What’s the Significance?
Taiping Uprising, 933–35
Opium Wars, 936–37
unequal treaties, 937
self-strengthening movement, 939
Boxer Uprising, 939
Commissioner Lin, 940–41
Chinese Revolution of 1911, 940–41
“the sick man of Europe,” 942–44
Tanzimat, 944–46
Young Ottomans, 945
Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, 945
Young Turks, 946
informal empires, 946–47
Tokugawa Japan, 948–49
Meiji restoration, 949–50
Russo-Japanese War, 1904–1905, 954
Big Picture Questions
Next Steps: For Further Study
William Bowman et al., Imperialism in the Modern World (2007). A collection of short readings illustrating the various forms and faces of European expansion over the past several centuries.
Carter V. Finley, The Turks in World History (2004). A study placing the role of Turkish-speaking peoples in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular in a global context.
Maurice Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (2000). A well-regarded account of Japan since 1600 by a leading scholar.
Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (1999). Probably the best single-volume account of Chinese history from about 1600 through the twentieth century.
E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (1990). An examination of the lives of women in Japan’s nineteenth-century textile factories.
Arthur Waley, The Opium War through Chinese Eyes (1968). An older classic that views the Opium War from various Chinese points of view.
MIT, “Visualizing Cultures: Image Driven Scholarship,” 2002. http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/home/index.html A collection of thoughtful essays and stunning images dealing with China and Japan during the nineteenth century.