The World, 1650–1789: Unit Review

1648 (Westphalia) mattered mainly to Europe; 1644 (the Qing take Beijing) and 1707 (Aurangzeb's death) were turning points for Asia's largest states. Choosing turning points is an interpretation.

Example: "To what extent did First Nations benefit from the fur trade between 1670 and 1789?"

Most written records were made by the literate and powerful; their histories survive in oral tradition, court records and objects, which must be read critically.

By keeping great nobles at Versailles (from 1682), busy with court ceremony and dependent on royal favour, and by governing provinces through intendants.

Bossuet: divine right (religion). Hobbes: a social contract for security (reason). Both concluded that power should be strong and undivided.

It linked noble rank to service to the state.

Any two: no taxes or suspending laws without Parliament; no peacetime standing army without consent; free elections; no cruel and unusual punishments.

There was war in Ireland (the Boyne, 1690) and Scotland, and penal laws against Irish Catholics followed.

He argued for natural rights to liberty but helped write Carolina's constitutions protecting slavery and invested in the Royal African Company.

From 1757, Europeans could trade in China only at Guangzhou, through licensed Cohong merchants.

Contact continued through four gates (Nagasaki, Tsushima, Satsuma, Matsumae), and the word sakoku dates only from 1801.

Manchu: banner armies, the queue order, the Manchu language. Confucian: civil-service examinations, Ming ministries, scholarly patronage.

Most of Hungary.

Nader Shah of Iran sacked the city, taking the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor.

After 1707, power moved from the Mughal centre to regional states (Hyderabad, Bengal, Awadh, the Marathas, Mysore), many of them prosperous.

Motion on Earth and in the heavens under the same laws of motion and universal gravitation.

From Ottoman practice via Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1717 letter; London 1721) and from West African knowledge via Onesimus in Boston (1721).

They made results public and repeatable, the root of peer review.

Montesquieu: separation of powers. Rousseau: the general will and the social contract. Beccaria: against torture and the death penalty.

Reforms that strengthened the state usually lasted; reforms that threatened nobles' power (ending serfdom) usually failed.

Rights were proclaimed universal while the slave trade peaked; women were excluded; some thinkers wrote racist rankings.

Build national wealth by exporting more than importing, collecting bullion and using colonies as suppliers and markets.

Europeans paid silver for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, and the Qing collected taxes in silver.

Poor villagers who lost common rights, many becoming landless wage labourers.

To Brazil and the Caribbean.

Any two: everyday resistance and keeping culture; flight; maroon communities (Palmares, Jamaica, Suriname); revolts (Stono, Tacky's Revolt); petitions and published writing.

Most of it is corroborated, and it is a rare first-person Black account that shaped the abolition campaign.

Peace between the French and about 40 First Nations, and (with agreements at Albany) Haudenosaunee neutrality between the empires.

Only the Crown could acquire it, by agreement at public meetings.

Both were coordinated uprisings against Spanish rule and forced labour; the Pueblo Revolt expelled the Spanish for 12 years, while the Andean rebellion was crushed.

Madras, showing that colonial wars were global.

Any three: North America, Europe, South Asia, the Caribbean, West Africa, the Philippines.

Britain's war debt led to colonial taxes; the French threat was gone; the Proclamation limited western settlement.

The right to collect land revenue in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, granted in 1765.

They lost land and cattle; after wars and the 1713 smallpox epidemic, many lost their independence.

The idea of terra nullius.

Natural rights, consent of the governed, and the right to alter or abolish a government.

People of African descent who sided with the British (often for promised freedom); about 3000 settled in Nova Scotia, and nearly 1200 later went to Sierra Leone (1792).

French spending on the war deepened the crown's debt, forcing Louis XVI to call the Estates-General for May 1789.

Rich Osaka merchants were officially below farmers; many samurai and nobles fell into debt.

A dispute over Chinese Christians honouring ancestors and Confucius; the Pope's 1715 ban led the Qing to restrict and later ban Christianity.

They present an ordered racial ranking wanted by colonial elites; real identities were more fluid.

A clear judgement with limits, for example "for some groups" or "in some regions".

Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Example: a lawyer in Indigenous rights cases analyses treaty evidence, including oral history; an archivist judges and preserves sources.