which began participating in imperial and Prussian elections in the early 1870s. The Centre generally received 20-25 percent of the total vote in all elections. The SPD grew from 2 seats in the first imperial election to 35 by 1890, when the SPD actually gained a plurality of votes. Bismarck termed the Centre and SPD along with the Progressives Reichsfeinde ("enemies of the empire") because he believed that each sought in its own way to change the fundamental conservative political character of the empire.

Beginning in 1871, he launched the Kulturkampf ("cultural struggle"), a campaign in concert with German liberals against political Catholicism. Bismarck's aim was clearly to destroy the Centre Party. Liberals saw the Roman Catholic church as politically reactionary and feared the appeal of a clerical party to the more than one-third of Germans who professed Roman Catholicism. Both Bismarck and the liberals doubted the loyalty of the Catholic population to the Prussian-centred and, therefore, primarily Protestant nation. In Prussia the minister of ecclesiastical affairs and education, Adalbert Falk, introduced a series of bills establishing civil marriage, limiting the movement of the clergy, and dissolving religious orders. All church appointments were to be approved by the state. As a result hundreds of parishes and several bishoprics were left without incumbents. Clerical civil servants were purged from the Prussian administration.

The Kulturkampf failed to achieve its goals and, if anything, convinced the Roman Catholic minority that their fear of persecution was real and that a confessional party to represent their interests was essential. By the late 1870s Bismarck abandoned the battle as a failure. He now launched a campaign against the SPD in concert with the two conservative parties and many National Liberals. Fearing the potential of the Social Democrats in a rapidly industrializing Germany, Bismarck found a majority to outlaw the party from 1878 to 1890, although constitutionally it could not be forbidden to participate in elections. Party offices and newspapers were closed down and meetings prohibited. Many socialists fled to Switzerland and sought to keep the party alive in exile. During the 1880s Bismarck also sought to win the workers away from socialism by introducing legislation granting them modest pensions, accident insurance, and a national system of medical coverage. Like the Kulturkampf, the campaign against the SPD was a failure, and, when the 1890 elections showed enormous gains for the Reichsfeinde, Bismarck began to consider having the German princes reconvene, as in 1867, to draw up a new constitution. The new emperor, William II, saw no reason to begin his reign (1888-1918) with a potential bloodbath and asked for the 74-year-old chancellor's resignation. Thus, Bismarck, the architect of German unity, left the scene in a humiliating fashion, believing that his creation was fatally flawed. Indeed, his policy of supporting rapid social and economic modernization while avoiding any reform of the authoritarian political system did lead to an atmosphere of persistent crisis.

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Germany - Unification, Imperialism, WWI: The German Empire was founded on January 18, 1871, in the aftermath of three successful wars by the North German state of Prussia. Within a seven-year period Denmark, the Habsburg monarchy, and France were vanquished in short, decisive conflicts.

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This shows what government ruled over France in 1850. Which was the Second French Republic.

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A depiction of Napoleon defeating counter-revolutionaries during the French Revolution.

France was a troubled country during the 19th century as a result of its inability to settle on a stable political system after the Napoleonic Empire. Royalists, Republicans and Bonapartists remained in conflict with one another throughout the century, leading to several abrupt shifts between monarchical, imperial and republican forms of government before 1900. Following the French Revolution, when the nation's lower classes overthrew the longstanding Bourbon monarchy, the country established its First Republic in 1792. The new Republic was shortly afterwards overthrown by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1799, whose imperial government would fall in 1815. France continued to shift back and forth between republican and imperial governments until the establishment of the Third French Republic, which would stand until 1940.

Napoleonic Era and Restoration of Monarchy

Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Emperor of France in 1804, 11 years after King Louis XVI was publicly beheaded by his subjects. Bonaparte, who led a string of military victories for the French Army during the First Republic, became the head of the French government as consul for life in 1802, and then emperor two years later. After Bonaparte's abdication and exile in 1815, the monarchy was reestablished under the rule of Louis XVIII, nephew of Louis VXI, until his death in 1824. The Bourbon family's rule of France would end with Charles X during the July Revolution of 1830.

Second Republic 1848-1852

The Second French Republic was established after the Revolution of 1848 led to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe, a cousin of the Bourbon family. That year Louis Napoleon - who would become Napoleon III - was elected president of the constitutional French Republic. In a move to gain power over the country's legislative assembly, Louis-Napoleon organized a coup in 1851 that resulted in a new constitution that reduced the power of the assembly. Louis-Napoleon was proclaimed emperor in 1852, ushering in the Second Empire.

Second Empire 1852-1870

Although Napoleon III's rule during France's Second Empire was initially authoritarian, he gradually introduced liberal reforms -- such as freedom of assembly and liberty of the press - in the 1860s. However, these liberalizations allowed the French people to legally voice their political grievances, leading to mass demonstrations against the empire. Although a new constitution establishing a semi-parliamentary government was approved in 1870, France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War that year was followed by large-scale uprisings in Paris that ultimately resulted in the collapse of the imperial government and abdication of Napoleon III.

Third Republic 1870-1940

Although the Third Republic of France was ushered in by the fall of Napoleon III in 1870, the Musee d'Orsay reports the republic did not truly begin until 1875. That year, the passage of the Wallon amendment described France as a "Republic." The amendment also established that the president of the Republic be elected by an absolute majority of votes in the National Assembly and may serve seven-year terms with the opportunity for re-election. The Third Republic remained intact until Nazi Germany conquered France in 1940.

Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images

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What Kind of Government Did France Have During the 1800s? | Synonym

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A depiction of Napoleon defeating counter-revolutionaries during the French Revolution. France was a troubled country during the 19th century as a result of its inability to settle on a stable political system after the Napoleonic Empire. Royalists, Republicans and Bonapartists remained in conflict with one another throughout the century, leading to several abrupt shifts between monarchical, imperial and republican forms of government before 1900.

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This is history

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U.S. Timeline 1800s - America's Best History

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America's Best History, ... United States History Timeline, 1800-1809. America explores.

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This page tells us about Meiji Restoration and Modernization in Japan, 1800s.

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In 1868 the Tokugawa shôgun ("great general"), who ruled Japan in the feudal period, lost his power and the emperor was restored to the supreme position. The emperor took the name Meiji ("enlightened rule") as his reign name; this event was known as the Meiji Restoration.
The Reign of the Meiji Emperor
When the Meiji emperor was restored as head of Japan in 1868, the nation was a militarily weak country, was primarily agricultural, and had little technological development. It was controlled by hundreds of semi-independent feudal lords. The Western powers - Europe and the United States - had forced Japan to sign treaties that limited its control over its own foreign trade and required that crimes concerning foreigners in Japan be tried not in Japanese but in Western courts. When the Meiji period ended, with the death of the emperor in 1912, Japan had

· a highly centralized, bureaucratic government;
· a constitution establishing an elected parliament;
· a well-developed transport and communication system;
· a highly educated population free of feudal class restrictions;
· an established and rapidly growing industrial sector based on the latest technology; and
· a powerful army and navy.

Japan had regained complete control of its foreign trade and legal system, and, by fighting and winning two wars (one of them against a major European power, Russia), it had established full independence and equality in international affairs. In a little more than a generation, Japan had exceeded its goals, and in the process had changed its whole society. Japan's success in modernization has created great interest in why and how it was able to adopt Western political, social, and economic institutions in so short a time.

One answer is found in the Meiji Restoration itself. This political revolution "restored" the emperor to power, but he did not rule directly. He was expected to accept the advice of the group that had overthrown the shôgun, and it was from this group that a small number of ambitious, able, and patriotic young men from the lower ranks of the samurai emerged to take control and establish the new political system. At first, their only strength was that the emperor accepted their advice and several powerful feudal domains provided military support. They moved quickly, however, to build their own military and economic control. By July 1869 the feudal lords had been requested to give up their domains, and in 1871 these domains were abolished and transformed into prefectures of a unified central state.

The feudal lords and the samurai class were offered a yearly stipend, which was later changed to a one-time payment in government bonds. The samurai lost their class privileges, when the government declared all classes to be equal. By 1876 the government banned the wearing of the samurai's swords; the former samurai cut off their top knots in favor of Western-style haircuts and took up jobs in business and the professions.

The armies of each domain were disbanded, and a national army based on universal conscription was created in 1872, requiring three years' military service from all men, samurai and commoner alike. A national land tax system was established that required payment in money instead of rice, which allowed the government to stabilize the national budget. This gave the government money to spend to build up the strength of the nation.
Resistance and Rebellion Defeated
Although these changes were made in the name of the emperor and national defense, the loss of privileges brought some resentment and rebellion. When the top leadership left to travel in Europe and the United States to study Western ways in 1872, conservative groups argued that Japan should reply to Korean's refusal to revise a centuries old treaty with an invasion. This would help patriotic samurai to regain their importance. But the new leaders quickly returned from Europe and reestablished their control, arguing that Japan should concentrate on its own modernization and not engage in such foreign adventures.

For the next twenty years, in the 1870s and 1880s, the top priority remained domestic reform aimed at changing Japan's social and economic institutions along the lines of the model provided by the powerful Western nations. The final blow to conservative samurai came in the 1877 Satsuma rebellion, when the government's newly drafted army, trained in European infantry techniques and armed with modern Western guns, defeated the last resistance of the traditional samurai warriors. With the exception of these few samurai outbreaks, Japan's domestic transformation proceeded with remarkable speed, energy, and the cooperation of the people. This phenomenon is one of the major characteristics of Japan's modern history.
Ideology
In an effort to unite the Japanese nation in response to the Western challenge, the Meiji leaders created a civic ideology centered around the emperor. Although the emperor wielded no political power, he had long been viewed as a symbol of Japanese culture and historical continuity. He was the head of the Shintô religion, Japan's native religion. Among other beliefs, Shintô holds that the emperor is descended from the sun goddess and the gods who created Japan and therefore is semidivine. Westerners of that time knew him primarily as a ceremonial figure. The Meiji reformers brought the emperor and Shintô to national prominence, replacing Buddhism as the national religion, for political and ideological reasons. By associating Shintô with the imperial line, which reached back into legendary times, Japan had not only the oldest ruling house in the world, but a powerful symbol of age-old national unity.

The people seldom saw the emperor, yet they were to carry out his orders without question, in honor to him and to the unity of the Japanese people, which he represented. In fact, the emperor did not rule. It was his "advisers," the small group of men who exercised political control, that devised and carried out the reform program in the name of the emperor.
Social and Economic Changes
The abolition of feudalism made possible tremendous social and political changes. Millions of people were suddenly free to choose their occupation and move about without restrictions. By providing a new environment of political and financial security, the government made possible investment in new industries and technologies.

The government led the way in this, building railway and shipping lines, telegraph and telephone systems, three shipyards, ten mines, five munitions works, and fifty-three consumer industries (making sugar, glass, textiles, cement, chemicals, and other important products). This was very expensive, however, and strained government finances, so in 1880 the government decided to sell most of these industries to private investors, thereafter encouraging such activity through subsidies and other incentives. Some of the samurai and merchants who built these industries established major corporate conglomerates called zaibatsu, which controlled much of Japan's modern industrial sector.

The government also introduced a national educational system and a constitution, creating an elected parliament called the Diet. They did this to provide a good environment for national growth, win the respect of the Westerners, and build support for the modern state. In the Tokugawa period, popular education had spread rapidly, and in 1872 the government established a national system to educate the entire population. By the end of the Meiji period, almost everyone attended the free public schools for at least six years. The government closely controlled the schools, making sure that in addition to skills like mathematics and reading, all students studied "moral training," which stressed the importance of their duty to the emperor, the country and their families.

The 1889 constitution was "given" to the people by the emperor, and only he (or his advisers) could change it. A parliament was elected beginning in 1890, but only the wealthiest one percent of the population could vote in elections. In 1925 this was changed to allow all men (but not yet women) to vote.

To win the recognition of the Western powers and convince them to change the unequal treaties the Japanese had been forced to sign in the 1850s, Japan changed its entire legal system, adopting a new criminal and civil code modeled after those of France and Germany. The Western nations finally agreed to revise the treaties in 1894, acknowledging Japan as an equal in principle, although not in international power.
The International Climate: Colonialism and Expansion
In 1894 Japan fought a war against China over its interest in Korea, which China claimed as a vassal state. The Korean peninsula is the closest part of Asia to Japan, less than 100 miles by sea, and the Japanese were worried that the Russians might gain control of that weak nation. Japan won the war and gained control over Korea and gained Taiwan as a colony. Japan's sudden, decisive victory over China surprised the world and worried some European powers.

At this time the European nations were beginning to claim special rights in China - the French, with their colony in Indochina (today's Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia), were involved in South China; the British also claimed special rights in South China, near Hong Kong, and later the whole Yangtze valley; and the Russians, who were building a railway through Siberia and Manchuria, were interested in North China. After Japan's victory over China, Japan signed a treaty with China which gave Japan special rights on China's Liaotung peninsula, in addition to the control of Taiwan. But Japan's victory was short lived. Within a week, France, Russia, and Germany combined to pressure Japan to give up rights on the Liaotung peninsula. Each of these nations then began to force China to give it ports, naval bases, and special economic rights, with Russia taking the same Liaotung peninsula that Japan had been forced to return.

The Japanese government was angered by this incident and drew the lesson that for Japan to maintain its independence and receive equal treatment in international affairs, it was necessary to strengthen its military even further. By 1904, when the Russians were again threatening to establish control over Korea, Japan was much stronger. It declared war on Russia and, using all its strength, won victory in 1905 (beginning with a surprise naval attack on Port Arthur, which gained for Japan the control of the China Sea). Japan thus achieved dominance over Korea and established itself a colonial power in East Asia.
The Period 1912-1941
The Meiji reforms brought great changes both within Japan and in Japan's place in world affairs. Japan strengthened itself enough to remain a sovereign nation in the face of Western colonizing powers and indeed became a colonizing power itself. During the Taishô period (1912-1926), Japanese citizens began to ask for more voice in the government and for more social freedoms. During this time, Japanese society and the Japanese political system were significantly more open than they were either before or after. The period has often been called the period of "Taishô democracy." One explanation is that, until World War I, Japan enjoyed record breaking economic prosperity. The Japanese people had more money to spend, more leisure, and better education, supplemented by the development of mass media. Increasingly they lived in cities where they came into contact with influences from abroad and where the traditional authority of the extended family was less influential. Industrialization in itself undermined traditional values, emphasizing instead efficiency, independence, materialism, and individualism. During these years Japan saw the emergence of a "mass society" very similar to the "Roaring 20s" in the United States. During these years also, the Japanese people began to demand universal manhood suffrage which they won in 1925. Political parties increased their influence, becoming powerful enough to appoint their own prime ministers between 1918 and 1931.

At the end of World War I, however, Japan entered a severe economic depression. The bright, optimistic atmosphere of the Taishô period gradually disappeared. Political party government was marred by corruption. The government and military, consequently, grew stronger, the parliament weaker. The advanced industrial sector became increasingly controlled by a few giant businesses, the zaibatsu. Moreover, Japan's international relations were disrupted by trade tensions and by growing international disapproval of Japan's activities in China. But success in competing with the European powers in East Asia strengthened the idea that Japan could, and should, further expand its influence on the Asian mainland by military force.

Japan's need for natural resources and the repeated rebuffs from the West to Japan's attempts to expand its power in Asia paved the way for militarists to rise to power. Insecurity in international relations allowed a right-wing militaristic faction to control first foreign, then domestic, policy. With the military greatly influencing the government, Japan began an aggressive military campaign throughout Asia, and then, in 1941, bombed Pearl Harbor.
Summary
The most important feature of the Meiji period was Japan's struggle for recognition of its considerable achievement and for equality with Western nations. Japan was highly successful in organizing an industrial, capitalist state on Western models. But when Japan also began to apply the lessons it learned from European imperialism, the West reacted negatively. In a sense Japan's chief handicap was that it entered into the Western dominated world order at a late stage. Colonialism and the racist ideology that accompanied it, were too entrenched in Western countries to allow an "upstart," nonwhite nation to enter the race for natural resources and markets as an equal. Many of the misunderstandings between the West and Japan stemmed from Japan's sense of alienation from the West, which seemed to use a different standard in dealing with European nations than it did with a rising Asian power like Japan.

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Japan's first treaty with a Western nation

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Treaty of Kanagawa | Japan-United States [1854]

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Treaty of Kanagawa: Treaty of Kanagawa, (March 31, 1854), Japan's first treaty with a Western nation. Concluded by representatives of the United States and Japan at Kanagawa (now part of Yokohama), it marked the end of Japan's period of seclusion (1639-1854). The treaty was signed as a result of pressure from U.S.

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Camilo Benso was an Italian statesman and a leading figure in the movement toward Italian unification.
Brendan He

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Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, Isolabella and Leri (10 August 1810 - 6 June 1861), generally known as Cavour ( kə-VOOR , Italian: ), was an Italian statesman and a leading figure in the movement towards Italian unification. He was one of the leaders of the Historical Right, and Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, a position he maintained (except for a six-month resignation) throughout the Second Italian War of Independence and Giuseppe Garibaldi's campaigns to unite Italy. After the declaration of a united Kingdom of Italy, Cavour took office as the first Prime Minister of Italy; he died after only three months in office, and thus did not live to see Venetia or Rome added to the new Italian nation.

Cavour put forth several economic reforms in his native region of Piedmont in his earlier years, and founded the political newspaper Il Risorgimento. After being elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he quickly rose in rank through the Piedmontese government, coming to dominate the Chamber of Deputies through a union of center-left and center-right politicians. After a large rail system expansion program, Cavour became prime minister in 1852. As prime minister, Cavour successfully negotiated Piedmont's way through the Crimean War, the Second Italian War of Independence, and Garibaldi's expeditions, managing to maneuver Piedmont diplomatically to become a new great power in Europe, controlling a nearly united Italy that was five times as large as Piedmont had been before he came to power. Cavour was a freemason of the Italian Symbolic Rite.

English historian Denis Mack Smith says Cavour was the most successful parliamentarian in Italian history but he was not especially democratic. Cavour was often dictatorial, ignored his ministerial colleagues and parliament, and interfered in parliamentary elections. He also practiced trasformismo and other policies which were carried over into post-Risorgimento Italy.

Camillo Benso was born in Turin during Napoleonic rule, into a family which had acquired estates during the French occupation. He was the second of two sons of Michele Giuseppe Francesco Antonio Benso, 4th Marquess of Cavour and Count of Isolabella and Leri, Lord of Corveglia, Dusino, Mondonio, Ottiglio and Ponticelli, Co-Lord of Castagnole, Cellarengo and Menabi, Cereaglio, Chieri, San Salvatore Monferrato, Santena and Valfenera, 1st Baron of the French Empire (1781-1850) and his wife (1805) Adélaïde (Adèle) Suzanne, Marchioness of Sellon (1780-1846), herself of French origin. His godparents were Napoleon's sister Pauline, and her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, after whom Camillo was named.

Camillo and his older brother Gustavo were initially educated at home. He was sent to the Turin Military Academy when he was only ten years old. In July 1824 he was named a page to Charles Albert, the king of Piedmont (1831-1849). Cavour frequently ran afoul of the authorities in the academy, as he was too headstrong to deal with the rigid military discipline. He was once forced to live three days on bread and water because he had been caught with books that the academy had banned.[specify ] He was found to be apt at the mathematical disciplines, and was therefore enlisted in the Engineer Corps in the Piedmontese-Sardinian army in 1827. While in the army, he studied the English language as well as the works of Jeremy Bentham and Benjamin Constant, developing liberal tendencies which made him suspect to police forces at the time. He resigned his commission in the army in November 1831, both because of boredom with military life and because of his dislike of the reactionary policies of King Charles Albert. He administered the family estate at Grinzane, some forty kilometers outside the capital, serving as mayor there from 1832 to the revolutionary upheaval of 1848.

Cavour then lived for a time in Switzerland, with his Protestant relatives in Geneva. He grew acquainted with Calvinist teachings, and for a short while he converted from a form of unorthodox Catholicism, only to go back later. A Reformed pastor, Alexandre Vinet, impressed upon Cavour the need for the separation of church and state, a doctrine Cavour followed for the remainder of his life. He then traveled to Paris where he was impressed by parliamentary debates, especially those of François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, confirming his devotion to a political career. He next went to London, where he was much more disappointed by British politics, and toured the country, visiting Oxford, Liverpool, Birmingham, Chester, Nottingham, and Manchester. A quick tour through the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland (the German part and the Lake Geneva area) eventually landed him back in Turin.

Cavour believed that economic progress had to precede political change, and stressed the advantages of railroad construction in the peninsula. He was a strong supporter of transportation by steam engine, sponsoring the building of many railroads and canals. Between 1838 and 1842 Cavour began several initiatives in attempts to solve economic problems in his area. He experimented with different agricultural techniques on his estate, such as growing sugar beets, and was one of the first Italian landowners to use chemical fertilizers. He also founded the Piedmontese Agricultural Society. In his spare time, he again traveled extensively, mostly in France and the United Kingdom.

Early political career

The first apparently "liberal" moves of Pope Pius IX and the political upheavals of 1848 spawned a new movement of Italian liberalism, allowing Cavour to enter the political arena, no longer in fear of the police. He then gave a speech in front of numerous journalists in favor of a constitution for Piedmont, which was eventually granted. Cavour, unlike several other political thinkers, was not at first offered a position in the new Chamber of Deputies, as he was still a somewhat suspicious character to the nation.

Cavour never planned for the establishment of a united country, and even later during his Premiership his objective was to expand Piedmont with the annexation of Lombardy and Venetia, rather than a unified Italy. For example, during the conservative period, he gained a reputation as a non-revolutionary progressive. He was a poor public speaker. Cavour then lost the next election, while the Piedmontese army was destroyed at the Battle of Novara, leading Charles Albert to abdicate, passing the throne to his son, Victor Emmanuel II.

Cavour was then brought back into Parliament by the voters, where he was much more successful. His knowledge of European markets and modern economics earned him the positions of Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Commerce, and Minister of the Navy in 1850. Cavour soon came to dominate the cabinet of Prime Minister Massimo d'Azeglio. Cavour united the Right Center and the Left Center in the chamber to show dominance there as well. In 1851, Cavour gained a Cabinet promotion to Minister of Finance by working against his colleague from inside the Cabinet in a somewhat disreputable takeover, although this was to Piedmont's advantage because of his many economic reforms. It allowed Cavour to begin his railway expansion program, giving Piedmont 800 kilometres of track by the year 1860, one third of the railways in Italy at the time. He took the lead in legislation weakening the powers of the Church to own land, control the schools and supervise marriage laws. When the bishops protested, they were punished or exiled, making Cavour the hero of liberal anticlerical elements across Italy.

Prime minister of Piedmont-Sardinia

Cavour formed a coalition with Urbano Rattazzi known as the Connubio ("union"), uniting the moderate men of the Right and of the Left, and brought about the fall of the d'Azeglio cabinet in November 1852. The King reluctantly accepted Cavour as prime minister, the most conservative possible choice, but their relationship was never an easy one.

Cavour was generally liberal and believed in free trade, freedom of opinion, and secular rule, but he was an enemy of republicans and revolutionaries, whom he feared as disorganized radicals who would upset the social order. Cavour dominated debate in Parliament but is criticized for the controversial methods he used while Prime Minister, including excessive use of emergency powers, employing friends, bribing some newspapers while suppressing others, and rigging elections, though these were fairly common practices for the time. The national debt soared by a factor of six because of his heavy spending on modernizing projects, especially railways, and building up the army and the Royal Sardinian Navy. When he became Prime Minister Piedmont had just suffered a major defeat by Austria, but when he died, Victor Emmanuel II ruled a state five times as large, which dominated Italy and ranked among Europe's great powers.

The allied powers of Britain and France asked Piedmont to enter the Crimean War, partially to encourage Austria to enter, which it would not do unless it was certain that Piedmontese troops were not available to attack Austrian positions in Italy. Cavour, who hoped that the allies would support Piedmont's expansion in Italy, agreed as soon as his colleagues' support would allow and entered the war on 10 January 1855. This was too late to truly distinguish themselves militarily, but the 18,000 man contingent earned Piedmont a position at the Congress of Paris that ended the war.

In January 1858, the Italian Felice Orsini's attempted assassination of Napoleon III paradoxically opened an avenue of diplomacy between France and Piedmont. While in jail awaiting trial, Orsini wrote a public letter to the Emperor of the French, ending with, "Remember that, so long as Italy is not independent, the peace of Europe and Your Majesty is but an empty dream... Set my country free, and the blessings of twenty-five million people will follow you everywhere and forever." Orsini was still executed, but Napoleon III began to explore the possibility of joint operation with Piedmont against Austria. Cavour and Napoleon met in July 1858 at Plombières-les-Bains, and the two agreed that Piedmont would attempt to provoke war with the Duchy of Modena, obliging Austria to enter, and France would then aid Piedmont. In return, Cavour reluctantly agreed to cede Savoy (the seat of the Piedmontese royal family) and the County of Nice to France, and also arranged a royal marriage between Princess Maria Clotilde of Savoy and Prince Napoléon Bonaparte, surprisingly without Victor Emmanuel's consent. In the same year, Cavour sent his cousin, the famous beauty, photographic artist, and secret agent Virginia Oldoïni, to further the interests of Italian unification with the emperor by whatever means possible, and by all accounts she succeeded, famously becoming the mistress of Napoleon.

Both France and Piedmont began to prepare for war, but diplomatic support diminished rapidly. Napoleon III quickly soured on the plot, and Britain, Prussia, and Russia proposed an international congress, with one likely goal the disarmament of Piedmont. Piedmont was saved by Austria's sending an ultimatum on 23 April, demanding that Piedmont disarm itself, thus casting Austria as an aggressor. France mobilised and slowly began to enter Italy, but Piedmont needed to defend itself for a short period. Fortunately, rainstorms and Austrian indecision under Ferencz Graf Gyulai gave time for France to arrive in force.

The battles of Magenta and Solferino left Franco-Piedmontese forces in control of Lombardy, but the Austrians remained confident of defending their "fortress quadrilateral" area, with four fortresses in Verona, Legnago, Peschiera, and Mantua. These defenses, the horrors of the Battle of Solferino, the possibility of Prussian entry into the war, and the potential for an over-strong Piedmontese state convinced Napoleon to sign a separate peace with Austria in the Treaty of Villafranca on 11 July 1859, ending the Second Italian War of Independence. Victor Emmanuel accepted the peace, but Cavour was so infuriated after reading the terms of the treaty that he tendered his resignation. He soon regained his optimism, however, as several of the terms, such as the restoration to power of the rulers of Tuscany and Modena, and the establishment of an Italian Confederation including Austria, were not actually carried out.

General La Marmora succeeded to Cavour's post and insisted on following the treaty terms, even sending a letter to Tuscany asking that they restore their Grand Duke. ( Bettino Ricasoli, virtual dictator of Tuscany at the time, wrote about this appeal to his brother, saying "Tell General La Marmora that I have torn his letter into a thousand pieces.") France continued direct talks with Piedmont on the destiny of the central Italian states, all of whose autocrats supported unification with Piedmont but were restrained by the treaty, which called for the restoration of their old governments.

Cavour had retired to his estate at Leri, out of politics but concerned about the King's alliance with Garibaldi's revolutionaries and his desire to renew the war with Austria without allied support. When the weak La Marmora cabinet resigned, Victor Emmanuel was reluctant to have Cavour as premier again due both to their quarrel over the treaty of Villafranca and Cavour's success in preventing the king from marrying his mistress after the queen's death. But Cavour was sent for on 20 January 1860.

Cavour agreed with Napoleon to cede Savoy and Nice to France, in order to annex Tuscany and Emilia to Piedmont. Plebiscites were arranged with huge majorities in all these provinces to approve the changes. Cavour managed to convince most that uniting Italy would make up for these territorial losses. With this, the first stage of unification was completed. It was now up to Garibaldi to overthrow the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and bring southern Italy into Piedmont's control.

Garibaldi was furious that his birthplace, Nice, had been ceded to France, and wished to recapture the city, but a popular insurrection in Palermo on 4 April 1860 diverted him southward. He requested a brigade of Piedmontese to take Sicily, but Cavour refused. So instead, Garibaldi raised a force of a thousand () redshirt volunteers. They landed at Marsala in Sicily on 11 May and won the battles of Calatafimi and Milazzo, gaining control of Sicily. Cavour attempted to annex Sicily to Piedmont, but Garibaldi and his comrade Francesco Crispi would not allow it.

Cavour persuaded Victor Emmanuel to write a letter to Garibaldi, requesting that he not invade the mainland; the letter was indeed sent, but the King secretly wished Garibaldi to invade. He wrote another letter asking him to go ahead, but this was apparently never sent. Cavour meanwhile attempted to stir up a liberal revolution in Naples, but the populace was unreceptive. Garibaldi invaded, attempting to reach Naples quickly before Cavour found a way to stop him. On 7 September he entered Naples, at that time the largest city in Italy, and unilaterally declared Victor Emmanuel the King of Italy. Garibaldi was now military dictator of southern Italy and Sicily, and he imposed the Piedmontese constitution but publicly demanded that Cavour be removed, which alienated him slightly from Victor Emmanuel.

Garibaldi was unwilling to stop at this point, and planned an immediate invasion of the Papal States. Cavour feared France in that case would declare war to defend the Pope and successfully stopped Garibaldi from initiating his attack. Garibaldi had been weakened by the Battle of Volturno, so Cavour quickly invaded the Papal regions of Umbria and Marche. This linked the territories conquered by Piedmont with those taken by Garibaldi. The King met with Garibaldi, who handed over control of southern Italy and Sicily, thus uniting Italy.

The relationship between Cavour and Garibaldi was always fractious: Cavour likened Garibaldi to "a savage" while Garibaldi memorably called Cavour "a low intriguer".

Prime Minister of Italy

In 1861, Victor Emmanuel II declared the Kingdom of Italy, making Cavour Prime Minister of Italy. Cavour had many difficult issues to consider, including how to create a national military, which legal institutions should be retained in what locations, and especially the future of Rome. Most Italians thought Rome must be capital of a united Italy, but this conflicted with the temporal power of the Pope and also the independence of the Church. Cavour believed that Rome should remain the seat of "a free church in a free state", which would maintain its independence but give up temporal power. These issues would become known as the " Roman Question". Still Austrian Venetia was also a problem. Cavour recognized that Venice must be an integral part of Italy but refused to take a stance on how to achieve it, saying "Will the deliverance of Venice come by arms or diplomacy? I do not know. It is the secret of Providence." A motion approving of his foreign policy passed by a huge majority, basically only opposed by left-wing and right-wing extremist groups.

Creating Italy was no easy task, but ruling it proved a worse strain on the Prime Minister. In 1861, at the peak of his career, months of long days coupled with insomnia and constant worry took their toll on Cavour. He fell ill, presumably of malaria, and to make matters worse insisted upon being bled. His regular doctor would have refused, but he was not available; so Cavour was bled several times until it was nearly impossible to draw any blood from him. He was buried in Santena, near Turin.

After his death, Italy would gain Venice in 1866 in the course of the Third Italian War of Independence, connected to the Austro-Prussian War. The Capture of Rome completed the unification of Italy (aside from Trentino and Trieste) in 1870.

Today, many Italian cities, including Turin, Trieste, Rome, Florence, and Naples, have important streets, squares, piazzas, and metro stations named after Cavour, as well as Mazzini and Garibaldi. The clipper ship, Camille Cavour, the battleship Conte di Cavour, which fought both in World War I and World War II, and the new Marina Militare aircraft carrier Cavour is also named in his honor.

In 1865, the Collegio dei Nobili, the oldest high school in Turin (founded 1568), and among the oldest and most prominent ones in Italy, was renamed the Liceo Ginnasio statale "Camillo Benso di Cavour" (Liceo classico Cavour).[citation needed ]

Beales, Derek & Eugenio Biagini. The Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. Second Edition. London: Longman, 2002. ISBN 0-582-36958-4

Braun, Martin. "'Great Expectations': Cavour and Garibaldi: 1859-1959." History Today (Oct. 1959) 9#10 pp 687-692; historiography

Dal Lago, Enrico. "Lincoln, Cavour, and National Unification: American Republicanism and Italian Liberal Nationalism in Comparative Perspective." Journal of the Civil War Era 3#1 (2013): 85-113.

Di Scala, Spencer. Italy: From Revolution to Republic, 1700 to the Present. (Boulder, Westview Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8133-4176-0

Hearder, Harry. Cavour (1994) excerpt, a scholarly biography

Holt, Edgar. The Making of Italy: 1815-1870. New York: Murray Printing Company, 1971.

Kertzer, David. Prisoner of the Vatican. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ISBN 0-618-22442-4

Mack Smith, Denis. Cavour. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. ISBN 0416421806, a scholarly biography, quite critical of Cavour online review; online review

Mack Smith, Denis. Italy: A Modern History. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1959.

Murtaugh, Frank M. Cavour and the Economic Modernization of the Kingdom of Sardinia (1991).

Norwich, John Julius. The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean. New York: Doubleday, 2006. ISBN 978-0-385-51023-3

Thayer, William Roscoe (1911). The Life and Times of Cavour vol 1. old interpretations but useful on details; vol 1 goes to 1859]; volume 2 online covers 1859-62

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Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour - Wikipedia

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Camillo Paolo Filippo Giulio Benso, Count of Cavour, Isolabella and Leri (10 August 1810 - 6 June 1861), generally known as Cavour ( kə-VOOR , Italian: ), was an Italian statesman and a leading figure in the movement towards Italian unification.

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Italian opera, literature, visual arts, architecture in the 1800''s.

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political and social revolution in 1866-1869, returned the emperor into a central position in Japan.

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Tokugawa Period and Meiji Restoration Exclusive Videos & Features - HISTORY.com

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Check out exclusive Tokugawa Period and Meiji Restoration videos and features. Browse the latest Tokugawa Period and Meiji Restoration videos and more on HISTORY.com.

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In October 1850 another prominent moderate, Camillo Benso di Cavour, entered the cabinet and directed a laissez-faire economic policy. In 1852, through an alliance with centre-left deputies that became known as the connubio (“marriage”).
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The role of Piedmont

In Piedmont Victor Emmanuel II governed with a parliament whose democratic majority refused to ratify the peace treaty with Austria. This was an exception to the general course of reaction. The skillfully worded Proclamation of Moncalieri (November 20, 1849) favourably contrasted Victor Emmanuel's policies with those of other Italian rulers and permitted elections. The victorious Liberals installed a new cabinet under Massimo d'Azeglio, a moderate trusted by the king. D'Azeglio introduced the Siccardi law, which curtailed the power of ecclesiastical courts. In October 1850 another prominent moderate, Camillo Benso di Cavour, entered the cabinet and directed a laissez-faire economic policy. He formulated international commercial treaties and drew on foreign capital to reduce the public debt, stimulate economic growth, and develop a railroad system. Cavour's dynamism alarmed conservatives and even d'Azeglio. In 1852, through an alliance with centre-left deputies that became known as the connubio ("marriage"), Cavour displaced d'Azeglio as head of the cabinet. Despite disagreements with the king (who favoured the clerical party and occasionally displayed absolutist tendencies), Cavour introduced various ecclesiastical, judicial, and fiscal reforms.

A number of events promoted Piedmont's prestige in Italy and abroad. In March 1854 France and England intervened in support of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the Crimean War. To obtain Austrian support, they were prepared to guarantee the status quo in Italy. Only Piedmont was in a position to disrupt it at that time, and Cavour negotiated an alliance with the Western powers. In May he sent to Crimea an army that performed brilliantly. As a result, Piedmont was able to assume a place among the victors at the Congress of Paris (February 1856). From this platform Cavour, achieving a diplomatic coup for Piedmont and Italy, declared that the only threat to peace in Italy, and the root cause of subversive plots, was the burdensome Austrian overlordship. Cavour's pronouncements at the congress increased the standing of Piedmont among nationalists.

Meanwhile, Mazzini's democratic and republican movement was crumbling. In February 1853 an insurrection against the Austrians failed in Milan. The discovery and execution at Belfiore (1852-53) of the leaders of a conspiracy in Mantua, as well as abortive insurrections in Cadore and Lunigiana, discredited the democratic movement and discouraged its most dedicated adherents. Mazzini faced complete isolation for his support of an expedition to the southern mainland to incite insurrection, known as the Sapri expedition (June-July 1857), in which the Neapolitan republican and socialist Carlo Pisacane and some 300 companions lost their lives. The democrats were divided and unable to carry on the revolutionary struggle; nothing was to be expected from the restored governments. In Lombardy-Venetia, Austria carried out stern repressive measures. Pius IX, now under the influence of the reactionary Giacomo Cardinal Antonelli, refused to grant any reforms in Rome. Liberal Catholicism could not remain viable without reforms in the Papal States. In Naples and the duchies, reaction became pervasive, although the grand duke of Tuscany sought to make his subjects forget that he owed his throne to Austrian military intervention. Only in Piedmont was there any hope left for the reformers.

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Italy - Unification, Risorgimento, Nation-State

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Italy - Unification, Risorgimento, Nation-State: In Piedmont Victor Emmanuel II governed with a parliament whose democratic majority refused to ratify the peace treaty with Austria. This was an exception to the general course of reaction. The skillfully worded Proclamation of Moncalieri (November 20, 1849) favourably contrasted Victor Emmanuel's policies with those of other Italian rulers and permitted elections.

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This article talks the major events happening at this time. Showing us multiple countries that Japan conquered over the years

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Visit this site for this Timeline Of Ancient Japan detailing Key historical dates and events. Fast facts and information for students, children & kids via the Timeline Of Ancient Japan. The Timeline Of Ancient Japan provides a record of events in the order of their occurrence.

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This website has a chart which shows the country's spending on military from 1830 to 1913.

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OWID presents work from many different people and organizations. When citing this entry, please also cite the original data source. This entry can be cited as:

Max Roser and Mohamed Nagdy (2017) - 'Military Spending'. Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/military-spending/ [Online Resource]

Military spending is intimately linked to war. In times of peace, few countries spend more than 5% of GDP on their military, choosing instead to maintain their capabilities and make use of their armies in other ways.

# Empirical View

# Historical Perspective

There are two ways in which we might want to measure military spending; the first way is spending in real terms and the second is as a percentage of GDP. Military expenditure in real terms is important since the absolute level of expenditure matters for the outcome of war. The US spending 10% of its GDP fighting a war is likely to defeat a low or middle income country spending 50% or more of its GDP. Yet, military expenditure as a percentage of GDP allows us to get a handle on the priorities and ambitions of a country.

The military expenditure of a country is largely determined by the whether it is at war or not. Outside of wartime, countries continue to spend substantial sums on maintaining their military capability. Below are two time series plots of military expenditure in real terms; the first is in thousands of 1900 UK pounds for the period 1830-1913, the second is in thousands of 2000 US dollars for the period 1914-2007.

The extent to which war influences military spending is demonstrated in the visualisation below. The UK's military spending as a percentage of GDP in peacetime fluctuates around 2.5%, in times of war however, military spending rises dramatically. At the height of the Second World War, the UK was spending around 53% of its GDP on its military. Such a dramatic rise is consistent with the existential danger faced by the UK during the Second World War.

# Military Expenditure Today and in the Future

The following visualisations provide a snapshot of military expenditure in the world today and into the future. World military expenditure in 2014 was dominated by the United States, with the top 5 completed by China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United Kingdom. Projections of Military expenditure in 2045 suggest that while the US will continue to be the largest spender, nevertheless China is expected to close the gap considerably.

Top ten military expenditures in US$ Bn., 2014 - International Institute for Strategic Studies

The following map displays military expenditure as a percentage of GDP. Military spending is particularly high in the Middle East, a region that has experienced dozens of conflicts since the Second World War. Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen all have very high levels of military expenditure relative to GDP and are all either currently engaged in conflict or have been in recent years. Two other countries that rank highly are Eritrea and North Korea, both of which are in perpetual conflicts with their neighbours Ethiopia and South Korea, respectively. It is estimated that North Korea spends roughly one-third of their national income on defence.

Projections of defence spending in 2045 - Global Strategic Trends, UK Government (2014)

# Data Sources

# Correlates of War Dataset (COW)

# Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)

Data: SIPRI Military Expenditure Database; "The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database contains consistent time series on the military spending of 171 countries since 1988, and of NATO member states from 1949 or from when they joined NATO. "

Geographical coverage: Global by country

Time span: 1949-2014

Available at: http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/milex/milex_database

# International Historical Statistics (Brian Mitchell)

Data: National accounts data

Geographical coverage: Global by country

Time span: Long time series with annual observations - from 19th century up to today (2010)

Available at: Online here

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Military spending is intimately linked to war. In times of peace, few countries spend more than 5% of GDP on their military, choosing instead to maintain their capabilities and make use of their armies in other ways. Empirical View Historical Perspective There are two ways in which we migh

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The government of France is a unique hybrid of presidential and parliamentary systems that reflect rich political traditions and culture - The conflictual political culture of France currently is somewhat more consensual than in the past.

Economic, social and geographical characteristics
French political culture is greatly influence by economic, social, and geographical characteristics of France.

Important characteristics of the French population have shaped the political culture. France is the least densely populated country in Europe, with an approximate population of 57 million. Although the typical French citizen lives in an urban area today, the agricultural areas of France remain strong. A big social and economic gap exists between Parisiens and the rest of the country with per capita income in Paris about 60% higher than in the rest of the country. The Northeast Quadrant around Paris is highly urbanized and industrialized, while the west and the south remain rural and agricultural. France is famous for its wine, produce, poultry, grains, and geese.

The geography of France has influenced its political, economic, and cultural development. Its fertile soil has played a large role in the country's reputation as a world culinary centre. France has extensive coastal areas on the Atlantic Ocean, English Channel, and Mediterranean Sea, so fishing and shipping play a significant role in the French economy.

Importance of ideology and history
The French are fascinated with their own history and love abstract and symbolic discussions. Perhaps this modern characteristics has its roots in the days of the absolute monarchs when intellectuals and bourgeoisie had no status, and in response to their demands, the monarchs gave them the right to discuss abstractions freely.

Distrust of government and politics
The modern tendency to distrust government probably has its roots in the French Revolution and the resulting conflicts between monarchists and republicans. The tendency to think that centralized government is not to be trusted does not affect the loyalty that the local government officials or representatives inspire. The citizen seems to believe that all deputies to the National Assembly are not to be trusted, with the exception of his/her own.

Nationalism
The legitimacy of the government is based largely on a broad-based nationalism, a pride in France, love of history, and instinct to preserve French culture that is alive in the hearts of most French citizens. Despite the conflict and disagreements, French political culture is held together by this very important nationalism.

Conflictual political culture
A very strong characteristic of the French political culture is the agreement to disagree. The division in political opinions into "left" and "right" goes back to the French Revolution, and remains an important force today. Consensus often has been reached by uniting behind a strong, charismatic leader, only to be lost when the leader dies or goes into disfavour. Cycles of consensus followed by alienation seem to be typical of the French political culture.

Source: http://www.prs.k12.nj.us/~ewood/CompGovt/France/Frenchpolcul.html
Topics

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The government of France is a unique hybrid of presidential and parliamentary systems that reflect rich political traditions and culture - The conflictual political culture of France currently is somewhat more consensual than in the past. Economic, social and geographical characteristics French political culture is greatly influence by economic, social, and geographical characteristics of France.

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Conflicts and political differences between Italy and nearby countries and its people 

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Conflicts and political differences between Italy and nearby countries and its people 

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Europe between 1850 and World War One: Mass Politics and State Authority. Used French intervention in Italy and French wars of imperial conquest in Asia an . After a series of disagreements, he pressured Bismarck.
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Europe between 1850 and World War One: Mass Politics and State Authority
Conservative reaction after 1848

by end of 1851, conservative order restored everywhere (including France under Louis Napoleon)

Conservative elites need to find way to "control movements for manhood suffrage and nationalism, to use these as props to support rule of traditional elites

Liberals, frightened by 1848, need to find a way to make change (extending voting rights, promoting free trade, national unification, etc) without risking radical social revolution from the lower classes

Socialists and the radical left debate over how to make social revolution-through peaceful electoral political means, through violent revolution, through terrorism? By organizing mass political parties, or by organizing conspiratorial movements?

One case in which these issues can be seen is Englan d.

* Failure of the Chartist Movement to win political reforms and extend voting rights in 1840s.

* Loose coalition of left liberals, radical republicans, and socialists push for voting reform in 1850s

* Conservative Party (Tories) led by Disraeli push for even wider voting reforms in late 1850s, based on belief that the lower classes are basically conservative and nationalistic, and will support Tories if they promote imperialism/patriotism
Another case is Prussia (northern Germany)

Collapse of revolutionary movement in 1849, King Fredrich Wilhelm back grants a constitution

Prussian constitution gives King special executive authority: names ministers, controls diplomacy and military, can disband legislature at will

Legislature's main power is control over budget

legislature elected by universal manhood suffrage, but by voting curia, so votes of big landowners count more than votes of peasants, urban workers, or the middle class

underlying conservativism of Prussian political culture reinforces authoritarian pseudo-democracy.

Another case is France under Louis Napoleon Bonaparte

To put down left opposition, LNB used police state tactics (spies, arrests, political trials) and restrictions on civil liberties (no freedom of speech , press, or assembly in 1850s)

To draw support from wide range of population, LNB granted universal manhood suffrage. He could claim that France was democratic, and he could use mass support to defend himself from critics. Repression prevented danger from the left, and his real opposition came from monarchists. He could not repress them, because he needed them to cooperate in governing vs the left.

To manipulate mass support, LNB use propaganda skillfully and presented himself as "all things to all people," friend of the common man, friend of the worker, of the business man, of the farmer, etc.

To boost mass support and reduce danger of revolution, LNB initiated new social legislation, e.g., clearing out and re-building slum sections of cities, building sewer systems, etc. Also re-legalized unions (although they were filled with police spies)

To boost mass support, LNB emphasized the link between patriotism and foreign policy. Used French intervention in Italy and French wars of imperial conquest in Asia and Africa to rally the public "around the flag" and promote idea that his rule was responsible for France's status as a world power.

To build support from middle classes and promote economic growth, LNB subsidized economic development, esp. the RRs. Also promoted banking reforms to make more capital available to business, and legal reforms to make it easier to form corporations.

All these measures had multiple aims-one clear aim was turning the lower classes away from radical politics and reducing the threat of radical (social) revolution.

The Crimean War (1854-56) came in the middle of this decade of conservative reaction.

Russia was pursuing the goal of expanding its control in Black Sea at expense of Turkey.

Austria saw this as threat because of danger of Slavic nationalism, but stayed "neutral." Prussia stayed out of war but supported Russia.

France and England both supported the Turks, out of fear that Russia would gain access to Mediterranean. Two year war proved to be humiliating to Russia. It gained minor territory, but its status as a Great Power was damaged. This would lead to major reforms in Russia in the 1 860s.

1860s: A decade of conservative-led change
Reforms in Russia. In early 1860s, the new Tsar Alexander II led a series of major reforms with the aim of building up Russia's economy and military. These included:

Abolishing serfdom, but keeping the peasants tied to their villages, with village (not private) ownership of land, and requiring that peasants pay the State for the cost of emancipation (the State had paid serf owners for the loss of their "property"

Reorganizing the military

Creating a new legal system based upon trials in open courts

Reorganizing education

Creating elected quasi-local government agencies, etc.

Three crucial ideas to keep in mind about these reforms:

1) they were change "from above," by the Autocratic regime, in an effort to keep Russia and world power and preserve the system of Autocratic rule

2) they did successfully accelerate the processes of capitalist economic development and urbanization in Russia, together with all of the social changes that go along with such processes (the growth of new social classes, etc.)

3) the limited and often contradictory nature of these reforms (serfs freed but with little land and required to pay the state for emancipation, local governments created but given no real decision making authority, attempt to build rule of law at the same time as continued centralized control of Autocratic regime that was not limited by any constitution, etc) would contribute to great social and economic tensions. This helps explain the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917. Radical intellectuals saw these reforms as disappointing half-measures that kept the system of Autocracy (the Russian form of Absolutism) in place. As a result, a radical revolutionary movement began to emerge in Russia in the 1860s.

Italian Unification:

In 1848, liberal movement for Italian unification led by radical nationalists like G. Mazzini. When (incomplete) unification finally occurred, it was largely the result of efforts by Conservative statesman Count Cavour of Piedmont-Sardinia.

In the late 1858 Cavour together with Louis Napoleon's France launched a war against Austrian control over much of Northern Italy. (LNB wanted to weaken Austria and wanted some territorial gains [ Nice]). But in 1859, LNB backed out of the war (in part afraid of political conflict with the Vatican). Cavour's war with Austria was largely successful, but Italy was still divided into multiple kingdoms.

Cavour did not want to work with the more radical nationalist groups, because he feared any potential for social revolution led by liberals (and especially by socialists). But in 1860 in the southern parts of Italy, the leftist nationalist leader Garibaldi led a successful rebellion/war against the Bourbon monarchy in Sicily and in southern Italy.

The division between the supporters of Cavour and those of Garibaldi was based on two major issues: should a united Italy be a centralized state (Cavour's view) or a federation; and should unification leave the old aristocratic ruling class and the wealthiest elements of the bourgeoisie in power (Cavour's position). To cut off Garibaldi's advance, Cavour invaded central Italy (including the Papal States) in August 1860 (with support from France). [ forces soon had to withdraw from the Papal States] He then pressured Garibaldi into accepting the annexation of the south into a "united" Italy under the control of Piedmont-Sardinia.

The Piedmontese King, Victor Emmanual , now became the constitutional monarch of a "united" Italy. The new government was based upon a highly centralized state system (with Turin as the capital), with the institutions of Piedomont imposed on the rest of the country. In practice, though, the country was hardly unified; deep regional loyalties and rivalries remained, the country was far from any kind of cultural "national" unity, and the danger of rebellion against the center was considerable. Still, what Cavour had done was achieve "unity" from "above," without any social revolution that would have disrupted the power of existing elites.
Germany and unification in the 1860s:
The revolutions of 1848 had failed to unify Germany. In Prussia, King Fredrich Wilhelm had restored monarchical rule and established a new "authoritarian" constitutional system (previous lecture). Germany would be unified around Prussia in the 1 860s, as a result of the efforts of King Wilhelm I and his brilliant conservative minister Otto von Bismarck.

The death of Fredrich Wilhem in 1861 brought to Prussian throne Wilhelm I, who believed that Prussia would united Germany through its military and economic dominance. In 1861-62, Wilhelm's attempts to institute a new military buildup were blocked by liberals in the legislature, who feared it would further strengthen the Junkers (and who wanted a "citizens' army"). This led to a constitutional crisis. Wilhelm appointed Bismarck, a conservative Junker, as his prime minister. Bismarck dissolved the parliament, repressed the left liberals, divided the opposition by making promises of concessions to the right liberals, and in this was controlled the legislature by the end of 1862. Bismarck laid out his agenda for unification in his 1862 "blood and iron" speech. Unification through military and economic might and ultra nationalism. The key question was, would Germany unite around Prussia in North or Austria in South?. The Prussians under Bismarck quickly strengthened their trade agreements with northern German states. But unifying the rest of Germany would require war.

In 1866, a conflict with Austria over who would politically dominate the territory of Holstein gave Bismarck a chance to whip up ultra-nationalistic fervor in northern Germany in favor of war. Prussia easily defeated Austria, which cemented its dominance in the north. But Catholic southern German states resisted Prussian dominance and would not join the new German confederation. Bismarck had united northern Germany without any social revolution, in a way that put the Prussian elites in power. Now, to do the same over the south, he would use a war against France, in 1870-71.
Louis Napoleon and France in the 1860s:
Support for Louis Napoleon began to disappear in the mid-1860s, due to conflicts with the Catholic Church and the small business community and the re-emerging radicalism of the workers movement. In response, and facing opposition from liberals in the parliament, LNB made a series of concessions (e.g., he restored freedom of press and limited free public assembly in 1868 and accepted parliamentary review of government policies in July 1869). The new constitution of 1870 made significant concessions to parliament, but it also recognized Louis Napoleon as the head of state. Parliament began asserting its independence in early 1870, in particular over issues of foreign policy. Parliament and LNB competed with each other to appear "tougher" on the issue of Spanish succession, in which France opposed Prussia's efforts to place a member of Prussian King Wilhelm's family on the Spanish throne. Both factions in French politics hoped to use confrontation with Prussia as a tool to secure their own domestic political goals.
The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71:
On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia. The war was a disaster for France, and after several major military defeats, LNB removed the Premier appointed by parliament and again assumed control over all aspects of government. On 2 September 1870, LNB was captured at the front in yet another French defeat. On 4 September, the parliament declared France a Republic (the Third Republic) and formed a "Government of National Defense." But on 19 September, the Prussians placed Paris under a state of siege. The city was blockaded and starved.

On 2 January 1871, the French government capitulated to Prussia, and asked that it be allowed to hold new elections before signing the peace treaty. Elections were held on 8 February, and a National Assembly began meeting on 12 February. On 23 February 1871, the Assembly appointed an old Liberal leader (Thiers) to form a new government. On 26 February, Thiers signed a peace treaty with the German Empire that 1) gave Germany 500 sq. miles of economically important territory (Alsace and Lorraine), with a population of 1.5 million; 2 required that France pay an indemnity. Under the treaty, German troops were to occupy Paris on 1 March 1871.
The Paris Commune:
On 18 March, the remaining population of Paris and the Paris National Guard refused to disarm and allow the Germans to enter the city. When ordered to do so by the government, they rebelled and seized control over the city. Thiers and the government then fled. On 19 March the people of Paris began elections for the Paris Commune, an absolutely democratic self-government. All men voted, and in most districts women voted, too. The Commune began meeting on 28 March: in addition to organizing the defense of the city, the Commune also instituted a large number of democratic social reforms. On 6 April 1871, the French government and army attacked the Commune. The Communards defended the city successfully until 21 May, when the army broke its way into the city. A week of bloody fighting followed, and on 28 May 1871 the last fighters of the Commune were killed. Over 100,000 people were then arrested: many were executed, and thousands were exiled. This was the last major popular uprising in France until the 1960s. On 31 August 1871, Thiers was selected as President of the Third Republic. He would be overthrown by conservative General MacMahonon in 1873. Political dominance of the Third Republic would thereafter bounce back and forth between conservatives and right-liberals.
German Unification and Its Challenges:
In 1870-71, Bismarck and King Wilhelm used the Franco-Prussian War to pull the remaining southern principalities (except Austria) into a united German Empire. The German Empire was declared on 21 January 1871.

Bismarck initially sought broad political support for unification by appealing to center-liberal political factions. But when in 1873 the world economy went into a depression (known world-wide at the time as the "Great Depression"), and the German middle class moved further to the right in its political sentiment, Bismarck abandoned his policy of compromise with liberals and built a political of the center-right and far right. This political alignment would dominate Germany through World War One.
Social tensions in the united Germany

Cultural Tensions--between the Lutheran culture of the North and the Catholic culture of the South, made worse by Bismarck's policy of "Culture Wars" against Catholicism in the 1 870s

Social tensions--The Junkers and other aristocrats were politically dominant but were increasingly economically threatened. In particular, free trade policies would have undermined their positions as agricultural capitalists.

The Middle Class was of growing economic importance, but still lacked real political power.

The Lower Middle Class was being "squeezed" by the growth of big business.

The peasants, especially in the South, were threatened by the kulturkampf and by trade policies that favored the Junkers.

The Working Class grew in numbers as the economy industrialized, and workers in Germany were very politically active. Although in the South, the Catholic political parties and trade unions had much influence among workers, in the North the most important political organization among workers was the German Social Democratic Labor Party--the socialist party founded by Karl Marx.

Political tensions: The right-center and conservative political parties-- mostly supported by the Junkers and some big industrialists--rallied around Bismarck and dominated politics, but they represented only a minority of the population. Most of the middle class supported various "centerist" and liberal parties. But the Social Democrats were by far the biggest political party.

By the 1 890s, the socialist party had more than 1 million members. This posed a potential threat to both the government and the middle class: The socialists had as their first goal the end of Germany's authoritarian system of constitutional monarchy and the establishment of a democratic republic; the socialists' longer term goal was ending capitalism and replacing capitalist society with a socialist society, in which there would be no private {or corporate] ownership of business, industry, or land.

Policies to Promote Conservative Stability in the German Empire, 1871-1914

Under Bismarck's leadership and even once Bismarck had been replaced in 1890, the German government followed a complex strategy to restrain social and political tensions and hold on to power. (When Emperor Wilhelm I died in 1888, the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, found himself at odds with Bismarck; after a series of disagreements, he pressured Bismarck to resign in 1890).

State support for big business: the government both became a major consumer of industrial goods (especially military industrial goods) and made legal changes that encouraged the growth of big corporate conglomerates.

In particular, in made it easier to form corporations--these have the advantage of being able to raise large sums of capital by selling stock, and they protect investors from legal claims against them as individuals. In Germany, large "cartels" formed that integrated corporations vertically (so that a corporation might control all of the industries that provide it with goods and services, thereby reducing costs and increasing profits) and horizontally (so that a corporation can control many or all of the companies in a particular industry, thereby eliminating competition and increasing profits). This was in keeping with the wide-spread trend away from laissez-faire and towards "organized capitalism."

The Marriage of Iron and Rye: to protect the incomes and power of the Junkers, the state imposed high tariffs on imported grain. This raised the price of imported grain and gave an advantage to the Junkers; whose large estates specialized in crops like rye. But raising the cost of grain hurt industrialists--it meant that the cost of living for workers was higher, and that forced industrialists to pay higher wages. [ also hurt the dairy- farming peasants of the South...]. The government's pro-big business policies were in part a way of securing a "balance" between the aristocrats and the industrialists--a marriage of Iron (the industrialists) and Rye (the aristocrats).

Negative Integration: The German government and its conservative supporters used all means within their grasp to define "good Germans" as those who were loyal to the Emperor and the government. Newspapers, churches, schools, and other shapers of public attitudes all stressed that certain categories of people were "un-German"--Jews, Gypsies, Poles and other ethnic minorities, and also socialists, anarchists, and even liberals who were "too critical" of the government. The point was to pressure people to conform politically and socially.

Socialization: The institutions responsible for socializing people--for teaching individuals how to fit into society and how to behave, emphasized that one should act like a "good German"--which meant conform politically and socially and respect and accept the leadership of the conservative elites. These institutions included schools, churches, universities, fraternities, the army, etc.

Social Imperialism: The German government undertook a policy of colonial expansion in Africa and in Asia during the 1 870s- 1914. This "imperialism" was partly motivated by economic concerns, which we will discuss in a later lecture. But is had a domestic political goal as well--the government used Germany's various victories in the colonies and its growing influence in the world to "rally people around the flag." The idea was that they could use "patriotism" to silence political dissent.

Social welfare programs: Bismarck (and the chancellors under Wilhelm II) understood that the socialists were popular among workers because the socialists' criticisms seemed to explain the great difficulties that workers faced in their daily lives. Bismarck outlawed almost all socialist party activities (the "anti-socialist laws" of 1878 and the anti-socialist trade union laws of 1879), but also introduced a number of social welfare programs designed to "take away the socialists' issues" by improving conditions for workers.

These reforms included a medical treatment bill for industrial workers (1883), an accident insurance act for industrial workers (1884), and the extension of insurance to agricultural workers (1886). In 1890, when Bismarck resigned, the government lifted the anti-socialist laws. but it continued issuing social reform measures like the 1891 factory inspection act.

This combination of policies may have prevented social tensions in Germany from boiling over into revolution. But they also helped reinforce the authoritarian aspects of German political culture, promoted ultra nationalism and intolerance towards minorities, and helped push Germany along the path that would lead to World War One, as we will see in a later lecture.

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Europe between 1850 and World War One: Mass Politics and State Authority Conservative reaction after 1848 by end of 1851, conservative order restored everywhere (including France under Louis Napoleon) Conservative elites need to find way to "control movements for manhood suffrage and nationalism, to use these as props to support

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This website displays the government types in Germany during the 19th century.

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Otto von Bismark, depicted here, would unify Germany into one nation under Prussian influence over the course of the 19th century.

By the end of the 19th century, Germany, which had before been a collection of principalities under the Holy Roman Empire, was unified under Otto von Bismarck of Prussia into a single government. This unification was conducted through a series of wars over the course of the 19th century where Prussia established itself as the dominant German state, particularly over its rival, Austria.

Impact of Napoleon

Despite their future animosity, Austria and Prussia, along with other European nations including Russia and Great Britain, formed an alliance in 1803 to halt the growth of Napoleonic France. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte defeated this alliance and conquered Germany. He forced Emperor Francis II, at that point the Holy Roman Emperor in name only and really just the ruler of Austria, to abdicate and restructuring Germany's government into the Confederation of the Rhine, effectively a French client state. Prussia and Austria remained independent from this Confederation, and Francis II declared himself Emperor of a separate Austria.

Austro-Prussian Rivalry

Even after Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo by another coalition of countries in 1815 and the Confederation of the Rhine was dismantled, Austria and Prussia remained separate states, and established a new German Confederation in 1815 to reorganize the German principalities and act as a buffer. Over the course of the next half-decade, however, Austrian influence over the German states waned in the face of Prussian military expansion, and in 1866 the tension boiled over into the Ausro-Prussian War. The war lasted only seven weeks and was a humiliating defeat for Austria, and confirmed Prussian dominance over the German Confederation.

German Nationalism

The result of this war was the new North German Confederation of 1867, an alliance of German states that specifically excluded Austria and would form the basis for a unified Germany four years later, completed under Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The exclusion of Austria was on the one hand a way for Prussia to remain the dominant power in the new German state, but was also the product of German nationalism, which had been brewing throughout the German states since formation of the Confederation in 1815 and had existed in some form for much longer. Austria was at this time a multinational Empire and its citizens included many non-Germans, and so its inclusion in the new Germany would challenge this image of a unified Germany.

Unification

Ultimately, Bismarck declared Germany a unified nation in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian war. This war saw the Prussian military defeat France as it had Austria five years before. At the palace of Versailles in 1871 Bismarck announced the unification of Germany into an Empire that included all the German states but excluded Austria, as the North German Confederation had done four years earlier. With Wilhelm, King of Prussia, declared as Emperor, Prussian dominance over German government was complete.

Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images

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Government Type in Germany During the 19th Century | Synonym

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Otto von Bismark, depicted here, would unify Germany into one nation under Prussian influence over the course of the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, Germany, which had before been a collection of principalities under the Holy Roman Empire, was unified under Otto von Bismarck of Prussia into a single government.

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From 1820-1870, German emigrants migrated to South Eastern Europe because of religious prosecutions and economic hardships.

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Germany Emigration and Immigration Genealogy - FamilySearch Wiki

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Emigration and immigration sources list the names of people leaving (emigrating) or arriving (immigrating) in Germany. These sources may be passenger lists, permissions to emigrate, or records of passports issued. The information in these records may include the emigrants' names, ages, occupations, destinations, and places of origin or birth places.

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What was America Like in the Mid-1800s?

America was experiencing many growing pain in the middle of the 19 th Century. The country had grown with the addition of Texas to the United States and the land added through the war with Mexico. Settlers rushed to the west. Slavery was a obviously a continuing source of controversy. To better appreciate the events of Proviso and York Townships we should examine a few of these events.

These articles are from "Don't Know Much About History" by Kenneth C. Davis. The book (also available on audio tapes) is a very good chronology with articles and essays on key events in the history of the United States. The Society does not necessarily agree with some of editorializing, but Kenneth Davis' opinions still provide a valuable perspective to the times.

What was the Compromise of 1850? 1

The election of 1848 was really about the future of slavery and the Union. But you wouldn't know it from the chief candidates. The hero of the Mexican War, General Zachary Taylor, got the Whig nod without expressing or even possessing any opinions about the chief question of the day: the future of slavery in the new territories. The Democratic nominee, Lewis Cass, side-stepped the issue with a call for "popular sovereignty," or leaving the decision up to territorial governments. The only clear stand on slavery was taken by an aging Martin Van Buren, who had given up equivocating and was now running on the Free Soil ticket, a splinter group of antislavery Democrats. Taylor's image as the conquering hero won the popular nomination, and with Van Buren's third party draining Democratic votes from Cass, Taylor was elected.

Zachary Taylor, 12th President of the United States

As President, Taylor had no policy or plan to cope with the new territories, including the impact of the (California) Gold Rush on the American economy. But when California petitioned for admission as a free state in 1849, the issue was placed squarely once more before Congress, with the fate of the Union hanging in the balance. Southerners, who accepted the Oregon Territory as free didn't want slaves kept out of another state, especially one of California's size and wealth.

Only another compromise saved the Union for the moment this one as distasteful to abolitionists as all the others in history had been. A package of bills, mostly the work of the aging Henry Clay, were introduced and heatedly debated in the Senate, chiefly by the other two congressional giants of the age, Daniel Webster -- who was willing to accept limited slavery in preservation of the Union -- and John Calhoun. Because Calhoun was too ill to speak his views were presented by Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia. Vowing secession, Calhoun died before the Compromise was signed into law. New faces on the congressional stage also joined the fray. William Seward of New York weighed in with an impassioned antislavery speech. The new senator from Illinois Stephen Douglas, finally ramrodded the Compromise through by dividing it into five separate bills and pulling together sufficient support for each of these.

It was only Zachary Taylor's death in office in 1850 that finally allowed passage of the Compromise of 1850 Taylor's successor, Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), signed the five bills that made up the Compromise of 1850. Under these bills, California was admitted as a free state; New Mexico and Utah were organized without restrictions on slavery; Texas, also unrestricted as to slavery, had its boundaries set and received $10 million for the land that would become New Mexico; the slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished in the District of Columbia -- a new Fugitive Slave Act provided federal jurisdiction to assist slaveowners in the recovery of escaped slaves. It was the last of these bills that provoked the most controversy, since it gave slaveowners enormous powers to call on federal help in recovering escaped slaves. Under the law no black person was safe. Only an affidavit was needed to prove ownership. Commissioners were granted great powers -- thoroughly unconstitutional in modern light -- to make arrests. Even the expenses of capturing and returning a fugitive slave were to be borne by the federal government. Although the burden of proof was on them, accused fugitives were not entitled to a jury trial and couldn't defend themselves. And citizens who concealed, aided, or rescued fugitives were subject to harsh fines and imprisonment.

Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the United States

Suddenly free blacks, many of them presumably safely established for years in northern towns, were subject to seizure and transport back to the South. Angry mobs in several cities bolted at the law with violent protests. In Boston, seat of abolitionist activity, William and Ellen Craft, who gained fame when they escaped through a ruse that involved Ellen posing as the male owner of William, were defended and hidden from slave catchers. When federal, marshals snatched a fugitive named Shadrach, a mob of angry blacks overwhelmed the marshals and sent Shadrach to Montreal. Outraged by this defiance of federal law, President Fillmore sent troops to Boston to remove a seventeen-year-old captured slave named Thomas Sims.

Resistance grew elsewhere. In Syracuse, New York, a large group of mixed race broke into a jail and grabbed William McHenry, known as Jerry, from his captors, spiriting him off to Canada. And in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker town that openly welcomed fugitives, troops again were called out after some escaped slaves shot and killed an owner and then escaped to Canada. President Fillmore sent marines after these slaves, but Canada refused to extradite them. In the South, these were viewed as affronts to what was considered their property and honor. New anger was spilling over into renewed threats of the Union's dissolution.

What was "Manifest Destiny"? 2

The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of "Lotto Fever". In 1845 this fervor was christened. In an expansionist magazine, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, journalistic John L. O'Sullivan wrote of the "fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."

O'Sullivan's phrase, quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost a religious mission. Behind this vision was some ideological saber-rattling, but the greatest motivator was greed, the obsessive desire for Americans to control the entire continent from Atlantic to Pacific. As each successive generation of Americans had pressed the fringes of civilization a little farther, this idea took on the passion of a sacred quest. The rapid westward movement of large group of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first traveled in 1847, first took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City And In the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.

The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still lay claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.

Why was Uncle Tom's Cabin the most important and controversial American novel of its time?3

The number of blacks actually captured and sent south under the Fugitive Slave Act was relatively small, perhaps three hundred. But the law did produce one practical effect. Calling the law a "nightmare abomination," a young woman decided to write a novel that shook the conscience of America and the world.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is certainly not the great American novel. It is far from the best-selling American novel, but for a long time it was surely the most significant American novel.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of Protestant clergymen. Her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, was a Calvinist minister who took the family to Cincinnati, where he headed a new seminary. There Harriet Beecher met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical literature. The seminary was a center of abolitionist sentiment, and a trip to nearby Kentucky provided the young woman with her only first-hand glimpse of slavery. In 1850 her husband took a teaching job at Bowdoin College in Maine, and there, after putting her children to bed at night, Stowe followed her family's urgings to write about the evils of slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly first appeared in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist journal. In 1852 a Boston publisher brought out the book in its complete form. Simplistic and overly melodramatic, the novel was also deeply affecting. The plot attempted to depict the lives of slaves and slaveholders through three primary characters:

Eliza, a slave who wants to keep her child who is about to be sold off, and sets off in search of the Underground Railroad;

Eva, the angelic but sickly daughter of a New Orleans plantation owner; and

Uncle Tom, the noble slave sold to a series of owners, but who retains his dignity through all the degradations he suffers in hopes of being reunited with his family.

That family, living together in Tom's idealized cabin on a Kentucky farm, represented the humanity of slaves, depicting them as husbands and wives, parents and children, in stark counterpoint to the common image of slaves as mere drudges.

Many of the book's characters were simply caricatures calculated to jolt tears from even the most heartless, but the book contained unforgettable images and scenes, perhaps the most famous of which was the picture of the barefoot Eliza, her child in her arms, leaping from one ice floe to another across the frozen Ohio River to escape a ruthless slave trader. There was the cherubic child Eva, trying to bring out the good in everyone in a weepy death scene; the vicious plantation owner, Simon Legree -- pointedly written as a transplanted Yankee -- vainly trying to break the will and spirit of Tom; and Uncle Tom himself, resilient and saintly, the novel's Christ-like central character, beaten by Legree but refusing to submit to overseeing the other slaves.

The reaction of the public -- North, South, and worldwide -- was astonishing. Sales reached 300,000 copies within a year. Foreign translations were published throughout Europe, and sales soon afterward exceeded 1.5 million copies worldwide, a staggering number of books for the mid-nineteenth century, when there were no paperbacks or big bookstore chains. A dramatic version played on stages around the world, making Stowe one of the most famous women in the world, although not necessarily wealthy; pirated editions were commonplace. The theatrical presentation also spawned a brand of popular minstrel entertainments called "Tom Shows," which provided the basis for the use of "Uncle Tom" as a derisive epithet for a black man viewed by other blacks as a shuffling lackey to whites.

In a time when slavery was discussed with dry legalisms and code words like "states' rights" and "popular sovereignty," this book personalized the question of slavery as no amount of abolitionist literature or congressional debate had. For the first time, thousands of whites got some taste of slavery's human suffering. In the South there was outraged indignation. Yet even there the book sold out. Stowe was criticized as naive or a liar. In one infamous incident, she received an anonymous parcel containing the ear of a disobedient slave. Faced with the charge that the book was deceitful, Stowe answered with A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which provided documentation that every incident in the novel had actually happened.

In 1862, Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe and reportedly said, "So you're the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war." The copies sold can be counted, but the emotional impact can't be calculated so easily. It is safe to say that no other literary work since 1776, when Tom Paine's Common Sense incited a wave of pro-Independence fervor, had the political impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

What forced the Republicans to start a new political party? 4

After (President) Polk left the White House in 1849, America was cursed by a string of Presidents who were at best mediocre and at worst ineffectual or incompetent. Polk's successor in the White House Zachary Taylor, had enormous battlefield experience but was in-prepared for the political wars of his administration. Before he had a chance to grow in office, he died of cholera in 1850 and was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore (1800-1874). Overshadowed by the congressional giants of his time -- Webster, Clay and Calhoun -- Fillmore made little impact in his abbreviated administration other than by winning passage of the Compromise of 1850 and dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open trade and diplomatic relations with Japan, a further extension of the Manifest Destiny" mood that had spilled past the California coast to overseas expansionism.

The campaign of 1852 brought another ineffectual leader to the White House in Franklin Pierce (1804-1869), and his election was symptomatic of the country's problems. The two major parties, Whig and Democrat, were fracturing over slavery and other sectional conflicts. Having once been a significant third-party factor, the Free Soil Party, which had opposed the Compromise of 1850, was leaderless. Looking for the battle-hero charm to work once more, the Whigs put up General Winfield Scott, the commander during the Mexican War. But this time the charm had worn out. A northern Democrat taking a southern stand, Pierce outpolled Scott easily, but in his attempts to appease southern Democrats he lost northern support and any hope of holding the middle ground against the two ends.

The election results meant political chaos. The Whigs were in a tailspin, no longer led by Clay and Webster, the two congressional masters who once gave the party its strength. Northern Democrats, rapidly outnumbered by the growing ranks of southerners in their party, were being pushed out. Out of the chaos came a new alliance. A series of meetings, the first occurring m Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, resulted in the birth of a new party known as the Republicans. A group of thirty congressmen adopted this party label on May 9, 1854. Although the Republicans made antislavery claims that attracted former Free Soilers and other antislavery groups, the party's opposition to extending slavery beyond its existing boundaries came from economic and political reasoning rather than from moral outrage. Essentially, the party appealed to the free, white workingman. Its basic tenet was that the American West must be open to free, white labor. Not only were the Republicans opposed to slaves in the West; they wanted all blacks kept out. This was hardly the ringing message of morality that we tend to associate with the antislavery movement, but it was a message that appealed to many in the North. In 1854 the Republicans won 100 seats in Congress. Just six years after the party was born, it would put its first President into the White House.

For the history of our local settlers, see Early Settler History (1833 - 1850).

1 "Don't Know Much About History", Kenneth C. Davis, pages 148-150
2 "Don't Know Much About History", Kenneth C. Davis, page 131
3 From "Don't Know Much About History", Kenneth C. Davis, pages 150-152
4 "Don't Know Much About History", Kenneth C. Davis, pages 153-154
Last Modified: 04/11/2003

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Carl Mosk, University of Victoria

Japan achieved sustained growth in per capita income between the 1880s and 1970 through industrialization. Moving along an income growth trajectory through expansion of manufacturing is hardly unique. Indeed Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States all attained high levels of income per capita by shifting from agrarian-based production to manufacturing and technologically sophisticated service sector activity.

Still, there are four distinctive features of Japan's development through industrialization that merit discussion:

The proto-industrial base

Japan's agricultural productivity was high enough to sustain substantial craft (proto-industrial) production in both rural and urban areas of the country prior to industrialization.

Investment-led growth

Domestic investment in industry and infrastructure was the driving force behind growth in Japanese output. Both private and public sectors invested in infrastructure, national and local governments serving as coordinating agents for infrastructure build-up.

Investment in manufacturing capacity was largely left to the private sector.

Rising domestic savings made increasing capital accumulation possible.

Japanese growth was investment-led, not export-led.

Total factor productivity growth - achieving more output per unit of input - was rapid.

On the supply side, total factor productivity growth was extremely important. Scale economies - the reduction in per unit costs due to increased levels of output - contributed to total factor productivity growth. Scale economies existed due to geographic concentration, to growth of the national economy, and to growth in the output of individual companies. In addition, companies moved down the "learning curve," reducing unit costs as their cumulative output rose and demand for their product soared.

The social capacity for importing and adapting foreign technology improved and this contributed to total factor productivity growth:

At the household level, investing in education of children improved social capability.

At the firm level, creating internalized labor markets that bound firms to workers and workers to firms, thereby giving workers a strong incentive to flexibly adapt to new technology, improved social capability.

At the government level, industrial policy that reduced the cost to private firms of securing foreign technology enhanced social capacity.

Shifting out of low-productivity agriculture into high productivity manufacturing, mining, and construction contributed to total factor productivity growth.

Dualism

Sharply segmented labor and capital markets emerged in Japan after the 1910s. The capital intensive sector enjoying high ratios of capital to labor paid relatively high wages, and the labor intensive sector paid relatively low wages.

Dualism contributed to income inequality and therefore to domestic social unrest. After 1945 a series of public policy reforms addressed inequality and erased much of the social bitterness around dualism that ravaged Japan prior to World War II.

The remainder of this article will expand on a number of the themes mentioned above. The appendix reviews quantitative evidence concerning these points. The conclusion of the article lists references that provide a wealth of detailed evidence supporting the points above, which this article can only begin to explore.

The Legacy of Autarky and the Proto-Industrial Economy: Achievements of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868)

Why Japan?

Given the relatively poor record of countries outside the European cultural area - few achieving the kind of "catch-up" growth Japan managed between 1880 and 1970 - the question naturally arises: why Japan? After all, when the United States forcibly "opened Japan" in the 1850s and Japan was forced to cede extra-territorial rights to a number of Western nations as had China earlier in the 1840s, many Westerners and Japanese alike thought Japan's prospects seemed dim indeed.

Tokugawa achievements: urbanization, road networks, rice cultivation, craft production

In answering this question, Mosk (2001), Minami (1994) and Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) emphasize the achievements of Tokugawa Japan (1600-1868) during a long period of "closed country" autarky between the mid-seventeenth century and the 1850s: a high level of urbanization; well developed road networks; the channeling of river water flow with embankments and the extensive elaboration of irrigation ditches that supported and encouraged the refinement of rice cultivation based upon improving seed varieties, fertilizers and planting methods especially in the Southwest with its relatively long growing season; the development of proto-industrial (craft) production by merchant houses in the major cities like Osaka and Edo (now called Tokyo) and its diffusion to rural areas after 1700; and the promotion of education and population control among both the military elite (the samurai) and the well-to-do peasantry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Tokugawa political economy: daimyo and shogun

These developments were inseparable from the political economy of Japan. The system of confederation government introduced at the end of the fifteenth century placed certain powers in the hands of feudal warlords, daimyo, and certain powers in the hands of the shogun, the most powerful of the warlords. Each daimyo - and the shogun - was assigned a geographic region, a domain, being given taxation authority over the peasants residing in the villages of the domain. Intercourse with foreign powers was monopolized by the shogun, thereby preventing daimyo from cementing alliances with other countries in an effort to overthrow the central government. The samurai military retainers of the daimyo were forced to abandon rice farming and reside in the castle town headquarters of their daimyo overlord. In exchange, samurai received rice stipends from the rice taxes collected from the villages of their domain. By removing samurai from the countryside - by demilitarizing rural areas - conflicts over local water rights were largely made a thing of the past. As a result irrigation ditches were extended throughout the valleys, and riverbanks were shored up with stone embankments, facilitating transport and preventing flooding.

The sustained growth of proto-industrialization in urban Japan, and its widespread diffusion to villages after 1700 was also inseparable from the productivity growth in paddy rice production and the growing of industrial crops like tea, fruit, mulberry plant growing (that sustained the raising of silk cocoons) and cotton. Indeed, Smith (1988) has given pride of place to these "domestic sources" of Japan's future industrial success.

Readiness to emulate the West

As a result of these domestic advances, Japan was well positioned to take up the Western challenge. It harnessed its infrastructure, its high level of literacy, and its proto-industrial distribution networks to the task of emulating Western organizational forms and Western techniques in energy production, first and foremost enlisting inorganic energy sources like coal and the other fossil fuels to generate steam power. Having intensively developed the organic economy depending upon natural energy flows like wind, water and fire, Japanese were quite prepared to master inorganic production after the Black Ships of the Americans forced Japan to jettison its long-standing autarky.

From Balanced to Dualistic Growth, 1887-1938: Infrastructure and Manufacturing Expand

Fukoku Kyohei

After the Tokugawa government collapsed in 1868, a new Meiji government committed to the twin policies of fukoku kyohei (wealthy country/strong military) took up the challenge of renegotiating its treaties with the Western powers. It created infrastructure that facilitated industrialization. It built a modern navy and army that could keep the Western powers at bay and establish a protective buffer zone in North East Asia that eventually formed the basis for a burgeoning Japanese empire in Asia and the Pacific.

Central government reforms in education, finance and transportation

Jettisoning the confederation style government of the Tokugawa era, the new leaders of the new Meiji government fashioned a unitary state with powerful ministries consolidating authority in the capital, Tokyo. The freshly minted Ministry of Education promoted compulsory primary schooling for the masses and elite university education aimed at deepening engineering and scientific knowledge. The Ministry of Finance created the Bank of Japan in 1882, laying the foundations for a private banking system backed up a lender of last resort. The government began building a steam railroad trunk line girding the four major islands, encouraging private companies to participate in the project. In particular, the national government committed itself to constructing a Tokaido line connecting the Tokyo/Yokohama region to the Osaka/Kobe conurbation along the Pacific coastline of the main island of Honshu, and to creating deepwater harbors at Yokohama and Kobe that could accommodate deep-hulled steamships.

Not surprisingly, the merchants in Osaka, the merchant capital of Tokugawa Japan, already well versed in proto-industrial production, turned to harnessing steam and coal, investing heavily in integrated spinning and weaving steam-driven textile mills during the 1880s.

Diffusion of best-practice agriculture

At the same time, the abolition of the three hundred or so feudal fiefs that were the backbone of confederation style-Tokugawa rule and their consolidation into politically weak prefectures, under a strong national government that virtually monopolized taxation authority, gave a strong push to the diffusion of best practice agricultural technique. The nationwide diffusion of seed varieties developed in the Southwest fiefs of Tokugawa Japan spearheaded a substantial improvement in agricultural productivity especially in the Northeast. Simultaneously, expansion of agriculture using traditional Japanese technology agriculture and manufacturing using imported Western technology resulted.

Balanced growth

Growth at the close of the nineteenth century was balanced in the sense that traditional and modern technology using sectors grew at roughly equal rates, and labor - especially young girls recruited out of farm households to labor in the steam using textile mills - flowed back and forth between rural and urban Japan at wages that were roughly equal in industrial and agricultural pursuits.

Geographic economies of scale in the Tokaido belt

Concentration of industrial production first in Osaka and subsequently throughout the Tokaido belt fostered powerful geographic scale economies (the ability to reduce per unit costs as output levels increase), reducing the costs of securing energy, raw materials and access to global markets for enterprises located in the great harbor metropolises stretching from the massive Osaka/Kobe complex northward to the teeming Tokyo/Yokohama conurbation. Between 1904 and 1911, electrification mainly due to the proliferation of intercity electrical railroads created economies of scale in the nascent industrial belt facing outward onto the Pacific. The consolidation of two huge hydroelectric power grids during the 1920s - one servicing Tokyo/Yokohama, the other Osaka and Kobe - further solidified the comparative advantage of the Tokaido industrial belt in factory production. Finally, the widening and paving during the 1920s of roads that could handle buses and trucks was also pioneered by the great metropolises of the Tokaido, which further bolstered their relative advantage in per capita infrastructure.

Organizational economies of scale - zaibatsu

In addition to geographic scale economies, organizational scale economies also became increasingly important in the late nineteenth centuries. The formation of the zaibatsu ("financial cliques"), which gradually evolved into diversified industrial combines tied together through central holding companies, is a case in point. By the 1910s these had evolved into highly diversified combines, binding together enterprises in banking and insurance, trading companies, mining concerns, textiles, iron and steel plants, and machinery manufactures. By channeling profits from older industries into new lines of activity like electrical machinery manufacturing, the zaibatsu form of organization generated scale economies in finance, trade and manufacturing, drastically reducing information-gathering and transactions costs. By attracting relatively scare managerial and entrepreneurial talent, the zaibatsu format economized on human resources.
Electrification
The push into electrical machinery production during the 1920s had a revolutionary impact on manufacturing. Effective exploitation of steam power required the use of large central steam engines simultaneously driving a large number of machines - power looms and mules in a spinning/weaving plant for instance - throughout a factory. Small enterprises did not mechanize in the steam era. But with electrification the "unit drive" system of mechanization spread. Each machine could be powered up independently of one another. Mechanization spread rapidly to the smallest factory.

Emergence of the dualistic economy

With the drive into heavy industries - chemicals, iron and steel, machinery - the demand for skilled labor that would flexibly respond to rapid changes in technique soared. Large firms in these industries began offering premium wages and guarantees of employment in good times and bad as a way of motivating and holding onto valuable workers. A dualistic economy emerged during the 1910s. Small firms, light industry and agriculture offered relatively low wages. Large enterprises in the heavy industries offered much more favorable remuneration, extending paternalistic benefits like company housing and company welfare programs to their "internal labor markets." As a result a widening gulf opened up between the great metropolitan centers of the Tokaido and rural Japan. Income per head was far higher in the great industrial centers than in the hinterland.

Clashing urban/rural and landlord/tenant interests

The economic strains of emergent dualism were amplified by the slowing down of technological progress in the agricultural sector, which had exhaustively reaped the benefits due to regional diffusion from the Southwest to the Northeast of best practice Tokugawa rice cultivation. Landlords - around 45% of the cultivable rice paddy land in Japan was held in some form of tenancy at the beginning of the twentieth century - who had played a crucial role in promoting the diffusion of traditional best practice techniques now lost interest in rural affairs and turned their attention to industrial activities. Tenants also found their interests disregarded by the national authorities in Tokyo, who were increasingly focused on supplying cheap foodstuffs to the burgeoning industrial belt by promoting agricultural production within the empire that it was assembling through military victories. Japan secured Taiwan from China in 1895, and formally brought Korea under its imperial rule in 1910 upon the heels of its successful war against Russia in 1904-05. Tenant unions reacted to this callous disrespect of their needs through violence. Landlord/tenant disputes broke out in the early 1920s, and continued to plague Japan politically throughout the 1930s, calls for land reform and bureaucratic proposals for reform being rejected by a Diet (Japan's legislature) politically dominated by landlords.

Japan's military expansion

Japan's thrust to imperial expansion was inflamed by the growing instability of the geopolitical and international trade regime of the later 1920s and early 1930s. The relative decline of the United Kingdom as an economic power doomed a gold standard regime tied to the British pound. The United States was becoming a potential contender to the United Kingdom as the backer of a gold standard regime but its long history of high tariffs and isolationism deterred it from taking over leadership in promoting global trade openness. Germany and the Soviet Union were increasingly becoming industrial and military giants on the Eurasian land mass committed to ideologies hostile to the liberal democracy championed by the United Kingdom and the United States. It was against this international backdrop that Japan began aggressively staking out its claim to being the dominant military power in East Asia and the Pacific, thereby bringing it into conflict with the United States and the United Kingdom in the Asian and Pacific theaters after the world slipped into global warfare in 1939.

Reform and Reconstruction in a New International Economic Order, Japan after World War II

Postwar occupation: economic and institutional restructuring

Surrendering to the United States and its allies in 1945, Japan's economy and infrastructure was revamped under the S.C.A.P (Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers) Occupation lasting through 1951. As Nakamura (1995) points out, a variety of Occupation-sponsored reforms transformed the institutional environment conditioning economic performance in Japan. The major zaibatsu were liquidated by the Holding Company Liquidation Commission set up under the Occupation (they were revamped as keiretsu corporate groups mainly tied together through cross-shareholding of stock in the aftermath of the Occupation); land reform wiped out landlordism and gave a strong push to agricultural productivity through mechanization of rice cultivation; and collective bargaining, largely illegal under the Peace Preservation Act that was used to suppress union organizing during the interwar period, was given the imprimatur of constitutional legality. Finally, education was opened up, partly through making middle school compulsory, partly through the creation of national universities in each of Japan's forty-six prefectures.

Improvement in the social capability for economic growth

In short, from a domestic point of view, the social capability for importing and adapting foreign technology was improved with the reforms in education and the fillip to competition given by the dissolution of the zaibatsu. Resolving tension between rural and urban Japan through land reform and the establishment of a rice price support program - that guaranteed farmers incomes comparable to blue collar industrial workers - also contributed to the social capacity to absorb foreign technology by suppressing the political divisions between metropolitan and hinterland Japan that plagued the nation during the interwar years.

Japan and the postwar international order

The revamped international economic order contributed to the social capability of importing and adapting foreign technology. The instability of the 1920s and 1930s was replaced with replaced with a relatively predictable bipolar world in which the United States and the Soviet Union opposed each other in both geopolitical and ideological arenas. The United States became an architect of multilateral architecture designed to encourage trade through its sponsorship of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (the predecessor to the World Trade Organization). Under the logic of building military alliances to contain Eurasian Communism, the United States brought Japan under its "nuclear umbrella" with a bilateral security treaty. American companies were encouraged to license technology to Japanese companies in the new international environment. Japan redirected its trade away from the areas that had been incorporated into the Japanese Empire before 1945, and towards the huge and expanding American market.

Miracle Growth: Soaring Domestic Investment and Export Growth, 1953-1970

Its infrastructure revitalized through the Occupation period reforms, its capacity to import and export enhanced by the new international economic order, and its access to American technology bolstered through its security pact with the United States, Japan experienced the dramatic "Miracle Growth" between 1953 and the early 1970s whose sources have been cogently analyzed by Denison and Chung (1976). Especially striking in the Miracle Growth period was the remarkable increase in the rate of domestic fixed capital formation, the rise in the investment proportion being matched by a rising savings rate whose secular increase - especially that of private household savings - has been well documented and analyzed by Horioka (1991). While Japan continued to close the gap in income per capita between itself and the United States after the early 1970s, most scholars believe that large Japanese manufacturing enterprises had by and large become internationally competitive by the early 1970s. In this sense it can be said that Japan had completed its nine decade long convergence to international competitiveness through industrialization by the early 1970s.

MITI

There is little doubt that the social capacity to import and adapt foreign technology was vastly improved in the aftermath of the Pacific War. Creating social consensus with Land Reform and agricultural subsidies reduced political divisiveness, extending compulsory education and breaking up the zaibatsu had a positive impact. Fashioning the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (M.I.T.I.) that took responsibility for overseeing industrial policy is also viewed as facilitating Japan's social capability. There is no doubt that M.I.T.I. drove down the cost of securing foreign technology. By intervening between Japanese firms and foreign companies, it acted as a single buyer of technology, playing off competing American and European enterprises in order to reduce the royalties Japanese concerns had to pay on technology licenses. By keeping domestic patent periods short, M.I.T.I. encouraged rapid diffusion of technology. And in some cases - the experience of International Business Machines (I.B.M.), enjoying a virtual monopoly in global mainframe computer markets during the 1950s and early 1960s, is a classical case - M.I.T.I. made it a condition of entry into the Japanese market (through the creation of a subsidiary Japan I.B.M. in the case of I.B.M.) that foreign companies share many of their technological secrets with potential Japanese competitors.

How important industrial policy was for Miracle Growth remains controversial, however. The view of Johnson (1982), who hails industrial policy as a pillar of the Japanese Development State (government promoting economic growth through state policies) has been criticized and revised by subsequent scholars. The book by Uriu (1996) is a case in point.

Internal labor markets, just-in-time inventory and quality control circles

Furthering the internalization of labor markets - the premium wages and long-term employment guarantees largely restricted to white collar workers were extended to blue collar workers with the legalization of unions and collective bargaining after 1945 - also raised the social capability of adapting foreign technology. Internalizing labor created a highly flexible labor force in post-1950 Japan. As a result, Japanese workers embraced many of the key ideas of Just-in-Time inventory control and Quality Control circles in assembly industries, learning how to do rapid machine setups as part and parcel of an effort to produce components "just-in-time" and without defect. Ironically, the concepts of just-in-time and quality control were originally developed in the United States, just-in-time methods being pioneered by supermarkets and quality control by efficiency experts like W. Edwards Deming. Yet it was in Japan that these concepts were relentlessly pursued to revolutionize assembly line industries during the 1950s and 1960s.

Ultimate causes of the Japanese economic "miracle"

Miracle Growth was the completion of a protracted historical process involving enhancing human capital, massive accumulation of physical capital including infrastructure and private manufacturing capacity, the importation and adaptation of foreign technology, and the creation of scale economies, which took decades and decades to realize. Dubbed a miracle, it is best seen as the reaping of a bountiful harvest whose seeds were painstakingly planted in the six decades between 1880 and 1938. In the course of the nine decades between the 1880s and 1970, Japan amassed and lost a sprawling empire, reorienting its trade and geopolitical stance through the twists and turns of history. While the ultimate sources of growth can be ferreted out through some form of statistical accounting, the specific way these sources were marshaled in practice is inseparable from the history of Japan itself and of the global environment within which it has realized its industrial destiny.

Appendix: Sources of Growth Accounting and Quantitative Aspects of Japan's Modern Economic Development

One of the attractions of studying Japan's post-1880 economic development is the abundance of quantitative data documenting Japan's growth. Estimates of Japanese income and output by sector, capital stock and labor force extend back to the 1880s, a period when Japanese income per capita was low. Consequently statistical probing of Japan's long-run growth from relative poverty to abundance is possible.

The remainder of this appendix is devoted to introducing the reader to the vast literature on quantitative analysis of Japan's economic development from the 1880s until 1970, a nine decade period during which Japanese income per capita converged towards income per capita levels in Western Europe. As the reader will see, this discussion confirms the importance of factors discussed at the outset of this article.

Our initial touchstone is the excellent "sources of growth" accounting analysis carried out by Denison and Chung (1976) on Japan's growth between 1953 and 1971. Attributing growth in national income in growth of inputs, the factors of production - capital and labor - and growth in output per unit of the two inputs combined (total factor productivity) along the following lines:
G(Y) = { a G(K) + [1-a] G(L) } + G (A)
where G(Y) is the (annual) growth of national output, g(K) is the growth rate of capital services, G(L) is the growth rate of labor services, a is capital's share in national income (the share of income accruing to owners of capital), and G(A) is the growth of total factor productivity, is a standard approach used to approximate the sources of growth of income.

Using a variant of this type of decomposition that takes into account improvements in the quality of capital and labor, estimates of scale economies and adjustments for structural change (shifting labor out of agriculture helps explain why total factor productivity grows), Denison and Chung (1976) generate a useful set of estimates for Japan's Miracle Growth era.

Operating with this "sources of growth" approach and proceeding under a variety of plausible assumptions, Denison and Chung (1976) estimate that of Japan's average annual real national income growth of 8.77 % over 1953-71, input growth accounted for 3.95% (accounting for 45% of total growth) and growth in output per unit of input contributed 4.82% (accounting for 55% of total growth). To be sure, the precise assumptions and techniques they use can be criticized. The precise numerical results they arrive at can be argued over. Still, their general point - that Japan's growth was the result of improvements in the quality of factor inputs - health and education for workers, for instance - and improvements in the way these inputs are utilized in production - due to technological and organizational change, reallocation of resources from agriculture to non-agriculture, and scale economies, is defensible.

With this in mind consider Table 1.

Table 1: Industrialization and Economic Growth in Japan, 1880-1970:
Selected Quantitative Characteristics

Panel A: Income and Structure of National Output

Real Income per Capita [a]

Share of National Output (of Net Domestic Product) and Relative Labor Productivity (Ratio of Output per Worker in Agriculture to Output per Worker in the N Sector) [b]

Years

Absolute

Relative to U.S. level

Year

Agriculture

Manufacturing & Mining

(Ma)

Manufacturing,

Construction & Facilitating Sectors [b]

Relative Labor Productivity

A/N

Panel B: Domestic and External Sources of Aggregate Supply and Demand Growth: Manufacturing and Mining (Ma), Gross Domestic Fixed Capital Formation (GDFCF), and Trade (TR)

Percentage Contribution to Growth due to:

Trade Openness and Trade Growth [c]

Years

Ma to Output Growth

GDFCF to Effective

Demand Growth

Years

Openness

Growth in Trade

Panel C: Infrastructure and Human Development

Human Development Index (HDI) [d]

Electricity Generation and National Broadcasting (NHK) per 100 Persons [e]

Year

Educational Attainment

Infant Mortality Rate (IMR)

Overall HDI

Index

Year

Electricity

NHK Radio Subscribers

Notes: [a] Maddison (2000) provides estimates of real income that take into account the purchasing power of national currencies.

[b] Ohkawa (1979) gives estimates for the "N" sector that is defined as manufacturing and mining (Ma) plus construction plus facilitating industry (transport, communications and utilities). It should be noted that the concept of an "N" sector is not standard in the field of economics.

[c] The estimates of trade are obtained by adding merchandise imports to merchandise exports. Trade openness is estimated by taking the ratio of total (merchandise) trade to national output, the latter defined as Gross Domestic Product (G.D.P.). The trade figures include trade with Japan's empire (Korea, Taiwan, Manchuria, etc.); the income figures for Japan exclude income generated in the empire.

[d] The Human Development Index is a composite variable formed by adding together indices for educational attainment, for health (using life expectancy that is inversely related to the level of the infant mortality rate, the IMR), and for real per capita income. For a detailed discussion of this index see United Nations Development Programme (2000).

[e] Electrical generation is measured in million kilowatts generated and supplied. For 1970, the figures on NHK subscribers are for television subscribers. The symbol n.a. = not available.

Sources: The figures in this table are taken from various pages and tables in Japan Statistical Association (1987), Maddison (2000), Minami (1994), and Ohkawa (1979).

Flowing from this table are a number of points that bear lessons of the Denison and Chung (1976) decomposition. One cluster of points bears upon the timing of Japan's income per capita growth and the relationship of manufacturing expansion to income growth. Another highlights improvements in the quality of the labor input. Yet another points to the overriding importance of domestic investment in manufacturing and the lesser significance of trade demand. A fourth group suggests that infrastructure has been important to economic growth and industrial expansion in Japan, as exemplified by the figures on electricity generating capacity and the mass diffusion of communications in the form of radio and television broadcasting.

Several parts of Table 1 point to industrialization, defined as an increase in the proportion of output (and labor force) attributable to manufacturing and mining, as the driving force in explaining Japan's income per capita growth. Notable in Panels A and B of the table is that the gap between Japanese and American income per capita closed most decisively during the 1910s, the 1930s, and the 1960s, precisely the periods when manufacturing expansion was the most vigorous.

Equally noteworthy of the spurts of the 1910s, 1930s and the 1960s is the overriding importance of gross domestic fixed capital formation, that is investment, for growth in demand. By contrast, trade seems much less important to growth in demand during these critical decades, a point emphasized by both Minami (1994) and by Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973). The notion that Japanese growth was "export led" during the nine decades between 1880 and 1970 when Japan caught up technologically with the leading Western nations is not defensible. Rather, domestic capital investment seems to be the driving force behind aggregate demand expansion. The periods of especially intense capital formation were also the periods when manufacturing production soared. Capital formation in manufacturing, or in infrastructure supporting manufacturing expansion, is the main agent pushing long-run income per capita growth.

Why? As Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) argue, spurts in manufacturing capital formation were associated with the import and adaptation of foreign technology, especially from the United States These investment spurts were also associated with shifts of labor force out of agriculture and into manufacturing, construction and facilitating sectors where labor productivity was far higher than it was in labor-intensive farming centered around labor-intensive rice cultivation. The logic of productivity gain due to more efficient allocation of labor resources is apparent from the right hand column of Panel A in Table 1.

Finally, Panel C of Table 1 suggests that infrastructure investment that facilitated health and educational attainment (combined public and private expenditure on sanitation, schools and research laboratories), and public/private investment in physical infrastructure including dams and hydroelectric power grids helped fuel the expansion of manufacturing by improving human capital and by reducing the costs of transportation, communications and energy supply faced by private factories. Mosk (2001) argues that investments in human-capital-enhancing (medicine, public health and education), financial (banking) and physical infrastructure (harbors, roads, power grids, railroads and communications) laid the groundwork for industrial expansions. Indeed, the "social capability for importing and adapting foreign technology" emphasized by Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973) can be largely explained by an infrastructure-driven growth hypothesis like that given by Mosk (2001).

In sum, Denison and Chung (1976) argue that a combination of input factor improvement and growth in output per combined factor inputs account for Japan's most rapid spurt of economic growth. Table 1 suggests that labor quality improved because health was enhanced and educational attainment increased; that investment in manufacturing was important not only because it increased capital stock itself but also because it reduced dependence on agriculture and went hand in glove with improvements in knowledge; and that the social capacity to absorb and adapt Western technology that fueled improvements in knowledge was associated with infrastructure investment.

References

Denison, Edward and William Chung. "Economic Growth and Its Sources." In Asia's Next Giant: How the Japanese Economy Works, edited by Hugh Patrick and Henry Rosovsky, 63-151. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1976.

Horioka, Charles Y. "Future Trends in Japan's Savings Rate and the Implications Thereof for Japan's External Imbalance." Japan and the World Economy 3 (1991): 307-330.

Japan Statistical Association. Historical Statistics of Japan [Five Volumes]. Tokyo: Japan Statistical Association, 1987.

Johnson, Chalmers. MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy, 1925-1975. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982.

Maddison, Angus. Monitoring the World Economy, 1820-1992. Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2000.

Minami, Ryoshin. Economic Development of Japan: A Quantitative Study. [Second edition]. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1994.

Mitchell, Brian. International Historical Statistics: Africa and Asia. New York: New York University Press, 1982.

Mosk, Carl. Japanese Industrial History: Technology, Urbanization, and Economic Growth. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001.

Nakamura, Takafusa. The Postwar Japanese Economy: Its Development and Structure, 1937-1994. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1995.

Ohkawa, Kazushi. "Production Structure." In Patterns of Japanese Economic Development: A Quantitative Appraisal, edited by Kazushi Ohkawa and Miyohei Shinohara with Larry Meissner, 34-58. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

Ohkawa, Kazushi and Henry Rosovsky. Japanese Economic Growth: Trend Acceleration in the Twentieth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973.

Smith, Thomas. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Uriu, Robert. Troubled Industries: Confronting Economic Challenge in Japan. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

United Nations Development Programme. Human Development Report, 2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Japanese Industrialization and Economic Growth

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Japan achieved sustained growth in per capita income between the 1880s and 1970 through industrialization. Moving along an income growth trajectory through expansion of manufacturing is hardly unique. Indeed Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the United States all attained high levels of income per capita by shifting from agrarian-based production to manufacturing and technologically sophisticated service sector activity.

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This one talks about general economic growth, GDP< life expectancy, poverty rate, income and others those are related to economy.
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This article shows a little bit about the history of this country, showing Italy's relationship with nearby countries.

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HISTORY OF ITALY including The Italian campaign, Napoleonic Italy, Rome in the French wars, Austria and Italy

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Welcome to SIRS Discoverer! Please enter your username and password.

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this is a good source

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The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)

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Japan - Politics, Economy, Society: Japan’s constitution was promulgated in 1946 and came into force in 1947, superseding the Meiji Constitution of 1889. It differs from the earlier document in two fundamental ways: the principle of sovereignty and the stated aim of maintaining Japan as a peaceful a…

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This article talk about what did France do before the world war I.

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For France before World War I, the 19th century, as elsewhere, was a period of economic modernisation and growing national unity. But but it was also a century of political turmoil, public dissatisfaction and military embarrassment. After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparate in 1815, France shook off decades of revolution, dictatorship and war. The Bourbon monarchy was restored - a move which did not please everyone, but provided some stability and breathing space for recovery. In 1848 another revolution implemented another republic; Louis-Napoleon, one of Bonaparte's nephews, returned from exile to be decisively elected as French president. Within four years he had seized autocratic powers, then had them endorsed by a referendum that was most likely rigged. In December 1852 Louis-Napoleon had himself crowned as Emperor Napoleon III, and France yet again had an absolutist monarch.

Napoleon III's chief interest was the French empire and how to expand it, so he soon began influencing or dictating foreign policy. This often had poor outcomes for the nation and the French people. The emperor's meddling initiated the Crimean War with Russia in 1853, then a conflict with Austria in 1859. These wars, followed by an economic recession in the 1860s, saw the emperor's public support plummet. In 1870 Napoleon III was provoked into a risky war with Prussia, which at the time boasted Europe's most professional military force. It was a disastrous decision: within six months France was defeated and Napoleon had been captured. The French people responded by abolishing the monarchy, the third time they had done so in the previous 80 years. In the subsequent peace negotiations, Paris surrendered to Prussia the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The French would agonise over these lost territories for the next four decades. The popular view - that they must one day be reclaimed for France - was a considerable source of anti-German nationalism.

"The twin shocks of defeat at the hands of Prussia and a temporary successful revolution in Paris produced in many of the French people a deep sense of national humiliation. Despite a remarkably swift economic recovery, and the establishment of a new, if unloved political system, French self-respect was not entirely resorted. As a result, France craved recognition of its status as a force to be reckoned with; this affected French attitudes towards all kinds of issues and questions."
Paul Hayes, historian

The 19th century also saw France's transition from a nation of peasants to a modern and diverse economy. Industrialisation, which had occurred much later in France than in Britain, was nevertheless well underway by the mid-1800s. Thousands of French farmers left their rural villages and relocated to towns and cities, causing rapid urbanisation and its connected problems. By the 1870s almost one-quarter of French workers were employed in factories and heavy industry. Railway construction was expanded rapidly, furthering internal trade and exports. The late 1800s saw the beginning of what the French call the Belle Epoque, or 'beautiful era'. France and its people began to enjoy the benefits of industrialisation and modernisation: cheap resources, technological developments, new inventions like the telegraph and automobile, readily available consumer goods. Living standards improved generally, though France was still plagued by class disparity and poverty. The Belle Epoque was accompanied by a cultural boom, with new artistic movements and entertainment forms like cinema, cabaret and the infamous can-can.

As elsewhere in Europe, the working classes were often the last to benefit from industrialisation - if they benefited at all. This led to dissatisfaction, grievances about working conditions and demands for political representation. French workplaces and communities were fertile ground for socialists and other radicals, many of whom enjoyed considerable support. By the early 1900s France had one of the most left-wing governments in Europe: a progressive mix of centrists and socialists. It passed laws guaranteeing freedom of religion and the complete separation of church and state; government funding of churches was abolished and all religious buildings were nationalised. A series of laws decreed free and compulsory education for all French children, both boys and girls. The government also introduced a progressive income tax, with higher rates for higher earners - a radical innovation for its time.

Abroad, the French consolidated their empire and sought to expand it. They competed with Britain for new territories in Africa and strengthened their control of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). In early 1913, Raymond Poincare became president of the French republic. Poincare - who was conservative, nationalist and anti-German - was a foreign policy interventionist who was determined to bolster France's position in Europe. During 1913-14 Poincare made some outspoken criticisms of Germany and the Kaiser. He also conducted negotiations and foreign visits to strengthen France's existing alliances, drawing it closer to both Russia and Britain.

1. France endured a turbulent first half of the 19th century, divided and disrupted by war, revolution and political instability.
2. In 1870 the French ruler Napoleon III entered into a dangerous war against Prussia, which produced an embarrassing defeat.
3. The loss of significant provinces like Alsace and Lorraine was a source of tension and nationalism for the next 40 years.
4. French industrialisation grew steadily in the later 1800s. New affluence gave rise to a period of urban, cultural and artistic growth called the Belle Epoque.
5. The French rulers were also occupied with the 'race for empire' and for securing France's position in Europe, particularly against a rapidly industrialising and militarising German empire.

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This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation:
J. Llewellyn et al, "France before World War I" at Alpha History, http://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/france/, 2014, accessed [date of last access].

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For France before World War I, the 19th century, as elsewhere, was a period of economic modernisation and growing national unity. But but it was also a century of political turmoil, public dissatisfaction and military embarrassment. After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparate in 1815, France shook off decades of revolution, dictatorship and war.

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This is the population in Italy by the time
Yijoo Choi

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More information about history on Italy, talking about few events, but not all

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A journal section about society in Southern America in 1891.

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Nineteenth-Century Culture and Society in Germany - Sunny

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Nineteenth-Century Culture and Society in Germany - Sunny

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Infobase Learning has databases and streaming video collections for every school, college, and library.

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Timeline of Italian unification - Wikipedia

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This article talk about the troubles for France

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The idea of a multicultural France is under threat following the November 13 attacks on Paris. Voices from the right to the left of the political spectrum have called for stricter immigration controls and a renewal of France's longstanding tradition of "assimilation".

But what exactly is this supposed tradition, and what is its historical and political context?

Assimilation and 'race war'

In France, the issue of assimilation emerged in the 19th century. The question then wasn't migrants, but of the place of Jews in French society. It was presented as a way to prevent a "race war" that anti-Semitic intellectuals - notably Edouard Drumont, author of Jewish France - threatened would break out. Assimilation was presented as a social pact: the ability to privately maintain one's religion in exchange for full participation in the construction of the nation.

Such discussions are best understood within the context of the time - they took place during a drive to erase regional and linguistic differences in France through free schooling and compulsory military service. Assimilation was seen initially as a way to treat domestic "others" - Jews - and more broadly, to forge a collective identity out of the mosaic of French regions.

This took place during the colonial era, so the question arose: should the people in colonised countries such as Algeria be included in the policy of assimilation? Those who opposed extending rights to colonised people came up with the concept of "assimilability" to prevent this. They held that some indigenous populations had cultural and racial characteristics that made them unable to accept the universal social pact.

Political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville made a voyage in 1840 to study Algerian tribes. The mission's findings still haunt today's debate on integration. Muslim tribes, portrayed as deeply religious as well as polygamous, nomadic, and unwilling to work, were described as being the farthest from the national standard, and hence the least "assimilable".

Under Napoleon III, the government implemented a "religious status" law: It allowed Muslims in Algeria - part of France at the time - to practice aspects of their religion that would have otherwise been illegal under French law (including the right to have several spouses), but which also deprived them of the right to vote and of eligibility for citizenship.

Nationality and citizenship were thus separated based on religion, effectively legalising this hierarchy: to be eligible for citizenship, immigrants were effectively required to renounce religion in the public sphere.

DR

In the late 19th century, France began to bring in immigrants - mainly from neighbouring countries such as Belgium, Italy and Spain - to compensate for its declining population. The state adopted the jus soli ("right of soil"), which meant that children born in France, could become citizens, whether their parents were French-born or not.

Algeria and Tunisia also attracted a large number of immigrants in this time, mostly Spanish and Italian, threatening to make the French a minority there. To address this problem, an 1889 law opened the way for French citizenship for those migrants - but it favoured immigrants from Europe, giving them rights that weren't extended to indigenous Muslims.

During the colonial period, there were three key components of assimilation policy: school, the army, and the right of soil. But it was a selective policy, racist and unequal, that built its notions on assimilability on the hierarchy of races and religions.

The class struggle

The next chapter begins after World War I. With economic growth strong, France needed labour. The question was entrusted to a consortium of entrepreneurs, the Société générale d'Immigration. Poland, newly independent in 1918, was a preferred source. For company owners, one of the key advantage of foreign workers was that they weren't unionised. To protect them from any "contamination", firms arranged with the Polish Catholic Church to provide priests for the workers. Their task, among others, was to prevent the new arrivals from joining unions.

The pattern was repeated for other European populations: Spanish, Italian or Portuguese churches were established where immigrant populations lived. The same process took place for Muslim populations, who were provided imams from their home countries. This is why organisations within the French Muslim Council (CFCM) are related to particular nations - Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and so on.

Jean-Pierre Dalbéra/Flickr

To counteract companies' efforts to control immigrants through their religion and ethnicity, unions organised evening French classes and assisted with citizenship. In this way, unions appear to serve as the melting pot of immigrant labour within the working class until the 1970s.

A new era began in 1974 when France closed its borders, significantly altering migration dynamics. Immigration for the purpose of work decreased while more migrants sought to bring their families. This definitive settling (and the subsequent arrival of "second generation" immigrants) occurs within a context of de-industrialisation and the decline of unions.

Under the new French immigration policy, helping immigrants preserve their cultural and religious identities served a key objective: it encouraged the return home. The state provided support to Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan benevolent societies that served as social spaces, provided Arabic classes and provide religious services. Teachers and imams were effectively agents of immigrants' states of origin.

The term "assimilation" is then replaced by that of "integration". But the policy remained paradoxical, combining access to greater rights with structures that eased the immigrants' return to home countries.

Repression makes a comeback

As this brief history indicates, assimilation à la française was from the start a selective ideology. Initially implemented for domestic reasons, it was accompanied by a range of policies and strategies that sought to maintain the ethnicity of populations thought to be "unassimilable". This has been used for a range of purposes: keeping non-French people at arm's length, managing labour supply, encouraging a return to home countries. The doctrine wasn't homogeneous, but a dialectic whose historical effects are still visible today.

In the current political landscape, former president and now-candidate Nicolas Sarkozy and his party, Les Républicains, emphasise the term "assimilation", within a context of a rigorous redefinition of French secularism (" laïcité ") and the rise of religious fundamentalism. While the primary target is the visibility of Islam in the public sphere, the term now emphasizes the responsability of immigrants (and Muslims in particular) to demonstrate their attachment to French values. In 2011 citizenship tests were introduced to obtain French nationality at the same time that integration and anti-discrimination policies were dismantled. In this way, the current situation echoes that of more than a century ago.

But rather than concerning new arrivals, in France today the real question is the place of the descendants of immigrants. The challenge is to define a social compact similar to that established for French Jews in the 19th century: the right to be left in peace in exchange for the ability to join in the building of the nation.

This negotiation continues. On one hand, the dynamics of integration have enabled the development of a middle-class Muslim culture that has won this right. They are teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers, business executives who are part of daily life in France. But this link is broken for the working class, a consequence not unrelated to the decline of the unions. The 2005 riots can be read as a failed step in the negotiation process.

Ten years later, the turn toward extremism of a fringe of France's Muslim population is part of a broader rightward shift of the working classes. Nearly 170 years after de Tocqueville's mission, the terms of the negotiation are the same: are Muslism members of the working class "assimilable"?

The current debate in France over the term "assimilation" is a mark of this tension. What the answer will be is playing out partly in the mosques, which are gradually losing their connections to the home countries as new immigrants and converts arrive. Together, these two groups will redefine what it is to be Muslim in French society, a definition, one can hope, that will escape from the supposed tradition of "assimilation".
Translated from the French by Leighton Walter Kille.

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The long, troubled history of assimilation in France

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The idea of a multicultural France is under threat following the November 13 attacks on Paris. Voices from the right to the left of the political spectrum have called for stricter immigration controls and a renewal of France's longstanding tradition of "assimilation". But what exactly is this supposed tradition, and what is its historical and political context?

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Welcome to Britannica School , a safe, up-to-date and age-appropriate information resource for Elementary, Middle and High School.

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About Japan: A Teacher's Resource | Timeline of Modern Japan (1868-1945) | Japan Society

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January 3 Restoration of Imperial rule is declared. In opposition, Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu attacks Kyoto, commencing the Boshin War. Yoshinobu surrenders unconditionally in Edo in May, but fighting between pro-Tokugawa and pro-imperial forces continues in eastern Japan until May 1869.

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How these key events influenced the future of Japan and what were the causes and effects of these events.

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1853 - US fleet forces Japan to open up to foreign influence after over 200 years of self-imposed isolation.

1868 - End of centuries of rule by Shogun military caste, Empire of Japan proclaimed, and country enters period of rapid industrialisation and trading dominance over East Asia.

1894-95 - Japan goes to war with China, and its better-equipped forces win victory in just nine months. China cedes Taiwan and permits Japan to trade on mainland.

Capital: Tokyo

Quake-prone Tokyo lies at the intersection of continental plates

Comprises the 'shi' (inner city) and 'to' (metropolis)

Population: 12.4 million (2003 estimate)

Japan's 2011 earthquake
1904 - Japan becomes first Asian country in modern times to defeat an European power when it routs Russia in Manchuria.

1910 - Japan annexes Korea after three years of fighting, becoming one of the world's leading powers.

1914 - Japan joins World War I on the side of Britain and her allies, gaining some Pacific islands from Germany at the end of the war.

1918-1922 - Japan tries to establish buffer zone against Bolshevik regime in Russia's Pacific provinces, forced out by British and US diplomatic pressure and domestic opposition.
Ultra-nationalism and war
1923 - Earthquake in Tokyo region kills more than 100,000 people.

World's oldest monarchy

Emperor Akihito, heads the world's oldest hereditary monarchy

Until 1945 emperors had the status of living gods

Currently, only males can succeed to the throne

Princess Kiko gave birth to a baby boy in September 2006, potentially resolving a succession crisis

Royal birth sparks succession debate
British Empire ends 21-year alliance with Japan, signalling Western and US apprehension of Japan's growing power in East Asia.

1925 - Universal male suffrage is instituted. The electorate increases fivefold.
Attack on Pearl Harbor
Late 1920s - Extreme nationalism begins to take hold in Japan as world economic depression hits. The emphasis is on a preservation of traditional Japanese values, and a rejection of "Western" influence.

1931 - Japanese army invades Chinese province of Manchuria, installs puppet regime.

1932 - Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi killed during failed coup by nationalist army officers. Military holds increasing influence in the country.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Atomic attacks

Devastation at Hiroshima: Atomic attacks are said to have forced Japan's WWII surrender
Hiroshima survivors keep memories alive 1945: US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima Independence 1945: Atom bomb hits Nagasaki
1936 - Japan signs alliance with Nazi Germany.

1937 - Japan goes to war with China, capturing Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing amid atrocities like the "Rape of Nanjing", in which up to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed.

1939 - Outbreak of Second World War in Europe. With fall of France in 1940, Japan moves to occupy French Indo-China.

1941 - Japan launches a surprise attack on US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. US and main allies declare war on Japan.

1942 - Japan occupies succession of countries, including Philippines, Dutch East Indies, Burma and Malaya. In June, US aircraft carriers defeat the Japanese at the Battle of Midway. The US begins a strategy of "'island-hopping", cutting the Japanese support lines as its forces advance.

1944 - US forces are near enough to Japan to start bombing raids on Japanese cities.

1945 - US planes drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Emperor Hirohito surrenders and relinquishes divine status. Japan placed under US military government. All Japanese military and naval forces disbanded.

Aum Shinrikyo cult

1995 attack on the Tokyo underground claimed 12 lives, injured more than 5,500

Aum Shinrikyo was founded by Shoko Asahara in 1987 and drew thousands of followers

Asahara was sentenced to death in 2004 over the Tokyo attack

Aum's lingering legacy Rise of Japanese cults Natural and man-made disasters
1947 - New constitution comes into force, establishes parliamentary system with all adults eligible to vote. Japan renounces war and pledges not to maintain land, sea or air forces for that purpose. Emperor granted ceremonial status.

1951 - Japan signs peace treaty with US and other nations. To this day, there is no peace treaty with Russia, as the legal successor to the Soviet Union.

1952 - Japan regains independence. US retains several islands for military use, including Okinawa.

1955 - Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) formed. Apart from brief interludes, party governs into 21st century.

1956 - Japan joins United Nations.
Koizumi at helm
1964 - Olympic Games held in Tokyo.

1972 - Japanese prime minister visits China and normal diplomatic relations are resumed. Japan subsequently closes embassy in Taiwan.

Okinawa is returned to Japanese sovereignty, but US retains bases there.

Yasukuni shrine

Remembers Japan's 2.5m war dead

Monument also venerates convicted war criminals

Ceremonies at the shrine raise hackles across Asia

Japan's controversial shrine
1982 - Japanese car firm Honda opens its first plant in the US.
Iraq deployment
1989 - Emperor Hirohito dies, succeeded by Akihito.

1993 July - Elections held against a background of bribery scandals and economic decline see the LDP ousted for the first time since 1955. A seven-party coalition takes power.

1993 August - Government issues historic "Kono statement" apologising for Japanese military's war-time use of sex slaves.
Abe takes over
1994 - The anti-LDP coalition collapses. An administration supported by the LDP and the Socialists takes over.

1995 January - An earthquake hits central Japan, killing thousands and causing widespread damage. The city of Kobe is hardest hit.

1995 March - A religious sect, Aum Shinrikyo, releases the deadly nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo underground railway system. Twelve people are killed and thousands are injured.

Rape of a local schoolgirl by US servicemen based on Okinawa sparks mass protests demanding the removal of US forces from the island.
Abe steps down
1997 - The economy enters a severe recession.

Shinto religion

Shinto rites are central to the daily life of followers

Rigidly enforced state religion until the 1950s

Followers venerate "kami", spirits who number in the millions

Shinto has no founder, major scriptures or ethical laws

Tens of thousands of Shinto shrines dot the country

BBC Religion and Ethics - Shinto
2001 March - A Japanese court overturns compensation order for Korean women forced to work as sex slaves during WW II.

2001 April - Junichiro Koizumi becomes new LDP leader and prime minister.
LDP defeated
2001 April - Trade dispute with China after Japan imposes import tariffs on Chinese agricultural products. China retaliates with import taxes on Japanese vehicles and other manufactured goods.

2001 August- Koizumi pays homage at the Yasukuni shrine dedicated to the country's war dead, provoking protests from Japan's neighbours. The memorial also honours war criminals.

Futenma: Controversial base

The US base on Okinawa has been a source of friction between the allies
No easy answers in Okinawa debate Economic woes Profile: Japan's Okinawa
2001 October - Koizumi visits Seoul and offers an apology for the suffering South Korea endured under his country's colonial rule.

2002 September - Koizumi becomes the first Japanese leader to visit North Korea. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il apologises for abductions of Japanese citizens in 1970s and 1980s and confirms that eight of them are dead. Five Japanese nationals return home.

2003 December - Government announces decision to install "purely defensive" US-made missile shield.

2004 February - Non-combat soldiers arrive in Iraq in first Japanese deployment in combat zone since World War II.

2005 September - PM Koizumi wins a landslide victory in early general elections.
Islands rows
2006 July - The last contingent of Japanese troops leaves Iraq.

2006 September - Shinzo Abe succeeds Junichiro Koizumi as prime minister.

2006 December - Parliament approves the creation of a fully-fledged defence ministry, the first since World War II.
Abe returns
2007 April - Wen Jiabao becomes first Chinese prime minister to address the Japanese parliament. Mr Wen says both sides have succeeded in warming relations.

2007 August - On the 62nd anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, almost the entire cabinet stays away from the Yasukuni shrine. Prime Minister Abe says he has no plans to visit the shrine for as long as the issue continues to be a diplomatic problem.

2007 September - Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigns, is replaced by Yasuo Fukuda.

2008 June - Japan and China reach a deal for the joint development of a gas field in the East China Sea, resolving a four-year-old dispute.
New security strategy
2008 September - Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda resigns. Former foreign minister Taro Aso appointed as new premier.

2008 November - General Toshio Tamogami, head of Japan's air force, loses his job after writing an essay seeking to justify Japan's role in the second world war.

2009 February - Economics Minister Kaoru Yosano says Japan is facing worst economic crisis since World War II, after figures show its economy shrank by 3.3% in last quarter.

2009 August - Opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) wins general election by a landslide, ending more than 50 years of nearly unbroken rule by the Liberal Democratic Party.

2009 September - DPJ leader Yukio Hatoyama elected PM at head of coalition with Social Democratic Party and People's New Party.

2010 June - Prime Minister Hatoyama quits over failure to close US military base on Okinawa. Finance Minister Naoto Kan takes over.

2010 July - Ruling coalition loses majority in elections to the upper house of parliament.

2011 February - Japan is overtaken by China as world's second-largest economy.

2011 March - Huge offshore earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastate miles of shoreline. Damage to the Fukushima nuclear plant causes a radiation leak that leaves extensive areas uninhabitable and contaminates food supplies.

2011 August - Following severe criticism of his handling of the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Prime Minister Naoto Kan steps down. He is succeeded by Yoshihiko Noda.

2011 December - The government announces a relaxation of Japan's self-imposed ban on arms exports. It says the move will allow the country to supply military equipment for humanitarian missions.

2012 June - The lower house of parliament approves a bill to double sales tax, in order to make up the income tax shortfall caused by an ageing population. The governing Democratic Party splits, but retains its lower house majority.

2012 July - Japan restarts the Ohi nuclear reactor, the first since the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant last year, amid local protests.

2012 August - Japan's economic growth slows to 0.3% from 1% in the second quarter as eurozone crisis hits exports and domestic consumption.

Japan recalls its ambassador to Seoul in protest at a visit to the Liancourt Rocks by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. Both countries claim the islets, which Japan calls Takeshima and South Korea calls Dokdo.

2012 September - China cancels ceremonies to mark the 40th anniversary of restored diplomatic relations with Japan because of a public flare-up in a dispute over ownership of a group of islands in the East China Sea administered by Japan as the Senkaku Islands and claimed by China as the Diaoyu Islands. Taiwan also claims the islands.

2012 December - Opposition conservative Liberal Democratic Party wins landslide in early parliamentary elections. Former prime minister Shinzo Abe forms government on pledge of stimulating economic growth.

2013 May - Exports rise 10.1% - the fastest annual rate since 2010 - thanks to weaker yen, boosting Prime Minister Abe's economic recovery plan.

2013 July - Prime Minister Abe's coalition wins upper house elections, giving him control of both houses of parliament - a first for a prime minister in six years.

2013 September - Tokyo is chosen to host the 2020 Olympics.

2013 December - Japan approves the relocation of a US military airbase on its southern island of Okinawa. The base, which houses over 25,000 US troops, will be relocated to a less densely populated part of the island.

Japan's cabinet approves a new national security strategy and increased defence spending in a move widely seen as aimed at China.

2014 July - Japan's government approves a landmark change in security policy, paving the way for its military to fight overseas.

A judicial panel recommends that three former executives of the TEPCO utility - which runs the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant - be indicted on criminal charges for their role in the 2011 disaster.

2014 December - The LDP-led government retains its large parliamentary majority in snap elections called by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to seek a fresh mandate for his economic policies, after Japan's economy slips back into recession mid-year.

2015 February - Economy re-emerges from recession in last quarter of 2014, although growth remains sluggish.

2015 July - Lower house of parliament backs bills allowing troops to fight overseas for first time since Second World War, prompting protests at home and criticism from China.

2015 August - Japan restarts first nuclear reactor at Sendai plant, under new safety rules following 2011 Fukushima disaster.

2016 April - At least 44 people die and more than 1,000 are injured as a result of two major earthquakes on the southern island of Kyushu.

These and major aftershocks also leave at least 100,000 people displaced.

2016 August - Emperor Akihito indicates his readiness to abdicate in a rare video message to the public.

2017 June - Parliament passes a landmark bill allowing Emperor Akihito to abdicate.

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1853 - US fleet forces Japan to open up to foreign influence after over 200 years of self-imposed isolation. 1868 - End of centuries of rule by Shogun military caste, Empire of Japan proclaimed, and country enters period of rapid industrialisation and trading dominance over East Asia.

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This talks about the events that have shifted the way Japans Economy worked. How they worked through Economic Depression.

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The Korean War marked the turn from economic depression to recovery for Japan. As the staging area for the United Nations forces on the Korean peninsula, Japan profited indirectly from the war, as valuable procurement orders for goods and services were assigned to Japanese suppliers. The Japanese economy at the return of independence in 1952 was in the process of growth and change. Sustained prosperity and high annual growth rates, which averaged 10 percent in 1955-60 and later climbed to more than 13 percent, changed all sectors of Japanese life. The countryside, where farmers had benefited from land reform, began to feel the effects of small-scale mechanization and a continuous migration to industrial centres. Agricultural yields rose as improved strains of crops and modern technology were introduced, as household appliances appeared in remote villages, and as the changing patterns of urban food consumption provided an expanded market for cash crops, fruits and vegetables, and meat products. Efforts to control population growth, which had begun with the legalization of abortion in 1948 and included a national campaign to encourage family planning, showed considerable success, as the population stabilized and thereafter grew slowly. Gains in economic output, therefore, were not offset by a rapidly expanding population, and steady industrial growth brought full employment and even labour shortages.

Two elements underscored rapid growth in the 1960s. The first was the development of a consumer economy, which was given a significant boost by Ikeda Hayato's Income Doubling Plan of 1960. This plan reaffirmed the government's responsibility for social welfare, vocational training, and education, while also redefining growth to include consumers as well as producers. The second was the new industrial policy that emerged out of the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MITI) in 1959. Under these influences the structure of the Japanese economy changed to concentrate on high-quality and high-technology products designed for domestic and foreign consumption. The production of such products also emphasized Japan's need for stable, economically advanced trading partners to replace the Asian markets to which inexpensive textiles had been sent earlier. Improvements in transportation-e.g., cargo-handling methods and bulk transport by large ore carriers and tankers-helped to remove the disadvantage of the greater distances over which Japan's products had to be shipped. Most important, the large and growing domestic market was rendering invalid earlier generalizations about Japan's need for cheap labour and captive Asian colonies to sustain its economy. The era of high growth continued until the "oil shock" of 1973: the embargo by OPEC (the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Nations). In the interim, Japan's output shifted with world currents, and its industrial expansion made it a world leader in shipbuilding, electronics, precision optical equipment, steel, automobiles, and high technology. In the 1960s Japanese exports expanded at an annual rate of more than 15 percent, and in 1965 Japan revealed the first signs that it had a trade surplus.

A number of factors greatly aided Japan's economic resurgence during the 1950s and '60s. One was the complete destruction of the nation's industrial base by the war. This meant that Japan's new factories, using the latest developments in technology, were often more efficient than those of their foreign competitors. The Japanese became enthusiastic followers of the American statistician W. Edward Deming's ideas on quality control and soon began producing goods that were more reliable and contained fewer flaws than those of the United States and western Europe. At the same time, Japan was able to import, under license, advanced foreign technology at relatively low cost. With the addition of a youthful and well-educated workforce, a high domestic savings rate that provided ample capital, and an activist government and bureaucracy that provided guidance, support, and subsidies, the ingredients were in place for rapid and sustained economic growth.

Social change

Two major changes were visible in the social life of the Japanese from 1952 to 1973. The first was the significant decline in the birth rate that stabilized the Japanese population. The second was the population shift from the countryside to urban centres. In addition to birth control, such factors as a more highly educated populace, postponement of marriage in favour of education and employment, and a desire for greater independence in early adulthood contributed to changing fertility patterns-as did the increasing conviction among many couples that it was in their economic self-interest to have fewer children. But even with a stable population Japan remained one of the world's most densely populated countries.

As population growth slowed and the economy expanded, Japan faced a labour shortage that drew workers from agriculture, as well as from small and medium enterprises, to the new large-scale industries of the cities. The resulting shift in Japan's population was dramatic. In the Meiji period the rural population of Japan stood at 85 percent of the national total; by 1945 it was approximately 50 percent, and by 1970 it had fallen to less than 20 percent. In the process, both village and urban life underwent significant changes. Factories were built in the countryside as industrialists tried to tap into the still-underemployed rural labour force. Agriculture itself became increasingly mechanized and commercialized. As sons, and even husbands, went off to the factories, women, children, and the elderly were often left to run the family farm. At the same time, the face of rural Japan changed, with hard-surfaced roads, concrete schools, factories, and sales outlets for automobiles and farm equipment replacing the once timeless thatched-roof houses. By 1970 the average farm household income had risen higher than its urban counterpart, providing considerable rural purchasing power. Television tied rural households to urban Japan and to the world beyond. Young men brought up on visions of urban life as projected by American television programs were eager to move to the cities after graduation from high school. Young women showed increasing reluctance to become farm wives, and in some instances villagers sought spouses for their sons in Southeast Asia. Rural solidarity suffered from such out-migration, and in many cases prewar village life ceased to be, as villages amalgamated into cities and struggled to develop new identities.

Cities also underwent rapid change. By 1972 one in every nine Japanese lived in Tokyo and one in four lived in the Tokyo-Ōsaka industrial corridor. As the national centre for government, finance, business, industry, education, and the arts, Tokyo became a magnet for many Japanese and the quintessential expression of Japanese urban life.

But while Tokyo and other large cities remained highly attractive, urban dwellers also faced serious problems, notably housing. Living space for most urban dwellers was infinitesimal when compared with Western societies. Although Japanese bristled when Westerners described them as living in "rabbit hutches," apartments with 125 square feet (12 square metres) of living space-often with shared facilities-were common. Such apartments were often found in drab residential developments that pushed out at greater distances from the inner wards of major cities and required increased commuting times. The dream of owning one's home, which most urban dwellers sought to keep alive, was already becoming increasingly elusive by the 1970s. In 1972 the price of land in or near Japan's largest cities was some 25 times higher than it had been in 1955, far surpassing the rise in the average urban worker's disposable income for the same period. While government and private industry were able to provide some low-cost housing, higher-priced housing in the form of high-rise condominiums, or "mansions," proliferated, and for most Japanese urbanites housing remained the chief flaw in Japan's postwar economic "miracle."

If urban life retained a number of density-induced drawbacks-which in addition to housing included few parks and open spaces, limited sewage systems, and an overcrowded transportation network of trains, subways, and buses that often required "pushers" and "pullers" to get passengers on and off-it also had its compensations in a rising standard of living and the entertainments that money afforded in splendid department stores, shopping areas, movie houses, coffee shops, bars, nightclubs and restaurants. The impact of American culture was everywhere. Young urbanites, in particular, took with gusto to jazz and rock music, pinball machines, American soft drinks and fast foods, baseball, and the freer social relations that typified American dating patterns. American fashions of dress and grooming, often set by movie and rock stars, quickly found bands of faithful imitators. Indeed, almost every American fad from the hula hoop to hang gliding had its Japanese supporters.

Urban life also brought about changes in traditional Japanese family and gender relationships. The position of women improved, as many more now went to high schools and colleges. Most found urban employment until marriage. As arranged marriages declined and "love" matches increased, marriage customs also changed. Urban living promoted the ideal of the nuclear family, particularly as housing conditions made it difficult for the extended family to live together. Urban dwellers found themselves less dependent on the goodwill of their neighbours. There was also less need for the conformity that typified rural life-although for many recent arrivals the city-based company and factory effectively restructured village values to support an efficient workplace.

The majority of villagers actually made the transition from rural to urban life with less social stress than was the case in Europe and America. Juvenile delinquency showed some increase, but overall crime rates remained low. So-called "new" religions such as Sōka Gakkai (Value-Creation Society), which strongly appealed to those feeling isolated or alienated, flourished in the 1950s and '60s. Disparities between the newly rich and the older generation living on fixed incomes and between a freer, franker, and often more egotistic and brash mass culture that appealed to the young and traditional taste set by what once had been the aristocracy often accentuated how generations viewed the postwar situation. For many of the older generation, the new culture epitomized moral decay, which they attributed to the postwar system of education; to the young, the older generation seemed out of touch with the new realities that Japan faced. Such a generational split was further dramatized in the universities, where older professors were firmly in control but where young people struggled to find ways of expressing their own positions, which, typically, were often far more radical than those of their teachers.

Political developments

With the restoration of sovereignty, politicians who had been purged by the occupation were allowed to return to public life. This included a number of prewar rightists who had been active in the 1930s. But the ideological right found few adherents among the postwar generation, and without military or big-business support the right wing played a largely dormant role during the 1950s and '60s. Occasionally disturbing incidents, such as the 1960 assassination of the socialist leader Asanuma Inajirō by a right-wing activist, revealed that the right was still able to intimidate; but rightists, for the most part, concentrated on campaigns to restore the use of the national flag, revive such national holidays as Foundation Day (February 11; succeeded in 1966), and restore state sponsorship for Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (where Japan's war dead, notably those of World War II, are enshrined). The left fared considerably better. Communists who returned to Japan from foreign exile or who were released from domestic prisons played a vigorous role in the immediate postwar political arena. In 1949 the Japan Communist Party (JCP) elected 35 candidates to the lower house and garnered 10 percent of the vote. But by 1952 the Korean War (which had led SCAP to purge communists from public office), steady improvements in living conditions, and uncooperative Soviet attitudes in negotiations over the return of the Kuril Islands and over fishing treaties had seriously undermined public support for the communists, as did communist opposition to the imperial institution and extremist labour tactics. Still, Marxist, and later Maoist, ideas remained highly appealing to large numbers of Japanese intellectuals and college students, and the noncommunist left became a major voice for opposition in Japanese politics.

The year 1955 was highly significant in postwar politics. The right and left wings of the socialist movement, which had been divided since 1951 over the peace treaty, merged to form the Japan Socialist Party (JSP). Faced with this united opposition the conservative parties, the Liberals and the Democrats, joined to found the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP). Japan thus entered a period of essentially two-party politics. The dominant LDP, which inherited Yoshida's mantle, worked effectively to solidify the close ties he had created with bureaucrats, bankers, and the business community. As a result, ex-bureaucrats played significant roles in the LDP, often being elected to the Diet and becoming important cabinet members. Three of the next six prime ministers (all from the LDP) who succeeded Yoshida-Kishi Nobusuke, Ikeda Hayato, and Satō Eisaku-were ex-bureaucrats. These close government-business ties, which became essential to domestic economic growth, later were characterized as "Japan Incorporated" in the West.

Ideologically, the LDP combined a strong commitment to economic growth with the desire to return Japan to world prominence. The party depended on the financial support of business and banking, but its voter base remained in rural Japan. At the local level, LDP politicians established political networks that became the hallmarks of postwar politics and emphasized the role of personal "machine" politics over party platforms. But individual LDP Diet members realized that in order to provide patronage for their constituents they needed the support of party leaders with access to the bureaucracy. Factions therefore formed around such leaders, who vied with one another for the premiership and sought to have members of their faction appointed to important cabinet posts.

As the voice of the opposition, the JSP resisted rearmament, had a strong antinuclear stance, campaigned to rid Japan of the American bases and abrogate the Mutual Security Treaty, supported mainland China, and vigorously opposed all efforts to change the postwar constitution. The appeal of the JSP was directed both to urban intellectuals and to the working classes, and its financial support came largely from labour (Sōhyō). In contrast to the LDP's focus on economic growth, big business, and agriculture, the JSP concentrated on urban issues, on those bypassed by prosperity, and on the mounting problems of pollution and environmental degradation that accompanied accelerated industrial growth. Socialist influence was weakened, however, when the more right-wing JSP members split off to form the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) in 1959.

By the early 1970s urban issues also attracted the JCP, which started to substitute practical matters for ideology and won a number of mayoral elections. To the right of the communists and socialists appeared the Clean Government Party ( Kōmeitō; later renamed the New Clean Government Party), which began in 1964 as the political arm of Sōka Gakkai but dissociated itself from the religion by 1970; like its opposition counterparts, it focused on the urban electorate. On occasion, as in 1960 with the Kishi government and the proposed renewal of the U.S-Japan Mutual Security Treaty, the opposition could mount sufficient public support to bring down an LDP cabinet, but on the whole the era was one in which the LDP remained firmly in power.

Still, by the late 1960s and early '70s there also were signs of a decline in LDP support. Dissatisfaction with the party's handling of domestic labour issues, Japan's involvement in the Vietnam War, demands for the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty, and extensive student uprisings on university campuses, combined with growing doubts about the effects of unbridled growth and the increasing dangers from pollution, all undercut the party's popularity. In 1952 the LDP had garnered two-thirds of the Diet seats, but by 1972 it controlled only slightly more than half. The effects of the so-called "Nixon shocks" in 1971, which allowed the yen to rise against the dollar and restructured the U.S.- China (and hence the Japan-China) relationship, were compounded in 1973 by the OPEC oil crisis that threatened the underpinnings of Japan's postwar prosperity and the LDP's political hegemony.

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Japan - Economic Transformation, Industrialization, Modernization: The Korean War marked the turn from economic depression to recovery for Japan. As the staging area for the United Nations forces on the Korean peninsula, Japan profited indirectly from the war, as valuable procurement orders for goods and services were assigned to Japanese suppliers.

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France, and more specifically its capital city of Paris, has been a high culture center dating back to the 1600s in most of Europe. In the 1900s the French culture and its high society appeal spread to be known throughout most of the world.

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France - France - Economy: France is one of the major economic powers of the world, ranking along with such countries as the United States, Japan, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Its financial position reflects an extended period of unprecedented growth that lasted for much of the postwar pe…

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HISTORY OF THE FRENCH EMPIRE including Cartier and Northwest Passage, New France, Ohio and Mississippi

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The Era of Mixed Feelings

The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings . The phrase was conceived by a Boston editor during Monroe's visit to New England early in his first term. That a representative of the heartland of Federalism could speak in such positive terms of the visit by a Southern president whose decisive election had marked not only a sweeping Republican victory but also the demise of the national Federalist Party was dramatic testimony that former foes were inclined to put aside the sectional and political differences of the past.

Effects of the War of 1812

Later scholars have questioned the strategy and tactics of the United States in the War of 1812, the war's tangible results, and even the wisdom of commencing it in the first place. To contemporary Americans, however, the striking naval victories and Jackson's victory over the British at New Orleans created a reservoir of "good feeling" on which Monroe was able to draw.

Abetting the mood of nationalism was the foreign policy of the United States after the war. Florida was acquired from Spain (1819) in negotiations , the success of which owed more to Jackson's indifference to such niceties as the inviolability of foreign borders and to the country's evident readiness to back him up than it did to diplomatic finesse. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), actually a few phrases inserted in a long presidential message, declared that the United States would not become involved in European affairs and would not accept European interference in the Americas; its immediate effect on other nations was slight, and that on its own citizenry was impossible to gauge, yet its self-assured tone in warning off the Old World from the New reflected well the nationalist mood that swept the country.

Internally, the decisions of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Marshall in such cases as McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) promoted nationalism by strengthening Congress and national power at the expense of the states. The congressional decision to charter the second Bank of the United States (1816) was explained in part by the country's financial weaknesses, exposed by the War of 1812, and in part by the intrigues of financial interests. The readiness of Southern Jeffersonians-former strict constructionists-to support such a measure indicates, too, an amazing degree of nationalist feeling. Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sense of national unity was the victorious Republican Party, standing in solitary splendour on the national political horizon, its long-time foes the Federalists vanished without a trace (on the national level) and Monroe, the Republican standard-bearer, reelected so overwhelmingly in 1820 that it was long believed that the one electoral vote denied him had been held back only in order to preserve Washington's record of unanimous selection.

National disunity

For all the signs of national unity and feelings of oneness, equally convincing evidence points in the opposite direction. The very Supreme Court decisions that delighted friends of strong national government infuriated its opponents, while Marshall's defense of the rights of private property was construed by critics as betraying a predilection for one kind of property over another. The growth of the West, encouraged by the conquest of Indian lands during the War of 1812, was by no means regarded as an unmixed blessing. Eastern conservatives sought to keep land prices high; speculative interests opposed a policy that would be advantageous to poor squatters; politicians feared a change in the sectional balance of power; and businessmen were wary of a new section with interests unlike their own. European visitors testified that, even during the so-called Era of Good Feelings , Americans characteristically expressed scorn for their countrymen in sections other than their own.

Economic hardship, especially the financial panic of 1819, also created disunity. The causes of the panic were complex, but its greatest effect was clearly the tendency of its victims to blame it on one or another hostile or malevolent interest-whether the second Bank of the United States, Eastern capitalists, selfish speculators, or perfidious politicians-each charge expressing the bad feeling that existed side by side with the good.

If harmony seemed to reign on the level of national political parties, disharmony prevailed within the states. In the early 19th-century United States, local and state politics were typically waged less on behalf of great issues than for petty gain. That the goals of politics were often sordid did not mean that political contests were bland. In every section, state factions led by shrewd men waged bitter political warfare to attain or entrench themselves in power.

The most dramatic manifestation of national division was the political struggle over slavery , particularly over its spread into new territories. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 eased the threat of further disunity, at least for the time being. The sectional balance between the states was preserved: in the Louisiana Purchase , with the exception of the Missouri Territory, slavery was to be confined to the area south of the 36°30′ line. Yet this compromise did not end the crisis but only postponed it. The determination by Northern and Southern senators not to be outnumbered by one another suggests that the people continued to believe in the conflicting interests of the various great geographic sections. The weight of evidence indicates that the decade after the Battle of New Orleans was not an era of good feelings so much as one of mixed feelings.

The economy

The American economy expanded and matured at a remarkable rate in the decades after the War of 1812. The rapid growth of the West created a great new centre for the production of grains and pork , permitting the country's older sections to specialize in other crops. New processes of manufacture, particularly in textiles, not only accelerated an "industrial revolution" in the Northeast but also, by drastically enlarging the Northern market for raw materials, helped account for a boom in Southern cotton production. If by midcentury Southerners of European descent had come to regard slavery-on which the cotton economy relied-as a "positive good" rather than the "necessary evil" that they had earlier held the system to be, it was largely because of the increasingly central role played by cotton in earning profits for the region. Industrial workers organized the country's first trade unions and even workingmen's political parties early in the period. The corporate form thrived in an era of booming capital requirements, and older and simpler forms of attracting investment capital were rendered obsolete. Commerce became increasingly specialized, the division of labour in the disposal of goods for sale matching the increasingly sophisticated division of labour that had come to characterize production.
Edward Pessen
The management of the growing economy was inseparable from political conflict in the emerging United States. At the start the issue was between agrarians (represented by Jeffersonian Republicans) wanting a decentralized system of easy credit and an investing community looking for stability and profit in financial markets. This latter group, championed by Hamilton and the Federalists, won the first round with the establishment of the first Bank of the United States (1791), jointly owned by the government and private stockholders. It was the government's fiscal agent, and it put the centre of gravity of the credit system in Philadelphia, its headquarters. Its charter expired in 1811, and the financial chaos that hindered procurement and mobilization during the ensuing War of 1812 demonstrated the importance of such centralization. Hence, even Jeffersonian Republicans were converted to acceptance of a second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816.

The second Bank of the United States faced constant political fire, but the conflict now was not merely between farming and mercantile interests but also between local bankers who wanted access to the profits of an expanding credit system and those who, like the president of the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle , wanted more regularity and predictability in banking through top-down control. The Constitution gave the United States exclusive power to coin money but allowed for the chartering of banks by individual states, and these banks were permitted to issue notes that also served as currency. The state banks, whose charters were often political plums, lacked coordinated inspection and safeguards against risky loans usually collateralized by land, whose value fluctuated wildly, as did the value of the banknotes. Overspeculation, bankruptcies, contraction, and panics were the inevitable result.

Biddle's hope was that the large deposits of government funds in the Bank of the United States would allow it to become the major lender to local banks, and from that position of strength it could squeeze the unsound ones into either responsibility or extinction. But this notion ran afoul of the growing democratic spirit that insisted that the right to extend credit and choose its recipients was too precious to be confined to a wealthy elite. This difference of views produced the classic battle between Biddle and Jackson, culminating in Biddle's attempt to win recharter for the Bank of the United States, Jackson's veto and transfer of the government funds to pet banks, and the Panic of 1837. Not until the 1840s did the federal government place its funds in an independent treasury, and not until the Civil War was there legislation creating a national banking system. The country was strong enough to survive, but the politicization of fiscal policy making continued to be a major theme of American economic history.

Transportation revolution

Improvements in transportation, a key to the advance of industrialization everywhere, were especially vital in the United States. A fundamental problem of the developing American economy was the great geographic extent of the country and the appallingly poor state of its roads. The broad challenge to weave the Great Lakes, Mississippi Valley, and Gulf and Atlantic coasts into a single national market was first met by putting steam to work on the rich network of navigable rivers. As early as 1787, John Fitch had demonstrated a workable steamboat to onlookers in Philadelphia; some years later, he repeated the feat in New York City. But it is characteristic of American history that, in the absence of governmental encouragement, private backing was needed to bring an invention into full play. As a result, popular credit for the first steamboat goes to Robert Fulton , who found the financing to make his initial Hudson River run of the Clermont in 1807 more than a onetime feat. From that point forward, on inland waters, steam was king, and its most spectacular manifestation was the Mississippi River paddle wheeler, a unique creation of unsung marine engineers challenged to make a craft that could "work" in shallow swift-running waters. Their solution was to put cargo, engines, and passengers on a flat open deck above the waterline, which was possible in the mild climate of large parts of the drainage basin of the Father of Waters. The Mississippi River steamboat not only became an instantly recognizable American icon but also had an impact on the law. In the case of Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Chief Justice Marshall affirmed the exclusive right of the federal government to regulate traffic on rivers flowing between states.

Canals and railroads were not as distinctively American in origin as the paddle wheeler, but, whereas 18th-century canals in England and continental Europe were simple conveniences for moving bulky loads cheaply at low speed, Americans integrated the country's water transport system by connecting rivers flowing toward the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes and the Ohio-Mississippi River valleys. The best-known conduit, the Erie Canal , connected the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, linking the West to the port of New York City. Other major canals in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio joined Philadelphia and Baltimore to the West via the Ohio River and its tributaries. Canal building was increasingly popular throughout the 1820s and '30s, sometimes financed by states or by a combination of state and private effort. But many overbuilt or unwisely begun canal projects collapsed, and states that were "burned" in the process became more wary of such ventures.

Canal development was overtaken by the growth of the railroads , which were far more efficient in covering the great distances underserved by the road system and indispensable in the trans-Mississippi West. Work on the Baltimore and Ohio line, the first railroad in the United States, was begun in 1828, and a great burst of construction boosted the country's rail network from zero to 30,000 miles (50,000 km) by 1860. The financing alone, no less than the operation of the burgeoning system, had a huge political and economic impact. Adams was a decided champion of "national internal improvements"-the federally assisted development of turnpikes, lighthouses, and dredging and channel-clearing operations (that is, whatever it took to assist commerce). That term, however, was more closely associated with Henry Clay , like Adams a strong nationalist. Clay proposed an American System , which would, through internal improvements and the imposition of tariffs, encourage the growth of an industrial sector that exchanged manufactured goods for the products of U.S. agriculture, thus benefiting each section of the country. But the passionate opposition of many agrarians to the costs and expanded federal control inherent in the program created one battlefield in the long contest between the Democratic and Whig parties that did not end until the triumph of Whig economic ideas in the Republican party during the Civil War.

Beginnings of industrialization

Economic, social, and cultural history cannot easily be separated. The creation of the "factory system" in the United States was the outcome of interaction between several characteristically American forces: faith in the future, a generally welcoming attitude toward immigrants, an abundance of resources linked to a shortage of labour, and a hospitable view of innovation. The pioneering textile industry, for example, sprang from an alliance of invention, investment, and philanthropy. Moses Brown (later benefactor of the College of Rhode Island, renamed Brown University in honour of his nephew Nicholas) was looking to invest some of his family's mercantile fortune in the textile business. New England wool and southern cotton were readily available, as was water power from Rhode Island's swiftly flowing rivers. All that was lacking to convert a handcraft industry into one that was machine-based was machinery itself; however, the new devices for spinning and weaving that were coming into use in England were jealously guarded there. But Samuel Slater , a young English mechanic who immigrated to the United States in 1790 carrying the designs for the necessary machinery in his prodigious memory, became aware of Brown's ambitions and of the problems he was having with his machinery. Slater formed a partnership with Brown and others to reproduce the crucial equipment and build prosperous Rhode Island fabric factories.

Local American inventive talent embodied in sometimes self-taught engineers was available too. One conspicuous example was Delaware's Oliver Evans , who built a totally automatic flour mill in the 1780s and later founded a factory that produced steam engines; another was the ultimate Connecticut Yankee, Eli Whitney , who not only fathered the cotton gin but built a factory for mass producing muskets by fitting together interchangeable parts on an assembly line . Whitney got help from a supportive U.S. Army, which sustained him with advances on large procurement contracts. Such governmental support of industrial development was rare, but, when it occurred, it was a crucial if often understated element in the industrializing of America.

Francis Cabot Lowell , who opened a textile factory in 1811 in the Massachusetts town later named for him, played a pathbreaking role as a paternalistic model employer. Whereas Slater and Brown used local families, living at home, to provide "hands" for their factories, Lowell brought in young women from the countryside and put them up in boardinghouses adjacent to the mills. The "girls"-most of them in or just out of their teens-were happy to be paid a few dollars for 60-hour workweeks that were less taxing than those they put in as farmers' daughters. Their moral behaviour was supervised by matrons, and they themselves organized religious, dramatic, musical, and study groups. The idea was to create an American labour force that would not resemble the wretched proletarians of England and elsewhere in Europe.

Lowell was marveled at by foreign and domestic visitors alike but lost its idyllic character as competitive pressures within the industry resulted in larger workloads, longer hours, and smaller wages. When, in the 1840s and 1850s, Yankee young women formed embryonic unions and struck, they were replaced by French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Nonetheless, early New England industrialism carried the imprint of a conscious sense of American exceptionalism.
Bernard A. Weisberger

Social developments

In the decades before the American Civil War (1861-65), the civilization of the United States exerted an irresistible pull on visitors, hundreds of whom were assigned to report back to European audiences that were fascinated by the new society and insatiable for information on every facet of the "fabled republic." What appeared to intrigue the travelers above all was the uniqueness of American society. In contrast to the relatively static and well-ordered civilization of the Old World, America seemed turbulent, dynamic, and in constant flux, its people crude but vital, awesomely ambitious, optimistic, and independent. Many well-bred Europeans were evidently taken aback by the self-assurance of lightly educated American common folk. Ordinary Americans seemed unwilling to defer to anyone on the basis of rank or status.

Birth of American Culture

"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" asked an English satirist early in the 1800s. Had he looked beyond the limits of "high culture," he would have found plenty of answers. As a matter of fact, the period between 1815 and 1860 produced an outpouring of traditional literary works now known to students of English-language prose and poetry everywhere-the verse of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edgar Allan Poe , the novels of James Fenimore Cooper , Nathaniel Hawthorne , and Herman Melville , as well as the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson -all expressing distinctively American themes and depicting distinctly American characters such as Natty Bumppo , Hester Prynne , and Captain Ahab who now belong to the world.

But setting these aside, Nathaniel Bowditch 's The New American Practical Navigator (1802), Matthew Fontaine Maury 's Physical Geography of the Sea (1855), and the reports from the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the various far Western explorations made by the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers, as well as those of U.S. Navy Antarctic explorer Charles Wilkes , were the American books on the desks of sea captains, naturalists, biologists, and geologists throughout the world. By 1860 the international scientific community knew that there was an American intellectual presence.

At home Noah Webster 's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) included hundreds of words of local origin to be incorporated in the former "King's English." Webster's blue-backed "Speller," published in 1783, the geography textbooks of Jedidiah Morse , and the Eclectic Readers of William Holmes McGuffey became staples in every 19th-century American classroom. Popular literature included the humorous works of writers such as Seba Smith , Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, and Artemus Ward , which featured frontier tall tales and rural dialect. In the growing cities there were new varieties of mass entertainment, including the blatantly racist minstrel shows , for which ballads like those of Stephen Foster were composed. The "museums" and circuses of P.T. Barnum also entertained the middle-class audience, and the spread of literacy sustained a new kind of popular journalism, pioneered by James Gordon Bennett , whose New York Herald mingled its up-to-the-moment political and international news with sports, crime, gossip, and trivia. Popular magazines such as Harper's Weekly, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, and Godey's Lady's Book, edited by Sarah Josepha Hale with a keen eye toward women's wishes, also made their mark in an emerging urban America. All these added up to a flourishing democratic culture that could be dismissed as vulgar by foreign and domestic snobs but reflected a vitality loudly sung by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass (1855).
Bernard A. Weisberger

The people

American society was rapidly changing. Population grew at what to Europeans was an amazing rate-although it was the normal pace of American population growth for the antebellum decades-of between three-tenths and one-third per decade. After 1820 the rate of growth was not uniform throughout the country. New England and the Southern Atlantic states languished-the former region because it was losing settlers to the superior farmlands of the Western Reserve , the latter because its economy offered too few places to newcomers.

The special feature of the population increase of the 1830s and '40s was the extent to which it was composed of immigrants. Whereas about 250,000 Europeans had arrived in the first three decades of the 19th century, there were 10 times as many between 1830 and 1850. The newcomers were overwhelmingly Irish and German. Traveling in family groups rather than as individuals, they were attracted by the dazzling opportunities of American life: abundant work, land, food, and freedom on the one hand and the absence of compulsory military service on the other.
Edward Pessen
The mere statistics of immigration do not, however, tell the whole story of its vital role in pre-Civil War America. The intermingling of technology, politics, and accident produced yet another "great migration." By the 1840s the beginnings of steam transportation on the Atlantic and improvements in the sailing speed of the last generation of windjammers made oceanic passages more frequent and regular. It became easier for hungry Europeans to answer the call of America to take up the farmlands and build the cities. Irish migration would have taken place in any case, but the catastrophe of the Great Famine (Irish Potato Famine) of 1845-49 turned a stream into a torrent. Meanwhile, the steady growth of the democratic idea in Europe produced the Revolutions of 1848 in France, Italy, Hungary, and Germany. The uprisings in the last three countries were brutally suppressed, creating a wave of political refugees. Hence, many of the Germans who traveled over in the wake of the revolutions-the Forty-Eighters-were refugees who took liberal ideals, professional educations, and other intellectual capital to the American West. Overall German contributions to American musical, educational, and business life simply cannot be measured in statistics. Neither can one quantify the impact of the Irish politicians, policemen, and priests on American urban life or the impact of the Irish in general on Roman Catholicism in the United States.

Besides the Irish and Germans, there were thousands of Norwegians and Swedes who immigrated, driven by agricultural depression in the 1850s, to take up new land on the yet-unbroken Great Plains. And there was a much smaller migration to California in the 1850s of Chinese seeking to exchange hard times for new opportunities in the gold fields. These people too indelibly flavoured the culture of the United States.

Mention must also be made of utopian immigrant colonies planted by thinkers who wanted to create a new society in a New World. Examples include Nashoba, Tennessee, and New Harmony , Indiana, by two British newcomers, Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen , respectively. There also were German planned settlements at Amana , Iowa, and in New Ulm and New Braunfels , Texas. If the growth of materialistic and expansionist bumptiousness represented by the Manifest Destiny movement was fueled in part by the immigration-fed expansion of the American populace, these experiments in communal living added to the less materialistic forces driving American thought. They fit the pattern of searching for heaven on earth that marked the age of reform.
Bernard A. Weisberger
Most African Americans in the North possessed theoretical freedom and little else. Confined to menial occupations for the most part, they fought a losing battle against the inroads of Irish competition in northeastern cities. The struggle between the two groups erupted spasmodically into ugly street riots. The hostility shown to free African Americans by the general community was less violent but equally unremitting. Discrimination in politics, employment, education, housing, religion, and even cemeteries resulted in a cruelly oppressive system. Unlike slaves, free African Americans in the North could criticize and petition against their subjugation, but this proved fruitless in preventing the continued deterioration of their situation.

Most Americans continued to live in the country. Although improved machinery had resulted in expanded farm production and had given further impetus to the commercialization of agriculture, the way of life of independent agriculturists had changed little by midcentury. The public journals put out by some farmers insisted that their efforts were unappreciated by the larger community. The actuality was complex. Many farmers led lives marked by unremitting toil, cash shortage, and little leisure. Farm workers received minuscule wages. In all sections of the country, much of the best land was concentrated in the hands of a small number of wealthy farmers. The proportion of farm families who owned their own land, however, was far greater in the United States than in Europe, and varied evidence points to a steady improvement in the standard and style of living of agriculturalists as midcentury approached.

Cities

Cities, both old and new, thrived during the era, their growth in population outstripping the spectacular growth rate of the country as a whole and their importance and influence far transcending the relatively small proportions of citizens living in them. Whether on the "urban frontier" or in the older seaboard region, antebellum cities were the centres of wealth and political influence for their outlying hinterlands. New York City , with a population approaching 500,000 by midcentury, faced problems of a different order of magnitude from those confronting such cities as Poughkeepsie , New York, and Newark , New Jersey. Yet the pattern of change during the era was amazingly similar for eastern cities or western, old cities or new, great cities or small. The lifeblood of them all was commerce. Old ideals of economy in town government were grudgingly abandoned by the merchant, professional, and landowning elites who typically ruled. Taxes were increased in order to deal with pressing new problems and to enable the urban community of midcentury to realize new opportunities. Harbours were improved, police forces professionalized, services expanded, waste more reliably removed, streets improved, and welfare activities broadened, all as the result of the statesmanship and the self-interest of property owners who were convinced that amelioration was socially beneficial.
Edward Pessen

Education and the role of women

Cities were also centres of educational and intellectual progress. The emergence of a relatively well-financed public educational system, free of the stigma of "pauper" or "charity" schools, and the emergence of a lively "penny press," made possible by a technological revolution, were among the most important developments. The role of women in America's expanding society was intriguingly shaped by conflicting forces. On one hand, there were factors that abetted emancipation. For example, the growing cities offered new job opportunities as clerks and shop assistants for girls and young women with elementary educations furnished by the public schools. And the need for trained teachers for those schools offered another avenue to female independence. At higher levels, new rungs on the ladder of upward mobility were provided by the creation of women's colleges, such as Mount Holyoke in South Hadley , Massachusetts (1837), and by the admission of women to a very few coeducational colleges, such as Oberlin (1833) and Antioch (1852), both in Ohio. A rare woman or two even broke into professional ranks, including Elizabeth Blackwell , considered the first woman physician of modern times, and the Rev. Olympia Brown , one of the first American women whose ordination was sanctioned by a full denomination.

On the other hand, traditionally educated women from genteel families remained bound by silken cords of expectation. The "duties of womanhood" expounded by popular media included, to the exclusion of all else, the conservation of a husband's resources, the religious and moral education of children and servants, and the cultivation of higher sensibilities through the proper selection of decorative objects and reading matter. The "true woman" made the home an island of tranquility and uplift to which the busy male could retreat after a day's struggle in the hard world of the marketplace. In so doing, she was venerated but kept in a clearly noncompetitive role.
Bernard A. Weisberger

Wealth

The brilliant French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville , in common with most contemporary observers, believed American society to be remarkably egalitarian. Most rich American men were thought to have been born poor; "self-made" was the term Henry Clay popularized for them. The society was allegedly a very fluid one, marked by the rapid rise and fall of fortunes, with room at the top accessible to all but the most humble; opportunity for success seemed freely available to all, and, although material possessions were not distributed perfectly equally, they were, in theory, dispersed so fairly that only a few poor and a few rich men existed at either end of the social spectrum.

The actuality, however, was far different. While the rich were inevitably not numerous, America by 1850 had more millionaires than all of Europe. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia each had perhaps1,000 individuals admitting to assets of $100,000 or more, at a time when wealthy taxpayers kept secret from assessors the bulk of their wealth. Because an annual income of $4,000 or $5,000 enabled a person to live luxuriously, these were great fortunes indeed. Typically, the wealthiest 1 percent of urban citizens owned approximately one-half the wealth of the great cities of the Northeast, while the great bulk of their populations possessed little or nothing. In what has long been called the "Age of the Common Man," rich men were almost invariably born not into humble or poor families but into wealthy and prestigious ones. In western cities too, class lines increasingly hardened after 1830. The common man lived in the age, but he did not dominate it. It appears that contemporaries, overimpressed with the absence of a titled aristocracy and with the democratic tone and manner of American life, failed to see the extent to which money, family, and status exerted power in the New World even as they did in the Old.

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United States - The United States from 1816 to 1850 | history - geography

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United States - The United States from 1816 to 1850: The years between the election to the presidency of James Monroe in 1816 and of John Quincy Adams in 1824 have long been known in American history as the Era of Good Feelings.

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The political climate of 1850's America 

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The political climate of 1850's America 

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By the 1850s the United States had become a nation polarized by specific regional identities. The South held a pro-slavery identity that supported the expansion of slavery into western territories, while the North largely held abolitionist sentiments and opposed the institution's westward expansion. Until the 1850s the nation precariously balanced the slavery issue. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was the first serious argument over the expansion of slavery into newly acquired western territory and also revealed fissures between the Second Party System of Whigs and Democrats in the North and the South. Whigs, while not an abolitionist party, believed a strong government served as the protector of Republican principles. The Democrats, on the other hand, emphasized the right of individual states to create and enforce laws. Ultimately, the parties compromised and prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri. This compromise artificially quelled the storm brewing between the two regions and for over thirty years the nation maintained this delicate balance with regards to slavery. This balance would teeter in the mid-1840s when, amid extreme controversy, Texas was annexed as a slave state by a majority vote in 1845. Events following the annexation of Texas would lead to war with Mexico and eventually to the American Civil War.

After two years of fighting, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican American War. Through this treaty the United States acquired over a half million square acres. This territory included all of present day California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona. (Niven 1990, 53) The treaty may have ended the hostilities between Mexico and the United States; however it revived the contentious arguments concerning slavery between the North and the South. Some politicians, like ardent pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun, had opposed the war with Mexico, fearing that any territory acquired as a result would imperil the Union. His fears would be realized in 1846 when Democratic Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot proposed the Wilmot Proviso in Congess. (Niven 1990, 53) The Wilmot Proviso stated that slavery would not be allowed to spread into any territory obtained from Mexico. Wilmot's proposal proved highly unpopular throughout the southern states whose white residents believed that the bill would infringe on the rights of their state and the rights provided them as American citizens by the Constitution.

In North Carolina, a slaveholding state with a relatively small slave population, "it was unclear whether ordinary North Carolinians ever accepted the notion that the issue of slavery in the territories was a matter of vital concern to them. Of course no influential politician in the state chose to endorse the restrictions of slavery in the territories. Instead, both parties tried to capitalize on the issue by denouncing their opponents and 'Wilmot Provisoists.'" (Jeffrey 1989, 287) In North Carolina, the Wilmot Proviso highlighted the competition between the Whig and Democratic Parties regarding which party most ardently supported and protected the right to own slave property. Although the Wilmot Proviso passed in the House of Representatives, where the Free States had a clear majority, the Senate rejected the legislation. Despite its failure, the Wilmot Proviso, like the Compromise of 1820, revealed the discontinuity between the Whig and Democratic Parties in the North and South and opened the way for the sectional realignment of the nation's party system.

The question of how to deal with the new territory acquired from Mexico led to the Compromise of 1850, orchestrated by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster with southern Democrat, John C. Calhoun. They warned that the Union would only survive if the North and the South shared equal power within it. After a series of fierce debates, "the 'Compromise' that finally emerged was not really a compromise in which all parties conceded part of what they wanted, but a series of separately enacted measures each of which became law with a majority of congressmen from each section voting against a majority of those from the other." (McPherson 1988, 71) The Compromise passed in a series of five bills. As part of the Compromise, California was annexed as a free state, which upset the balance of free and slave states. Additionally, the New Mexico and Utah territories were given popular sovereignty, which allowed them to choose whether slavery would be allowed within their borders. The Compromise abolished the slave trade in Washington D.C., but appeased southern Democrats with the passage of a tougher Fugitive Slave Law, to the outrage of the northern public.

In North Carolina the Compromise of 1850 demonstrated the divisiveness of the state's Second Party System comprised of Whigs and Democrats. The divide in the parties can be seen in the state's political newspapers. The majority of "Whig presses in North Carolina supported the Compromise and rejoiced after its passage in Congress, while Democratic newspapers like the North Carolina Standard opposed the key compromise proposals and regarded their passage as a defeat for the South." (Jeffrey 1989, 293) Ultimately the debates concerning Clay's Compromise proposal placed the North Carolina Democratic Party firmly in the corner of southern rights. They used the controversy over the compromise, "as an opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to Southern rights and to create an image of their opponents as cowardly submissionists who were willing to sacrifice the interests of their own section in the name of compromise and moderation." (Jeffrey 1989, 293)

The Compromise of 1850 settled the turmoil created by the territory acquisition of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however, the nation's debate over slavery would resurface on a national level only a few years later with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Over the years a steady stream of settlers made their way to these areas and looked to establish territorial and eventually state governments. Once again slavery became an issue in these areas. The 1854 act proposed by Democrat Stephen Douglass, "sought to expand the political liberties of the territory's white men by giving them the power at the local level to pronounce on the most contentious issue of the time, black slavery. Popular sovereignty, the principal of the Kansas bill, built on the belief that the balance between personal freedom and government power ought to tilt toward the former." (Etcheson 2004, 2) Giving settlers in the Kansas-Nebraska territory the opportunity to choose whether or not they would allow slavery conflicted with the parameters of the 1820 Missouri Compromise which outlawed slavery in that area of the country. Debates about the bill erupted throughout the nation. Despite public opposition, Douglass, "utilizing all his powers of argument, his prestige, and his mastery of parliamentary tactics [forced] the bill through Congress by the narrowest of margins. It received President Pierce's signature on May 29, 1854." (Niven 1990, 83) The Kansas-Nebraska Act deepened the already existing gulf between the North and the South that would eventually push the nation to Civil War. It also led to the creation of a new national political party.

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A Nation Divided: The Political Climate of 1850s America

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By the 1850s the United States had become a nation polarized by specific regional identities. The South held a pro-slavery identity that supported the expansion of slavery into western territories, while the North largely held abolitionist sentiments and opposed the institution's westward expansion. Until the 1850s the nation precariously balanced the slavery issue.

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Social Studies Unit: U.S. History - BrainPOP

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Learn the history of the United States of America!

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France - Resources and power: Compared with its agricultural resources, the country is far less well-endowed with energy resources. Coal reserves are estimated at about 140 million tons, but French coal suffered from being difficult and expensive to mine and from its mediocre quality.

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General information about France(Geography, History, Economy, Cultural Life, Government)

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France, country of northwestern Europe. Historically and culturally among the most important nations in the Western world, France has also played a highly significant role in international affairs, with former colonies in every corner of the globe. Bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, the Alps and the Pyrenees, France has long provided a geographic, economic, and linguistic bridge joining northern and southern Europe. It is Europe's most important agricultural producer and one of the world's leading industrial powers.

France is among the globe's oldest nations, the product of an alliance of duchies and principalities under a single ruler in the Middle Ages. Today, as in that era, central authority is vested in the state, even though a measure of autonomy has been granted to the country's régions in recent decades. The French people look to the state as the primary guardian of liberty, and the state in turn provides a generous program of amenities for its citizens, from free education to health care and pension plans. Even so, this centralist tendency is often at odds with another long-standing theme of the French nation: the insistence on the supremacy of the individual. On this matter historian Jules Michelet remarked, " England is an empire, Germany is a nation, a race, France is a person." Statesman Charles de Gaulle, too, famously complained, "Only peril can bring the French together. One can't impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 kinds of cheese."

This tendency toward individualism joins with a pluralist outlook and a great interest in the larger world. Even though its imperialist stage was driven by the impulse to civilize that world according to French standards ( la mission civilisatrice), the French still note approvingly the words of writer Gustave Flaubert:

I am no more modern than I am ancient, no more French than Chinese; and the idea of la patrie, the fatherland-that is, the obligation to live on a bit of earth coloured red or blue on a map, and to detest the other bits coloured green or black-has always seemed to me narrow, restricted, and ferociously stupid.

At once universal and particular, French culture has spread far and greatly influenced the development of art and science, particularly anthropology, philosophy, and sociology.

France has also been influential in government and civil affairs, giving the world important democratic ideals in the age of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and inspiring the growth of reformist and even revolutionary movements for generations. The present Fifth Republic has, however, enjoyed notable stability since its promulgation on September 28, 1958, marked by a tremendous growth in private initiative and the rise of centrist politics. Although France has engaged in long-running disputes with other European powers (and, from time to time, with the United States, its longtime ally), it emerged as a leading member in the European Union (EU) and its predecessors. From 1966 to 1995 France did not participate in the integrated military structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), retaining full control over its own air, ground, and naval forces; beginning in 1995, however, France was represented on the NATO Military Committee, and in 2009 French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that the country would rejoin the organization's military command. As one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council-together with the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and China -France has the right to veto decisions put to the council.

The capital and by far the most important city of France is Paris, one of the world's preeminent cultural and commercial centres. A majestic city known as the ville lumière, or "city of light," Paris has often been remade, most famously in the mid-19th century under the command of Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussman, who was committed to Napoleon III's vision of a modern city free of the choleric swamps and congested alleys of old, with broad avenues and a regular plan. Paris is now a sprawling metropolis, one of Europe's largest conurbations, but its historic heart can still be traversed in an evening's walk. Confident that their city stood at the very centre of the world, Parisians were once given to referring to their country as having two parts, Paris and le désert, the wasteland beyond it. Metropolitan Paris has now extended far beyond its ancient suburbs into the countryside, however, and nearly every French town and village now numbers a retiree or two driven from the city by the high cost of living, so that, in a sense, Paris has come to embrace the desert and the desert Paris.

Among France's other major cities are Lyon, located along an ancient Rhône valley trade route linking the North Sea and the Mediterranean; Marseille, a multiethnic port on the Mediterranean founded as an entrepôt for Greek and Carthaginian traders in the 6th century bce; Nantes, an industrial centre and deepwater harbour along the Atlantic coast; and Bordeaux, located in southwestern France along the Garonne River.

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France | History, Map, Flag, Population, Cities, Capital, & Facts

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France, country of northwestern Europe. Historically and culturally among the most important nations in the Western world, France has also played a highly significant role in international affairs for centuries. Its capital is Paris, one of the most important cultural and commercial centers in the world.

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this is history too

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The 1850s was a pivotal decade in the 19th century. In the United States, tensions over slavery became prominent and events began to put the nation on the road to civil war. In Europe, new technology was celebrated and the great powers fought the Crimean War.

Decade By Decade: Timelines of the 1800s

1850

January 1850: The Compromise of 1850 was introduced in the US Congress. The legislation would eventually pass and be highly controversial, but it essentially delayed the Civil War by a decade.

January 27: The labor leader Samuel Gompers was born.

February 1: Edward "Eddie" Lincoln, a four-year-old son of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, died in Springfield, Illinois.

July 9: President Zachary Taylor died in the White House. His vice president, Millard Fillmore, ascended to the presidency.

July 19: Margaret Fuller, an early feminist writer and editor, died tragically at the age of 40 in a shipwreck on the coast of Long Island.

September 11: The first New York City concert by Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind created a sensation. Her tour, promoted by P.T. Barnum, would cross America for the following year.

December: The first clipper ship built by Donald McKay, the Stag Hound, was launched.

1851

May 1: An enormous exhibition of technology opened in London with a ceremony attended by Queen Victoria and the event's sponsor, her husband Prince Albert. Prize-winning innovations shown at the Great Exhibition included photographs by Mathew Brady and the reaper of Cyrus McCormick.

September 11: In what became known as the Christiana Riot, a Maryland slave-owner was killed when he attempted to capture a runaway slave in rural Pennsylvania.

September 18: Journalist Henry J. Raymond published the first issue of the New York Times.

November: Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick was published.

1852

March 20: Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin.

June 29: Death of Henry Clay. The great legislator's body was taken from Washington, D.C. to his home in Kentucky and elaborate funeral observances were held in cites along the way.

July 4: Frederick Douglass delivered notable speech, "The Meaning of July 4th for the Negro."

October 24: Death of Daniel Webster.

November 2: Franklin Pierce elected President of the United States.

1853

March 4: Franklin Pierce sworn in as President of the United States.

July 8: Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Japanese harbor near present day Tokyo with four American warships, demanding to deliver a letter to the emperor of Japan.

December: Gadsden Purchase signed.

1854

March: The Crimean War began.

March 31: Treaty of Kanagawa signed.

May 30: The Kansas-Nebraska Act signed into law. The legislation, designed to lessen the tension over slavery, actually has the opposite effect.

September 27: The steamship S.S. Arctic collided with another ship off the coast of Canada and sank with a great loss of life. The disaster was considered scandalous as women and children were left to die in the icy waters of the Atlantic.

October: Florence Nightingale left Britain for the Crimean War.

November 6: Birth of composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa.

1855

January: The Panama Railroad opened, and the first locomotive to travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific traveled on it.

March 8: British photographer Roger Fenton, with his wagon of photographic gear, arrived at the Crimean War. He would make the first serious effort to photograph a war.

July: Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass in Brooklyn, New York.

November: The violence over slavery that will become known as "Bleeding Kansas" began in the US territory of Kansas.

November: David Livingstone became the first European to view Victoria Falls in Africa.

1856

February: The Know-Nothing Party held a convention and nominates former president Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate.

May 22: Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was attacked and beaten with a cane in the US Senate chamber by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina.

The nearly fatal beating was prompted by a speech the anti-slavery Sumner gave in which he insulted a pro-slavery Senator. His attacker, Brooks, was declared a hero in the slave states, and southerners took up collections and sent him new canes to replace the one he had splintered while being Sumner.

May 24: Abolitionist fanatic John Brown and his followers perpetrated the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas.

October: Second Opium War began between Britain and China.

November 4: James Buchanan elected president of the United States.

1857

March 4: James Buchanan was inaugurated as President of the United States. He became very ill at his own inauguration, raising questions in the press about whether he had been poisoned in a failed assassination attempt.

March 6: The Dred Scott Decision was announced by the U.S. Supreme Court. The decision, which asserted that African Americans could not be American citizens, inflamed the debate over slavery.

1858

August-October 1858: Perennial rivals Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln held a series of seven debates in Illinois while running for a U.S. Senate seat. Douglas won the election, but the debates elevated Lincoln, and his anti-slavery views, to national prominence. Newspaper stenographers wrote down the content of the debates, and portions which were published in newspapers introduced Lincoln to an audience outside of Illinois.

1859

August 27: The first oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania to a depth of 69 feet. The following morning it was discovered to be successful.

September 15: Death of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the brilliant British engineer. At the time of his death his enormous steel ship The Great Eastern was still unfinished.

October 16, Abolitionist fanatic John Brown launched a raid against the U.S. arsenal at Harper's Ferry.

December 2: Following a trial, abolitionist John Brown was hanged for treason. His death energized many sympathizers in the North, and made him a martyr. In the North, people mourned and church bells tolled in tribute.

In the South, people rejoiced.

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Major Events of the 1850s: Slavery, Shipwrecks, Debates, and More

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The 1850s was a pivotal decade in the 19th century. In the United States, tensions over slavery became prominent and events began to put the nation on the road to civil war. In Europe, new technology was celebrated and the great powers fought the Crimean War.