Chapter 22 - The End of Empire

In today's reading, Strayer discuss about the freedom towards the African American and Asian Independence. The phrase "Third World" is of a Cold War origin referring to that area of the world that was neither part of the Capitalist West nor the Communist East. In the textbook Strayer mention the third world as the "Global South", recognizing that the southern hemisphere is poorer than the northern hemisphere while recognizing that the Global North owns the Global South some help because of the former exploitation of the South's capital minerals, labor, and land. In 1900, European colonial empires in Asia and Africa came as permanent features of the world's political landscape. In the late 1940s was the first dominant breakthroughs occurred in Asia and the Middle East when the Philippines, India, Burma, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Israel achieved independence. The time period from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s was the age of African Independence as province after province, in total of fifty into what is now called freedom. Towards the end of empire in world history the European colonies in the Americas threw off British, French, Spanish, or Portuguese rule during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the Americas, however, many of the colonized people were themselves of European origin, sharing much of their culture with their colonial rulers. In this case, the African and Asian struggles of the twentieth century were very different, for they no only claimed political independence but also declared the vitality of their cultures, which had been submerged and denigrated during the colonial era. During the twentieth century, many empires collapsed. The Austrian and Ottoman empires departure following World War I, giving rise to a number of new states in Europe and the Middle East. The Russian Empire also unraveled, although it was soon reassembled under the sponsorship of the Soviet Union. Next was the World War II that ended the German and Japanese empires. Then, African and Asian movements for independence shared national self determination. On page 1094 is one of the most widely recognized and admired picture in the global struggle against colonial rule was India's Mahatma Gandhi. In this photo Gandhi is sitting crossed-legged on the floor, clothed in a traditional Indian garment called dhoti. Near him is a spinning wheel, symbolizing the independent and nonindustrial India that Gandhi sought. Gandhi was born in Gujarat, Hindu family and was alive from 1869-1949. He got married at age 13 and embraced an opportunity to study law in England at 18. He became a lawyer in 1893 and accepted a job in South Africa. Gandhi was the primary leader of India's Independence movement and also the architect of a form of non-violent civil disobedience that would influence the world. This part of Gandhi's life amazes me because even though he got married at a young he still had a goal and he achieved it with his hard work. Throughout Gandhi's life he experienced racism. This did not stop him but instead made him become a stronger person by organizing his first mass civil-disobedience campaign, which he called "Satyagraha" (truth and firmness), in reaction to the Transvaal government's new restrictions on the rights of Indians, including the refusal to recognize Hindu marriages. Majority of his actions did not make the government stop Gandhi, however this did not make him stop either but he still kept on going until he accomplished his task to create an Indian Independence movement for equality.