Atlantic Revolutions ( Global Echoes)

Other peoples to had times of cultural flowering: Greeks, Indians, South Asia, Arabs, Chinese, Incas and Aztecs. Western people have enjoyed their worldwide primacy for at most two centuries. The rise of Europe occurred within an international context it was the withdrawal of the Chinese naval fleet that allowed Europeans to enter the Indian Ocean in the 16th and 17th centuries. Native Americans lacked the immunity of European diseases. Industrial revolution also benefited from the New World resources and markets European control of the elite. The rise of Europe to a position of a global dominance was not an easy automatic process Europeans had to modify their policies example British control in India. In Africa the entering of missionaries, always in some way was a negotiated arrangement. People in the world made active use of Europeans ideas for their own purposes seeking to gain advantage over local rivals or to seek a benefit. Haitian Revolution used French ideas about the rights of man. Christianity that took in the Americas or later in Africa evolved in culturally distinctive ways. Ideas of nationalism, born in Europe were used to oppose European imperialism throughout Asia and Africa. Russian and Chinese socialism in the 20th centuries departed in many ways from the vision of Karl Marx. China confronted the western aggression in the 19th centuries, but also was observing a huge population, experiencing a massive revolt of peasants. West African societies in the 19th centuries experience a wave of religious wars that create a new state and extended and transform the practice of Islam that spread along the centuries.

The ideas of enlightenment spread through the ocean with the printing press to North America, and Latin America. The divine right of kings, state and trade were no longer Sacrosanct and came under repeated attack. New ideas of liberty, equality and free trade, religious tolerance, republicanism and human rationality were in the air. This was the rise of popular sovereignty. Nationalism perhaps the most potent ideology of the modern era, was nurtured in Atlantic revolutions and she ate much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Ideas of human equality articulated in there Revolutions later found expression in feminist, socialist and communist movement.

North American revolution was launched with the declaration of independence in 1776, resulted in a military victory in 1781, and generated the federal Constitution in 1787. Joining 13 formally separate colonies into a new nation. All Freeman enjoyed the same status before the law, a situation that excluded black slaves in and some ways white women. Thus the American Revolution did not grow out of social tensions within the colonies, but from a rather sudden effort by British government to tighten its control over the colonies and to extract more revenue from them adding taxes. British and France drained it’s treasury, therefore to continue in war with each other they implemented tariffs and taxes in their colonies without consent.