AP World History Notes - Political Reorderings (PDF)

1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings Political Reorderings AP® Skills & Processes...

1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings Political Reorderings AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION How did Enlightenment ideas get translated into political action? Late in the eighteenth century, revolutionary ideas spread across the Atlanticworld (see Map 8.1) following the trail of Enlightenment ideas about freedom and reason. As more newspapers, pamphlets, and books circulated in European countries and American colonies, readers began to discuss their societies’ problems and to believe they had the right to participate in governance. The Global View Map 8.1 Revolutions and Empires in the Atlantic World, 1776–1829 Influenced by Enlightenment thinkers and the French Revolution, colonies gained independence from European powers (and in the case of Greece, from the Ottoman Empire) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Which European powers granted independence to their colonial possessions in the Americas during this period? What were the first two colonial territories to become independent in the Americas? Based on the chronology presented in this map and on your reading, consider the relative importance of European influence and local developments in the Americas in accounting for the timing of independence in different countries. Why, in particular, did colonies in Spanish and Portuguese America obtain political independence decades after the United States won its independence? The slogans of independence, freedom, liberty, and equality seemed to promise an end to oppression, hardship, and inequities. In the North American colonies and in https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 1/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings France, revolutions ultimately brought down monarchies and blossomed into republics. The examples of the United States and France soon encouraged other people in the Caribbean and Central and South America to reject the rule of monarchs. In these revolutionary environments, new institutions—such as written constitutions and permanent parliaments—claimed to represent the people. THE NORTH AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE, 1776–1783 Core Objectives COMPARE political and economic developments in the Atlantic world with those of regions elsewhere around the globe during the period 1750–1850. The American Revolution ended British rule in North America. It was the first of a series of revolutions to shake the Atlantic world, inspired by new ideas of freedom. By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain’s colonies in North America swelled with people and prosperity. Bustling port cities like Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston saw inflows of African slaves, European migrants, and manufactured goods, while agricultural staples flowed out. A “genteel” class of merchants and landowning planters dominated colonial affairs. AP® Skills & Processes CONTINUITY AND CHANGE Explain why land became such an important issue in eighteenth-century North America. Land was a constant source of dispute. Planters struggled with independent farmers (yeomen). Sons and daughters of farmers, often unable to inherit or acquire land near their parents, moved westward, where they came into conflict with Amerindian peoples. To defend their lands, many Amerindians allied with Britain’s rival, France. After losing the Seven Years’ War (see Chapter 6), however, France ceded its Canadian colony to Britain to secure the return of its much more lucrative Caribbean colonies, especially Saint-Domingue. This left many Indians no choice but to turn to the British government to help them resist the aggressive advances of land-hungry colonists. British officials did make some concessions to Indian interests, but they did not have the troops or financial strength to enforce them. Asserting Independence from Britain Despite these tensions, Britain stood supreme in the Atlantic world in the mid-1760s, with its greatest foes defeated and its empire expanding. Political revolution in North America seemed unimaginable. And yet, a decade later, that is what occurred. The spark came from the government of King George III, which insisted that colonists contribute to the crown that protected them, notably in the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War). The king’s officials imposed taxes on a variety of commodities and tried to putan end to smuggling by colonists who sought to evade mercantilist restrictions on https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 2/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings trade. To the king’s surprise and dismay, colonists objected to the new measures and protested having to pay taxes when they lacked political representation in the British Parliament. The Boston Massacre Paul Revere’s idealized view of the Boston Massacre of March 5,1770. In the years after the Seven Years’ War, Bostonians grew increasingly disenchanted with British efforts to enforce imperial regulations. When British troops fired on and killed several members of an angry mob in what came to be called the “Boston Massacre,” the resulting frenzy stirred revolutionary sentiments among the populace. In 1775, resistance in the form of petitions and boycotts turned into open warfare between a colonial militia and British troops in Massachusetts. Once blood was spilled, more radical voices came to the fore. Previously, leaders of the protest had claimed to revere the British Empire. Now calls for severing the ties to Britain became more prominent. Thomas Paine, a recent immigrant from England, captured the new mood in a pamphlet he published in 1776, arguing that it was “common sense” for people to govern themselves. Later that year, the Continental Congress (in which representatives from thirteen colonies gathered) adapted part of Paine’s popular pamphlet for the Declaration of Independence. AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION Explain the connection between government and the social contract. Drawing on Enlightenment themes (see Chapter 7), the declaration written by Thomas Jefferson stated the people’s “natural right” to govern themselves. It also drew inspiration from the writings of the British philosopher John Locke, notably the idea that governments should be based on a social contract in which the law binds both ruler and people. Locke had written nearly a century earlier that the people had the right to rebel against their government if it broke the contract and infringed on their rights. With the Declaration of Independence, the rebels announced their right to rid themselves of the English king and form their own government. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 3/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings The Declaration’s assertion that “all men are created equal” overturned former social hierarchies in the thirteen colonies (now calling themselves states). Thus, common men no longer automatically deferred to gentlemen of higher rank. Many women claimed that their contributions to the revolution’s cause (by managing farms and shops in their husbands’ absence) earned them greater equality in marriage, including property rights. However, the political arrangements Americans designed during their War of Independence gave voting rights only to white, male property owners—not women, not slaves, not Amerindians, not poor white men without property. Indeed, many slaves sided against the revolution, for it was the British who offered them freedom most directly, in exchange for military service. Their hopes for freedom were thwarted when Britain conceded the loss of its rebellious American colonies. With the Treaty of Paris (1783), the United States gained its independence. AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION Explain why slavery posed a problem for the new national government in the United States. Building a Republican Government With independence, the former colonists had to build a new government. They generally agreed that theirs was not to be a monarchy. But what it was to be remained through the 1780s a source of much debate, involving heated words and sometimes heated action. As a loose confederation of relatively autonomous states, the new national state struggled to deal with local rebellions, foreign relations, and crushing levels of debt. To save the young nation from falling into “anarchy,” propertied men convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. This gathering aimed to forge a document that would create a more powerful national government and a more unified nation. After fierce debate, the convention drafted a charter for a republican government in which power would rest with representatives of the people—not with a king. When it went before the states for approval, the Constitution was controversial. Its critics, known as Anti-Federalists, feared the growth of a potentially tyrannical national government and insisted on including a Bill of Rights to protect individual liberties from abusive government intrusions. Ultimately the Constitution was ratified by the states and then amended bythe Bill of Rights. Ratification of the Constitution and the addition of the Bill of Rights did not end arguments about the scope and power of the national government of the United States. Some Americans called for the national government to abolish slavery. However, many others—especially leaders in the south, where slavery was a mainstay of the economy —argued that the national government did not have the power to do so. In an uneasy truce, political leaders agreed not to let the debate over whether to abolish slavery escalate into a cause for disunion. As the frontier pushed westward, however, the question of which new states would or would not allow slavery again posed a vexing challenge. Initially the existence of ample land postponed a confrontation. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s election as the third president of the United States marked the triumph of https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 4/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings a model of sendingpioneers out to new lands in order to reduce conflict on old lands. In the same year, however, a Virginia slave named Gabriel Prosser raised an army of slaves to seize the state capital at Richmond and won support from white artisans and laborers for a more inclusive republic. His dream of an egalitarian revolution fell victim to white terror and black betrayal, though: twenty- seven slaves, including Prosser, went to the gallows. With them, for the moment, died the dream of a multiracial republic in which all men were truly created equal. In the larger context of the Atlantic world, the successful defiance of Europe’s most powerful empire and the establishment of a nonmonarchical, republican form of government sent shock waves through the Americas and Europe and even into distant corners of Asia and Africa. It also helped pave the way for other revolts over the next several decades. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1789–1799 Liberty and Revolution after 1789  Transcript Partly inspired by the American Revolution, French men and women soon began to call for liberty, too—and the result profoundly shook Europe’s dynasties and social hierarchies. Its impact, though, reached well beyond Europe, for the French Revolution, even more than the American, inspired rebels and terrified rulers around the globe. AP® Skills & Processes CAUSATION AND COMPARISON Compare the French and American Revolutions. What caused each of them to develop in the way that they did? Origins and Outbreak The French king himself opened the door to revolution. Eager to weaken his rival, England, Louis XVI spent huge sums in support of the American rebels—and thereby overloaded the state with debt. To restore his credit, Louis needed to raise taxes on the privileged classes; to do so, he was forced to convene the Estates-General, a medieval advisory body that had not met for over a century. Like the American colonists, French nobles argued that taxation gave them the right of representation. When the delegates assembled in 1789, however, a procedural dispute spun out of control. The delegates of the clergy (the First Estate) and the aristocracy (the Second Estate) hoped to vote by estate and overrule the delegates representing everyone else (the Third Estate). But the Third https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 5/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings Estate, which had more representatives than the first two estates combined, refused to be outvoted. It demanded that all delegates sit together in one chamber andvote as individuals. Soon delegates of the Third Estate declared themselves to be the “National Assembly,” the body that should determine France’s future. Afraid that the king would crush the reform movement, a Parisian crowd attacked a medieval armory in search of weapons on July 14, 1789. Not only did this armory—the Bastille—hold gunpowder, but it was also an infamous prison for political prisoners. The crowd stormed the prison and murdered the commanding officer, then cut off his head and paraded it through the streets of Paris. On this day (Bastille Day), the king made the fateful decision not to call out the army, and the capital city belonged to the crowd. As news spread to the countryside, peasants torched manor houses and destroyed municipal archives containing records of feudal dues, payments they owed to landlords of specially designated properties. Barely three weeks later, the French National Assembly abolished the privileges of the nobility and the clergy. It declared a new era of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Liberty, like freedom, now meant the absence of constraint rather than a special privilege granted by the king. The “Tennis Court Oath” Locked out of the chambers of the Estates- General, the deputies of the Third Estate reconvened at a nearby indoor tennis court in June 1789; there they swore an oath not to disband until the king recognized the sovereignty of a national assembly. AP® Skills & Processes COMPARISON Compare the French Declaration of the Rights of Man with the American Declaration of Independence. Explain the differences between them and why one was more radical than the other. Revolutionary Transformations The French Revolution connected the concept of a people more closely with a nation. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) echoed the Americans’ Declaration of Independence, but in more radical terms. It guaranteed all citizens of the French nation inviolable liberties and gave all men equality under the law. It also proclaimed that “the principle of all sovereignty rests essentially in the nation.” Both the rhetorical and the real war against old-regime privileges threatened to end dynastic and aristocratic rule in Europe. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 6/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings Social relations changed too, as women felt that the new principles of citizenship should include women’s rights. In 1791, a group of women demanded the right to bear arms to defend the revolution, but they stopped short of claiming equal rights for both sexes. In their view, women would become citizens by being good revolutionary wives and mothers, not because of any natural rights. In the same year, Olympe de Gouges composed the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, proposing rights to divorce, hold property in marriage, be educated, and have public careers. The all-male assembly did not take up these issues, believing that a “fraternity” of free men composed the nation. As the revolution gained momentum, deep divisions emerged. In 1790, all clergy had to take an oath of loyalty to the new state—an action that bitterly divided the country. The most divisive, destructive turn in the revolution came in 1792, when the French declared a preemptive war against Austria, and then Prussia, Britain, and Russia. They soon had foreign armies on their soil and a civil war to contend with, when peasants outraged by the loyalty oath and city dwellers in major provincial cities rose up against the revolutionary government and its wartime demands. The Terror In response to this self-induced crisis, elite reformers made common cause with urban radicals in Paris, who demanded price controls, direct democracy, and the violent suppression of dissent. Together, they launched the Reign of Terror. The Committee of Public Safety, including the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre, oversaw the execution of as many as 40,000 so-called enemies of the people— mostly peasants and laborers who had taken up arms against them—justified in terms of defending the Republic. If most victims were of modest means, the term aristocrat was often equated with treason. Even before terror was declared as government policy, Louis XVI and hiswife, Marie Antoinette, had lost their heads to the guillotine (itself a noveland supposedly rational, enlightened way to execute prisoners painlessly). AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION Explain the connection between the Terror in France and the French Revolution. How does the Terror fit with Enlightenment ideas? By 1794 France’s army numbered some 800,000 soldiers, making it the world’s largest. Most French officers now came from the middle classes, some even from the lower class. Foot soldiers identified with the French fatherland. Having vowed to wage a defensive war, they now pushed foreign armies off French soil and waged a war to “liberate” the disenfranchised from their rulers across Europe. When the military emergency ended, enthusiasm for Robespierre’s measures lost popular support, and Robespierre himself went to the guillotine on 9 Thermidor (according to the new, revolutionary calendar, or July 28, 1794). His execution marked the end of the Terror but did not restore order. Several years later, following yet more https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 7/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings political turmoil, a coup d’état brought to power a thirty- year-old general from the recently annexed Mediterranean island of Corsica. The general, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), put security and order ahead of social reform. His regime retained significant revolutionary changes, especially those associated with more efficient state government. He eased religious tensions by working out an accord with the Vatican. However, Napoleon was determined not only to reform France but also to prevail over its enemies, and he retreated from republican principles. Taking the title Emperor of the French, he centralized government administration and established a system of rational tax collection. Most important, he created a civil legal code— the Napoleonic Code—that applied throughout all of France (and the French colonies). THE NAPOLEONIC ERA, 1799–1815 Determined to extend the reach of French influence, Napoleon launched a series of military campaigns in an effort to build a vast empire. He had his armies trumpet the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity wherever they went. Many local populations initially embraced the French, regarding them as liberators from the old order. Although Napoleon thought the entire world would take up his cause, this was not always the case. AP® Skills & Processes COMPARISON Compare European responses to the Napoleonic attempts at European integration. In Portugal, Spain, and Russia, French troops faced fierce popular resistance. Portuguese and Spanish soldiers and peasants formed bands of resisters called guerrillas, and British troops joined them to fight the French in the Peninsular War (1808–1813). In Germany and Italy, as local inhabitants grew tired of paying tribute, many looked to their past for inspiration to oppose the French. Now they discovered something they had barely recognized before: national traditions and borders. One of the ironies of Napoleon’s attempt to bring all of Europe under French rule was that it laid the foundations for nationalist strife. AP® Skills & Processes COMPARISON Compare the revolution in Saint Domingue with those in France and North America. In Europe, Napoleon extended his empire from the Iberian Peninsula to the Austrian and Prussian borders. (See Map 8.2.) By 1812, when he invaded Russia, however, his forces were too overstretched and undersupplied to survive the harsh winter. After his failed attack on Russia, all the major European powers united against him. At the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium in 1815, armies from Prussia, Austria, Russia, and Britain crushed his troops as they made their last stand. The stage was now set for a century-long struggle on the continent between those who wanted to restore society as it had been before the French Revolution https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 8/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings and those who wanted to guarantee a more liberal order based on individual rights, limited government, and free trade. REVOLUTION IN SAINT-DOMINGUE (HAITI) Slavery and Freedom  Transcript France also saw colonies break away in this age of new freedoms, notably Saint-Domingue. Unlike most of British North America, revolution here came from the bottom rungs of the social ladder: slaves. In this Caribbean colony, freedom therefore meant not just liberation from Europe but emancipation from white planters. It posed a powerful question: How universal were these new rights? AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION AND CONTINUITY AND CHANGE Identify and explain the reasons that revolutionaries in France and Saint Domingue came into contact with each other. At the outset of the French Revolution, the island’s black slave population numbered 500,000, compared with 40,000 white French settlers and about 30,000 free “people of color” (individuals of mixed black and white ancestry, as well as freed black slaves). Almost two-thirds of the slaves were relatively recent arrivals, brought to the colony to toil on its renowned sugar plantations, which were exceptional in their brutality. The slave population was an angry majority without local ties, producing wealth for rich absentee landlords of a different race. The breakdown of authority in France unleashed conflict in Saint-Domingue, where local tensions were already high. White settlers sought self-government; they wanted to break free of the exclusive trade arrangement with France and to control the island themselves. Free blacks wanted to end racial discrimination among property holders without, initially, calling slavery into question. Slaves, by contrast, invoked revolutionary languageto denounce their masters and air long-standing grievances. As civil war erupted, slaves fought French forces that had arrived to restore order. In 1793, the National Convention in France abolished slavery. In part, the motive was to declare the universality of liberty, equality, and fraternity within the French nation, which included colonies. In part, it was to restore order to the colony. Once liberated, the former https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 9/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings slaves took control of the island. (See Current Trends in World History: Two Case Studies in Political Change and Environmental Degradation.) Map 8.2 Napoleon’s Empire, 1812 Early in the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon controlled almost all of Europe. What major states were under French control? What countries were allied to France? Compare this map with the European part of Map 8.1, and explain how Napoleon redrew the map of Europe. What major country was not under French control? According to your reading, how was Napoleon able to control and build alliances with so many states and kingdoms? Revolution in Saint-Domingue In 1791, slaves took up arms against white planters. This engraving was based on a German report on the uprising and reflects white fears of slave rebellion as much as the actual events themselves. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 10/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings The specter of a free country ruled by former slaves sent shudders across the Western Hemisphere, and above all in Britain and Spain, which had neighboring colonies. A version of martial law was declared in Venezuela. Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. president at the time, refused to recognize Haiti. Like other American slave owners, he worried that the example of a successful slave uprising might inspire similar revolts in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas. REVOLUTIONS IN SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE AMERICA AP® Skills & Processes CAUSATION Why did the French abolish slavery in 1793, and what was the impact of that abolition on slave society? Revolutionary enthusiasm also spread through Spanish and Portuguese America. As in Haiti, subordinated people of color took advantage of the period’s political instability; they mobilized European ideas against European colonizers and challenged the established order. (See Map 8.3.) AP® Skills & Processes COMPARISON Compare the revolutions in Spanish and Portuguese America with those in France, Haiti, and North America. Even before the French Revolution, Andean Indians rebelled against Spanish colonial authority. In a major uprising in the 1780s, they demanded freedom from forced labor and compulsory consumption of Spanish wares. After an army of 40,000 to 60,000 Andean Indians besieged the ancient capital of Cuzco and nearly vanquished Spanish armies, it took Spanish forces many years to eliminate the insurgents. After this uprising, Iberian American elites who feared their Indian or slave majorities renewed their loyalty to the Spanish or Portuguese crown. Ultimately, however, the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars shattered the ties between Spain and Portugal and their American colonies. AP® Skills & Processes CAUSATION AND CONTEXTUALIZATION Explain why the Portuguese royal family led the overthrow of their own government in Brazil. Brazil and Constitutional Monarchy Brazil was a prized Portuguese colony whose path to independence saw little political turmoil and no social revolution. In 1807, French troops stormed Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, but not before the royals and their associates fled to Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil. There they settled down, enacting reforms in administration, agriculture, and manufacturing and establishing schools, hospitals, and a library. Brazil now became the center of the Portuguese Empire. Furthermore, https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 11/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings the royal family willingly shared power with the local planter aristocracy, so the economy prospered and slavery expanded. When the king returned to Portugal in 1821, his son Pedro remained. Fearing an uprising among local elites, Pedro declared Brazil an independent state and established a constitutional monarchy. Local elites soon embraced Pedro’s rule and cooperated to minimize conflict, lest a slave revolt erupt. By the 1840s, Brazil had achieved a political stability unmatched in the Americas. AP® Skills & Processes COMPARISON Explain why the Spanish colonies in the Americas took longer to change their systems of rule than those elsewhere in the western hemisphere. Mexico’s Independence When Napoleon occupied Spain, he sparked a crisis in the Spanish Empire that eventually led Mexico to secede. Because the ruling Spanish monarchy fell captive to Napoleon in 1807, colonial elites in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Caracas (Venezuela), and Mexico City (Mexico) found themselves without an emperor. After Napoleon’s defeat, locally born creoles resented the fact that Spain reinstated peninsulares (people born in Spain) as colonial officials with the help of the royal army. Inspired by Enlightenment thinkers and chafing at the efforts to restore Iberian authority, the creoles wanted to keep their privileges and get rid of the peninsulares. Mexico’s creoles identified themselves more as Mexicans than as Spanish Americans, and as the Spanish king appeared less and less able to govern effectively, Mexican generals (with support of the creoles) proclaimed Mexican independence in 1821. Unlike the situation in Brazil, Mexican secession did not lead to stability. AP® Skills & Processes CONTINUITY AND CHANGE AND CONTEXTUALIZATION Identify the social struggles within Latin America. Why might these have actually prolonged the path to independence? Other South American Revolutions The loosening of Spain’s grip on its colonies was more prolonged and militarized than Britain’s separation from its American colonies. Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), the son of a merchant-planter family, who was educated on Enlightenment texts, dreamed of a land governed by reason. He revered Napoleonic France as a model state built on military heroism and constitutional proclamations. So did the Argentine leader General José de San Martín (1778– 1850). Men like Bolívar, San Martín, and their many generals waged extended wars of independence against Spanish armies and their allies between 1810 and 1824. What started in South America as a political revolution against Spanishcolonial authority escalated into a social struggle among Indians, mestizos, slaves, and whites. The armed populace threatened the planters and merchants; rural folk battled against aristocratic creoles; Andean Indians fled the mines and occupied great estates. Popular armies, having defeated Spanish forces by the 1820s, fought civil wars over the new postcolonial order. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 12/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings CURRENT TRENDS IN WORLD HISTORY Two Case Studies in Political Change and Environmental Degradation O verthrowing slavery and colonial domination did not necessarily halt environmental degradation. In fact, in two important New World countries, the new nations of Haiti and Brazil, the transition to independence aggravated environmental problems created by former colonial regimes. Two hundred and fifty years ago, Haiti, which was under French colonial rule at that time and known as Saint- Domingue, was the richest colony in the Americas, perhaps even the richest colony in the world, accounting for two- thirds of France’s worldwide investment. Saint-Domingue’s extraordinary wealth came from large, white-owned sugar plantations that used a massive and highly coerced slave population. The slaves’ lives were short and brutal, lasting on average only fifteen years; hence the wealthy planter class had to replenish their labor supplies from Africa at frequent intervals. Slaves Cutting Cane Sugar was the preeminent agricultural export from the New World for centuries. Owners of sugarcane plantations relied almost exclusively on African slaves to produce the sweetener. Labor in the fields was especially harsh, as slaves worked in the blistering sun from dawn until dusk. https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 13/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings White planters on the island were eager to amass quick fortunes so that they could sell out and return to France. Vastly outnumbered by enslaved Africans at a time when abolitionist sentiments were gaining ground in Europe and even circulating among slaves in the Americas, the planters’ families knew that their prosperity was unlikely to last. They gave little thought to sustainable growth and were not troubled that they were destroying their environment. The planters greeted the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 with enthusiasm. They saw an opportunity to assert their independence from France, to engage in wider trading contacts with North America and the rest of the world, and thus to become even richer. They ignored the possibility that the ideals of the French Revolution—especially its slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity—could inspire the island’s free blacks and slaves. Indeed, no sooner had the white planters thrown in their lot with the Third Estate in France than a slave rebellion broke out in Saint-Domingue. From its beginnings in 1791, it led, after great loss of life to African slaves and French soldiers, to the proclamation of an independent state in Haiti in 1804, ruled by African Americans. Haiti became the Americas’ second independent republican government. Although the revolt brought political independence to its black population, it only intensified the land’s environmental deterioration. Not only did sugarcane fields become scorched battlefields, but freed slaves rushed to stake out independent plots on the old plantations and in wooded areas. In both places, the new peasant class energetically cleared the land. The small country became even more deforested, and intensive cultivation increased erosion and soil depletion. Haiti fell into a more vicious cycle of environmental degradation and poverty. The second case study of political change leading to the destruction of the environment comes from the independent Brazilian state, where the ruling elite, having achieved autonomy from Portugal, expanded the agrarian frontier. Landowners oversaw the clearing of ancient hardwood forests so that slaves and squatters could plant coffee trees. The clearing process had begun with sugarcane in the coastal regions, but it accelerated with coffee plantings in the hilly regions of São Paulo. In fact, coffee was a worse threat to Brazil’s forests than any other invader in the previous 300 years. Coffee trees thrive on soils that are neither soggy nor overly dry. Therefore, planters razed the virgin forest, which contained a balanced variety of trees and undergrowth, and Brazil’s once-fertile soil suffered rapid depletion by a single-crop industry. Within one generation the clear-cutting led to infertile soils and extensive erosion, which drove planters farther into the frontier to destroy even more forest and plant more coffee groves. The environmental impact was monumental: between 1788 and 1888, when slavery was abolished, Brazil produced about 10 million tons of coffee and lost 300 million tons of ancient forest biomass (the accumulated biological material from living organisms). Questions for Analysis Who intensified the deforestation and degradation in each case, and why did they do it? Why do you think deforestation increased in intensity after Haitians and Brazilians gained their autonomy/independence? https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 14/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings Explore Further Diamond, Jared, and James A. Robinson (eds.), Natural Experiments of History (2010). Geggus, David (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (2001). AP® Skills & Processes CONTEXTUALIZATION Why might Simon Bolivar have wanted a confederation of independent states in Latin America? New states and collective identities of nationhood now emerged.A narrow elite led these political communities, and their guiding principles were often contradictory. Bolívar, for instance, encouraged his followers to become “American,” to overcome their local identities. He wanted the liberated countries to form a Latin American confederation, urging Peru and Bolivia to join Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia in the “Gran Colombia.” But local identities prevailed, giving way to unstable national republics. Bolívar died surrounded by opponents; San Martín died in exile. The real heirs to independence were local military chieftains, who often forged alliances with landowners. Thus, the legacy of the Spanish American revolutions was contradictory and echoed developments elsewhere around the world: the triumph of wealthy elites under a banner of liberty, yet often at the expense of poorer, nonwhite, and mixed populations. Map 8.3 Latin American Nation Building Creating strong, unified nation-states proved difficult in Latin America. The map shows where boundaries were drawn in Mexico, the United Provinces of Central https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 15/16 1/8/25, 8:28 PM Political Reorderings America, and the Republic of Colombia. In each case, the governments’ territorial and nation-building ambitions failed to some degree. During what period did a majority of the colonies in Latin America gain independence? Which European countries lost the most in Latin America during this period? Why did all these colonies gain their independence during this time? https://nerd.wwnorton.com/nerd/82839/r/goto/cfi/186!/4 16/16