Deck 24: Capital, Technology, and the Changing Balance of Global Power, 1860-1914

Question 1

What country was the leader in steam engine technology in the early nineteenth century?

A) Britain
B) France
C) United States
D) Germany

Answer 1

Britain

Question 2

Why did Britain need to import more food in the late nineteenth century?

A) The middle class was beginning to develop an appetite for exotic foods.
B) Imported food was cheaper, which drove domestic demand for it.
C) The great droughts of the late century decimated domestic crops.
D) More than half of England's population worked in industry.

Answer 2

More than half of England's population worked in industry.

Question 3

On the European continent, where did steam-powered industry mainly develop?

A) along rivers and lakes
B) in coal and iron-rich regions
C) near large cities
D) in harbor towns

Answer 3

in coal and iron-rich regions

Question 4

Why did western France, most of Spain, southern Italy, and Poland build few factories or rail lines?

A) few cities
B) low levels of investment capital
C) strong land-owning elites
D) All these answers are correct.

Question 5

Why didn't Russian rulers support a strong private business class?

A) They adhered to a communist doctrine.
B) They did not want to identify with western Europe.
C) They feared they would challenge their allies, the aristocratic landowners.
D) The rural population was overwhelmingly illiterate.

Question 6

By the mid-nineteenth century, Moscow's policies toward private industrial development began to change. Why?

A) lessons learned in the Crimean War
B) loss of trading partners to more developed nations
C) the new tsar's education at Oxford in England
D) the need to import grain

Question 7

Which of the following was the land-owning class of Japan?

A) shogun
B) daimyo
C) samurai
D) geisha

Question 8

What action convinced the Japanese elite to open several ports to trade with the United States?

A) the Crimean War
B) the Opium War
C) Perry's flotilla arriving in Edo harbor
D) the collapse of the closed country policy in China

Question 9

In what respect did Japan go much further than Russia in modernizing their country?

A) the use of fossil fuels and building factories
B) laying rail lines and building armaments
C) agricultural production and land reform
D) adoption of European-style governing institutions

Question 10

Which of the following was NOT a factor in Japan's sudden ascent into the fossil-fuel era?

A) an abundant supply of raw materials
B) a homogeneous culture
C) a revered emperor
D) a literate warrior class

Question 11

Strong countries used inequitable tariffs, large bank loans, and displays of naval power to build what historians have labeled ________ empires.

A) economic
B) informal
C) gunboat
D) first world

Question 12

What did Europeans call the patterned, multicolored carpets produced by Ottoman manufactures?

A) Persian rugs
B) Turkish carpets
C) oriental rugs
D) wudu mats

Question 13

What Indian industry suffered deindustrialization in the mid-nineteenth century as a result of British imperial policies?

A) fine weaving
B) mat making
C) jute rope and bags
D) carpets and rugs

Question 14

Why did some economic thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century fear that industrialization could sputter out?

A) excess demand
B) overproduction
C) the lack of raw materials
D) communications difficulties

Question 15

What event in 1869 slashed trade costs by shrinking the travel time between Asian and European ports?

A) the launching of double-side-wheel ocean steamers
B) the opening of the Panama Canal
C) the opening of portage railroads at Corinth and Suez
D) the opening of the Suez Canal

Question 16

The arid area of Australia where stock ranchers and sheep displaced the native hunter-foragers is known at the

A) Outback.
B) pampas.
C) Prairies.
D) Western Territory.

Question 17

Which of the following is NOT a drug food?

A) sugar
B) coffee
C) hot peppers
D) tobacco

Question 18

What action taken by governments forced small property owners into wage jobs?

A) sale of government-owned land to large investors
B) cash taxation
C) allowing foreign purchase of land
D) clearing of tropical forests

Question 19

Why were India and Brazil able to expand their cotton exports so dramatically in the mid-nineteenth century?

A) improved farming techniques
B) the recent availability of artificial fertilizer
C) the American Civil War
D) increased consumer demand

Question 20

One glaring inequity between "have" and "have-not"
Societies in the industrializing world of the nineteenth century was

A) caloric intake.
B) social equality.
C) access to education.
D) life expectancy.

Question 21

When regional population growth is not matched with regional economic growth, the standard of living generally

A) goes up.
B) falls.
C) goes up or down depending on a variety of other factors.
D) doesn't change.

Question 22

The periodic fluctuations in production, consumption, and trade that affect world economic conditions are referred to by economists as

A) business cycles.
B) recessions.
C) depressions.
D) bull or bear markets.

Question 23

In Brazil, immense tracts of tropical forest were cleared for the production of

A) coffee.
B) tea.
C) cotton.
D) poppies.

Question 24

The periodic atmospheric phenomena related to increases in surface temperatures in the South Pacific Ocean are known as ________ Southern Oscillations.

A) Periodic Warm
B) El Ni-o
C) Humboldt Current
D) La Ni-a

Question 25

What labor union sought to improve labor conditions within the liberal capitalist framework?

A) Industrial Workers of the World
B) Socialist Labor Party
C) International Workers' Association
D) American Federation of Labor

Question 26

In late-nineteenth-century Europe, the proportion of females in factory work

A) increased.
B) declined.
C) greatly increased.
D) stayed about the same.

Question 27

In Britain, one informal standard of middle-class membership involved

A) being at least a deacon in the Anglican Church.
B) being a union member of a skills union versus a trade union.
C) employing servants.
D) having a "stay-at-home" spouse.

Question 28

Many modern-minded men of the Ottoman empire adopted European dress, but instead of a top hat they wore a

A) fez.
B) turban.
C) bowler.
D) keffiyeh.

Question 29

With the discovery of the laws of thermodynamics, ________ emerged as a distinct modern discipline.

A) calculus
B) thermo-engineering
C) chemistry
D) physics

Question 30

Who arranged the sixty-three known elements into the periodic table?

A) Louis Pasteur
B) Dmitri Mendeleev
C) Charles Darwin
D) Friedrich Krupp

Question 31

Which of the following was NOT occupied by U.S. forces in the late nineteenth century?

A) Cuba
B) Taiwan
C) the Philippines
D) Guam

Question 32

What coal-rich region did the French lose to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?

A) Franche-Comté
B) Alsace-Lorraine
C) Savoy
D) Flanders and Hainaut

Question 33

In 1870-1871, unification movements in which two countries led to two large new centralized states in Europe?

A) Hungary and Poland
B) Poland and Austria
C) Austria and Italy
D) Italy and Germany

Question 34

What was the name of the French regime that governed between 1871 and 1940?

A) the Third Republic
B) the Third Estate
C) the Third Reich
D) the Troisième Démocratie

Question 35

What North African nation remained a legally sovereign Muslim state but under French political control?

A) Egypt
B) Tunisia
C) Algeria
D) Senegal

Question 36

The officers of King Leopold's private army known as the Public Force were

A) regular Belgian officers.
B) mostly African men.
C) European mercenaries.
D) Muslim Algerians trained by the French.

Question 37

Why did British troops invade part of the kingdom of Myanmar (Burma) in 1852?

A) to shield India's border on the east
B) to plunder recently-discovered gold deposits
C) to secure mountain passes over the Burmese Himalayas
D) as a reprisal for guerrilla raids

Question 38

Who did Japan NOT fight with at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century?

A) the United States
B) Russia
C) China
D) Korea

Question 39

Like Germany, the United States seized territories abroad to

A) achieve economic dominance.
B) meet security objectives.
C) enhance national prestige.
D) become the world's policeman.

Question 40

What propelled thousands of European fortune-seekers deep into the Amazon rainforest in the 1880s?

A) a gold rush
B) the collection of wild animal species
C) the discovery of diamonds
D) the demand for rubber

Question 41

What medication that became available in the 1840s offered significant defense against malaria?

A) quinine
B) cinchona
C) coca
D) quelicin

Question 42

What public health measure used by Europeans in the tropics drastically reduced troop death rates from both malaria and yellow fever?

A) the burning of body waste
B) daily bathing
C) mosquito eradications
D) the use of lime in pit toilets

Question 43

Rifled barrels do all of the following EXCEPT

A) increase effective range.
B) decrease loading time.
C) increase accuracy.
D) impart spin to the projectile.

Question 44

Why did European states invent moral justifications for violently seizing other peoples' land?

A) in recognition of one of the tenets of Social Superiority theory
B) their view of themselves as modern and civilized
C) in attempting to apply the theory of ethnocentrism
D) None of these answers is correct.

Question 45

What theory contends that dependent elements of society occupy their inferior position because they have exhibited less biological fitness?

A) natural selection
B) pseudo-scientific racism
C) social Darwinism
D) phrenology

Question 46

Who emerged as a potent political figure it the upper Congo River region in 1874?

A) Sonni Ali
B) Samori Ture
C) Askia Mohammed
D) Hamid bin Muhammad

Question 47

King Leopold tried to legitimize his Congo Free State by appointing ________ as a provincial governor, a position he held until 1891.

A) Samori Ture
B) Yakub Al-Mansur
C) Tippu Tip
D) Samory Toure

Question 48

Which of the following statements about Samori Ture is most accurate?

A) He invoked Islam, a minority religion in the region, as an ideology.
B) He used wealth from agriculture to help defeat competing rulers.
C) He frequently engaged the French in head-on battles.
D) He was unable to incorporate modern weaponry into his arsenal.

Question 49

The ________ Rebellion in Tanganyika is an example of a resistance movement without state support or organization.

A) Zulu
B) Maji Maji
C) Boer
D) Senegalese

Question 50

What was the only large African polity to keep its independence by defeating a European invader on the field of battle?

A) Ethiopia
B) Somalia
C) South Africa
D) Nigeria

Question 51

Why did England's rate of growth slow and its share of world of GDP gradually decline in the second half of the nineteenth century?

Question 52

Describe the relationship between the Russian government and industry circa 1870.

Question 53

What grim financial problems did Japan face at the beginning of the nineteenth century?

Question 54

Discuss the infrastructure improvements, in place by the middle of the nineteenth century, that gave merchants and manufacturers confidence to plan operations and estimate prices.

Question 55

Identify some of the strategies that the working classes of the latter nineteenth century used to try to improve their economic conditions.

Question 56

Discuss the conflict between Belgium's monarch and its parliament regarding colonial expansion.

Question 57

Explain how new drugs and public health measures aided Europeans in the colonization of tropical lands.