Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Analyze how the two intertwined Atlantic revolutions (political and industrial) altered the global balance of power. How did Russian, Mughal, Ottoman, and Qing dynasties respond to this change?

Russia's industrialization was uneven and slower than rivals but succeeded in European areas. By 1890 iron and steel production had doubled from three decades prior, coal production had mushroomed, and nearly a million and a half Russians worked in factories (mostly in textiles). Russia's trans-Siberian railroad began the incorporation of Russia's vast undeveloped lands to the east into the economy, similar to how the transcontinental railroad in the U.S. was used to span its own vast undeveloped territories. By the end of the century, Russia had more railroad track than any country apart from the U.S. Dependence on foreign industrial finance (British, then German, then French), the doubling of the mostly rural peasant population, vast size, difficulty managing political discontent from social and economic change, and limited export success all hindered Romanov Russia from keeping up with the rapid pace of the advanced economies.
Mughal decline in India was accompanied by de-industrialization in the 19th century. For example, Indian output had reached 25% of world production by the middle of the 18th century, yet by 1900 that share had dropped to 2%. Britain's industrial revolution increased the efficiency of its textile looms by a factor of forty, and the center of the textile industry shifted to the Atlantic as the patterns of once coveted Indian textiles could now be reproduced at home on steam-powered mechanized looms. Political fragmentation of the Mughal empire contributed to the lack of a coordinated response. Mughal military inferiority was clear after the last Mughal emperor's rebellion was put down in 1857. Meanwhile, the British imperial administration focused its industrialization efforts on linking the vast continent by railroad, an advance which paid dividends for India in the long run after unification.
Halfway through the 19th century, the Ottoman empire had lost most of their export markets and an increasing share of their domestic market to competitors from the advanced industrial economies. Ottoman superiority began to erode during the Age of Exploration when Europeans pioneered new sea routes to India making the Ottoman Mediterranean monopoly on that trade less relevant. The overconfidence of the Ottomans in their natural superiority, the isolation of Ottoman princes and their Empire from exposure to new ideas from outside, the new economic centrality of the Atlantic and the New World all worked to decrease European vulnerability to Ottoman imperial expansion. The industrial revolution and the Ottoman leadership's inability to adapt to this explosion in foreign productivity completed their process of decline. The Ottoman military by the latter 19th century had undergone some modernization but was only an effective force when aided by modern Western powers (the British and French) in the Crimean War.
The Qing dynasty was forced to accept British military superiority after their defeat in the Opium Wars. Reforms like the Self-Strengthening programs introduced translations of Western texts and the introduction of European advances in education, finance, as well as in political and military organization and administration. Rapid industrialization, however, was not undertaken and the rapid expansion of China's mostly rural agricultural population outstripped output growth leading to a lowering of Chinese living standards to levels far below Western standards. Western ideas and imports also caused destabilizing social problems leading upheavals like the Taiping Rebellion which cost tens of millions of lives. The Qing dynasty survived into the 20th century but rapid modernization and industrialization was not effectively undertaken until much later in the late 20th century.
In each of these cases the balance of power shifted away from these empires and toward the advanced industrial economies of the West (and their imitators like the Japanese and South Koreans).

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