Deck 18: The World System, Colonialism, and Inequality 

Question 1

According to Gerhard Lenski (1966), in advanced industrial societies what reduces the polarization between the owning and working classes?

A) the growth of the middle class
B) off-shoring of low-wage jobs
C) less social mobility
D) a socialist government
E) a less complex stratification system

Answer 1

the growth of the middle class

Question 2

The growth of a market for sugar in Europe spurred

A) the movement of capitalism, once a cultural trait specific to New Guinea (where sugar was first domesticated), to the rest of the world.
B) the development of a transatlantic slave trade.
C) a long-term improvement in the distribution of wealth among the rural peasantry of England.
D) the movement of sugar-producing nations from the periphery to the core of the world system.
E) a tremendous expansion in the strength of independent indigenous nations of Mexico and South America.

Answer 2

the development of a transatlantic slave trade.

Question 3

Which of the following statements about British colonialism is FALSE?

A) It began to disintegrate after World War II.
B) It lacked an intervention philosophy.
C) It was legitimized by the racist notion of the "white man's burden."
D) It was partly driven by business interests.
E) It can be divided into two stages.

Answer 3

It lacked an intervention philosophy.

Question 4

What does the term Columbian exchange refer to?

A) the peaceful exchange among Europeans and Native Americans of native edible plant species
B) the spread of European notions and technologies of warfare to Native Americans, who never engaged in massive violent campaigns prior to the 1500s
C) the spread of people, resources, products, ideas, and diseases between the Eastern and Western hemispheres after contact
D) the exchange of culture that occurred among Native Americans and Europeans that eventually led to the first great civilizations in the Americas and, in Europe, the first classless societies
E) the general reciprocity that characterized the relationship between Europeans and Native Americans during the first 15 years after initial contact

Question 5

According to Weber, what are the three dimensions of social stratification?

A) age, gender, and ethnicity
B) gender, ethnicity, and race
C) wealth, power, and prestige
D) status, exchange, and religion
E) the means of production, mode of production, and measure of production

Question 6

According to Karl Marx, classes are

A) not important to his vision of social change in Western society.
B) based more on notions of prestige and morality than on actual economic differences.
C) part of the original, preindustrial social system of humans.
D) complementary, in that they each do different tasks necessary for the survival of the society.
E) powerful collective forces that could mobilize human energies to influence the course of history.

Question 7

According to Marx, who are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat?

A) moiety groups that dominate Western capitalism
B) exogamous social groups
C) distinct and opposed classes produced by the world capitalist economy
D) groups destined to reconcile through the postcapitalist process of alienation
E) the products of gender differentiation from Europe's tribal past

Question 8

What best characterizes the intervention philosophy of the British empire?

A) manifest destiny
B) white man's burden
C) fifty-four forty or fight
D) this land is our land
E) in his majesty's domain

Question 9

Which of the following statements about Karl Marx is FALSE?

A) He analyzed 19th-century industrial production capitalism.
B) He called the people who sold their own labor the proletariat.
C) He emphasized class consciousness.
D) He called the owners of the means of production the bourgeoisie.
E) He viewed socioeconomic stratification in terms of several classes with different but complementary interests.

Question 10

What changes did workers instigate in response to industrialization in England?

A) Workers developed organizations to protect their interests.
B) Workers barred women and children from working in factories.
C) Workers launched a proletarian revolution.
D) Workers demanded the 8-hour work day and the Sabbath off.
E) Workers won the right to control production.

Question 11

What is the name of the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of a territory and its people by a foreign power for an extended time?

A) industrialization
B) apartheid
C) colonialism
D) alienation
E) petty capitalism

Question 12

Which of the following is NOT true about the poorest Americans?

A) The large number of poor in the country gives the group a strong political influence.
B) The poorest 1 percent of males die an average of 15 years younger than a male from the richest 1 percent.
C) Irreparable health damage has been done to an entire city in Michigan due to a cost-cutting switch of water sources.
D) Companies that produce environmental hazards are mostly located in poorer communities.
E) The life expectancy difference between a poor community and a rich one can be as much as 30 years.

Question 13

What term refers to the ideological justification for outsiders to guide native groups in specific directions?

A) intrusive ideology
B) development philosophy
C) development ideology
D) coercive philosophy
E) intervention philosophy

Question 14

Which of the following statements about core nations is FALSE?

A) They have complex economies.
B) They have advanced systems of production.
C) They export their raw materials to other countries.
D) They represent the dominant structural position in the world system.
E) They consist of the strongest and most powerful states.

Question 15

According to world-system theory, countries are assigned to one of which three positions?

A) metropole, satellite, and semisatellite
B) core, periphery, and semiperiphery
C) wealth, power, and prestige
D) state, nation-state, and nation
E) preliterate, nonliterate, and literate

Question 16

What best typifies the intervention philosophy of the French empire?

A) carte blanche
B) nom de plume
C) mission civilisatrice
D) coup d'état
E) savoir-faire

Question 17

Periphery nations

A) have economies that produce raw materials for export to the core and the semiperiphery.
B) have little incentive to interact with nations of the core.
C) are isolated from the world economy.
D) export to the core but not to the semiperiphery.
E) lack industrialization.

Question 18

How did the Belgian colonizers of East Africa identify who was Tutsi and who was Hutu?

A) previous census data
B) the number of cattle owned
C) phenotype, or how the individual physically looked
D) unique tribal body modifications such as scar tattoos
E) individual self-identification

Question 19

What term refers to wealth or resources invested in business with the intent of producing a profit?

A) capital
B) the modern world system
C) socioeconomic stratification
D) industrialization
E) an open class system

Question 20

What economic system is committed to production for sale or exchange, with the object of maximizing profits rather than supplying domestic needs?

A) world-system theory
B) communism
C) neoliberalism
D) capitalist world economy
E) intervention philosophy

Question 21

In anthropology, history, and literature, the field of postcolonial studies has gained prominence since the 1970s. Postcolonial refers to

A) the period succeeding the slave trade.
B) the study of social movements that, instead of rejecting colonialism, actually embraced it and transformed it for their own benefit.
C) the study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized.
D) an up-and-coming subfield in sociology.
E) a moral stance toward oppressed peoples.

Question 22

The current world stratification system features a substantial contrast between capitalists and workers in the core nations, and workers on the periphery.

Question 23

By promoting rural-to-urban migration, industrialization hastened the process of proletarianization, which is

A) the separation of workers from the means of production.
B) the shift from mills and factories to cottages and farms.
C) elite domination of the means of communication, schools, and other key institutions.
D) personal identification with one's own economic group.
E) a form of communism.

Question 24

Neoliberalism is a new form of the old economic liberalism laid out in Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations (1776). To Smith, economic liberalism encouraged free enterprise and competition, with the goal of generating profits. However, this meaning of liberal

A) is a more accurate use of the term than the one Americans typically hear in current talk radio.
B) is a Protestant ideology.
C) varies depending on whether it refers to politics in a Western or non-Western context.
D) is different from the one typically used in current U.S. politics, in which liberal is the opposite of conservative.
E) has no implications for the relationship between economics and the state.

Question 25

Which of the following refers to a conscious policy of extending the rule of a country or an empire over foreign nations and of taking and holding foreign colonies?

A) imperialism
B) neoliberalism
C) colonization
D) postcolonial
E) communism

Question 26

The labels First World, Second World, and Third World represent a common, if ethnocentric, way of categorizing nations. First World refers to the democratic West, which is traditionally conceived of as being in opposition to a Second World ruled by

A) Communism.
B) primitive neoliberalism.
C) imperialism.
D) folk economic and political models.
E) dictators.

Question 27

When deciding where to locate polluting facilities, industries typically target minority and low-income neighborhoods.

Question 28

Trade and other economic relations between core and periphery disproportionately benefit capitalists in the core.

Question 29

In postsocialist Russia's initial changeover to capitalism, all of the following declined EXCEPT

A) farm and industry subsidies.
B) the gross domestic product.
C) the poverty rate.
D) life expectancy.
E) the birth rate.

Question 30

All of the following are true about neoliberalism EXCEPT that it

A) is characterized by the policy that environmental protection and job safety are too important to be left unregulated.
B) characterizes the type of policies designed by powerful international financial institutions.
C) has been spreading globally.
D) refers to a recent revival of economic liberalism.
E) seeks to control costs by lowering wage expenses.

Question 31

Communism has two meanings, distinguished by how they are written. Small-c communism describes a social system in which property is owned by the community and in which people work for the common good. Large-C Communism

A) is an imperial doctrine to appropriate private capital for the sake of the survival of the state.
B) is just another version of neoliberalism but in disguise.
C) refers to the social aspects of small-c communism.
D) is Lenin's political theory of small-c communism.
E) was a political movement and doctrine seeking to overthrow capitalism and establish a form of communism such as that which prevailed in the Soviet Union (the USSR) from 1917 to 1991.

Question 32

According to world-system theory, the nations in the world system can be classified into three types: core, periphery, and frontier.

Question 33

One of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution started in England was that England needed to innovate in order to meet a demand for staples both at home and in its far-flung colonies.

Question 34

According to Marx, the bourgeoisie is made up of the people who must sell their labor to survive.

Question 35

Which of the following statements about environmental hazards in American communities is NOT accurate?

A) Polluting industries are more likely to target communities with fewer resources to organize a resistance.
B) Economic resources and political clout have little to do with where polluting facilities are constructed.
C) Polluting facilities are often built in neighborhoods undergoing demographic and social transition.
D) Environmental hazards are located disproportionately in minority and poor neighborhoods.
E) Poorer communities are more likely to be victims of toxic waste exposure than are more affluent or even average (middle class) communities.

Question 36

Sugar and cotton helped fuel the development of a capitalist world economy.

Question 37

________ is the term for the physical destruction of ethnic groups by murder, warfare, and introduced diseases.

A) Biocide
B) Patricide
C) Sociocide
D) Genocide
E) Ethnocide

Question 38

The seeds of industrial society were planted well before the 18th century. For example, a knitting machine invented in England in 1589 was so far ahead of its time that it played a profitable role in factories two and three centuries later.

Question 39

Marx argued that socioeconomic stratification was based on the sharp and simple division between the successful Protestant industrialists and the poor Catholic peasantry.

Question 40

Adam Smith laid out an economic plan of laissez-faire capitalism that is currently called

A) conservatism.
B) colonialism.
C) democracy.
D) neoliberalism.
E) socialism.

Question 41

Colonialism refers to the solicitation by peripheral countries of political and financial assistance from core nations.

Question 42

The distinction between small-c communism and large-C Communism is an example of arbitrary concepts defined in the social sciences.

Question 43

Standards of comfort rose, but prosperity was uneven.

Question 44

Weber argued that without Catholic ethics and values, capitalism and industrialism would have never spread beyond England.

Question 45

Postsocialist Russia's economy was growing again by 2010, as were its birth rate and average life expectancy.

Question 46

The United States originally started out as a peripheral nation, but by 1900 it had asserted itself as a member of the industrialized core.

Question 47

The British notion of the "white man's burden" was similar to the French concept mission civilisatrice, in that both were racist ideologies used to justify the colonial efforts of their respective countries.

Question 48

Belgian colonial administrators were careful to use culturally significant differences to distinguish between the Hutus and Tutsis.

Question 49

French colonial strategies incorporated both direct and indirect rule.

Question 50

The domestic system is the economic system in which an organizer-entrepreneur supplies the raw materials to workers in their homes and collects the finished products from them.

Question 51

The U.S. government continues to subsidize its own corn farmers, who otherwise would go out of business.

Question 52

Mass production gave rise to a culture of consumption, which has become global in scope.

Question 53

The share of national wealth held by the top 1 percent of Americans is less than that of the top 1 percent of most European countries.

Question 54

Many of the political, linguistic, religious, and economic distinctions among the countries of West Africa today are artifacts of colonialism.

Question 55

Weber argued that the only true capitalists were Protestants, and people who believed in any other faith could never fully mature as capitalists.

Question 56

Neoliberalism refers to a revival of Adam Smith's classic economic liberalism, which suggests that governments should not regulate private enterprise and that free market forces should rule.