During the era of third-wave civilizations, China, a massive and powerful civilization, was imitated by adjacent peoples. It gave rise to China-centered "world order" encompassing most of eastern Asia. Its borders extended deep into central Asia while its wealthy and cosmopolitan culture attracted its visitors from all over Eurasia. China's prospering economy and many of its technological innovations affected the Afro-Eurasia world with its ripple effects. The country was involved in international trade which stimulated important social, cultural, and economic changes within China itself.
Reemergence of China
The fall of the Han dynasty around 220 C.E. created more than three centuries' worth of political fragmentation in China and resulted in the rise of powerful and local entrenched aristocratic families. The incursion of northern nomads created the merging of language and families. They learned Chinese, dressed like Chinese, and married into Chinese families and governed northern regions of the country in a Chinese fashion.
China regained its unity under the Sui dynasty (589-618) because its emperors solidified its unity through a vast extension of the country's canal system, which stretched around 1,200 miles in length. The canals linked northern and southern China economically and contributed to the prosperity that soon followed.
China and the Northern Nomads
China had many interactions with the Eurasian world from early times to the nineteenth century. It had its most enduring and intense interaction with foreigners were in the north. It involved many nomadic pastoral or semi-agricultural peoples of the steppes. Even though the Chinese often came with threats, bringing their own military forces deep into the steppes, building the Great Wall to keep the nomads out, and preventing the pastoral people easy access to trading opportunities in China, the Chinese still needed the nomads. The nomads' lands were sources of horses and products such as skins, furs, hides, and amber, which were all valuable to China. The relationship and interaction between China and the northern nomads brought together people occupying different environments, practicing different economics, governing themselves with different institutions, and thinking about the world in very different ways.
China and the Eurasian World Economy
China's incredible economic growth took place during the Tang and Song dynasties and could hardly be contained within China's borders and had a major impact throughout Eurasia. China was both a recipient and donor in the economic interactions of the third-wave era, and its own economic achievements owed something with the larger world.
Sunday, November 6, 2016
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
Ch. 9 The Worlds of Islam (Afro-Eurasian Connections) & Ch. 10 The World of Christendom (Contraction, Expansion, and Division)
Ch. 9
The history of Islam is one that reveals a great history of diversity and debate. Islam played a central role in the Afro-Eurasian world for a thousand years or more. From 600 to 1600 or later, it was a proud, cosmopolitan, often prosperous, and frequently powerful civilization that spanned Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The early Islamic community also associated with Medina, Mecca, and Muhammad as a model for Islamic renewal in the present. Sharp religious differences between Sunnia and Shia understandings of the faith, differences in emphasis between advocates of the sharia and of Sufi spirituality, and more divided the umma.
Ch. 10
Over the past thirty years, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and parts of India all hosted substantial Christian communities. Yao Hong, a Chinese woman, became a Christian sometime around 1990 after discovering her husband was having an affair; and she was devastated. She is one of the many millions who has made Christianity a rapidly growing faith. The non-Muslim regions of Africa also witnessed an explosive advance of Christianity during the twentieth century. And Latin America has experienced an incredible growth of Pentecostal Protestant Christianity since the 1970s.
In the early twenty-first century, over 60% of the world's Christians lived in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The sixth- and seventh-century world of Christendom revealed flourishing communities in Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Ethiopia, Nubia, Syria, Armenia, Persia, India, and China, as well as Europe. Over the course of a thousand years, changes that occurred shaped the Christian World. The African and Asian posts largely vanished, declined, or were marginalized; and Christianity became primarily a European phenomenon for the next thousand years or more.
Byzantine Christendom
Byzantium had no clear starting point, unlike most empires. It was simply viewed as a continuation of the Roman Empire. Some historians date its beginning to 330 C.E. when the Roman emperor Constantine, who began to favor Christianity during his reign, established a new capital, Constantinople, on the site of an ancient Greek City - Byzantium. At the end of this century, the Roman Empire was formally divided into eastern and western halves - launching the division of Christendom which lasted into the twenty-first century.
While the western Roman Empire collapsed during the fifth century, the eastern side lasted for another thousand years.
Late Rome with its roads, taxation system, military structures, centralized administration, imperial court, laws, and Christian persisted in the east for many centuries. Emperors, who feared contamination by "barbarian" customs, forbade the residents of Constantinople from wearing boots, trousers, clothing made from animal skins, and long hairstyles, which were all associated with the Germanic peoples. The Byzantine Empire became known as the home of a distinctive civilization.
Political Life in Europe
The traditional date marking the collapse of the empire was 476 when the German general Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor in the west. Disease and warfare reduced Western Europe's population by more than 25%. Land under cultivation contracted and forests, marshland, and wasteland expanded. Urban life also dimished and Europe veered off to a largely rural existence. On a political front, a series of regional kingdoms emerged to replace Roman authority and these were: the Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France, Lombards in Italy, and Angles and Saxons in England. Contact with the Roman Empire in the first seven centuries C.E. genderated more distinct ethnic identities among them, militarized their societies, and gave greater prominence to Woden, their god of war. When Germanic peoples migrated into or invaded Roman lands, many of them were deeply influenced by Roman culture, especially if they served in the Roman army. As leaders of their own kingdoms, the Germanic rulers acticely embraced written Roman law, used fines and penalties to provide order and justice in their new states in place of feuds and vendettas.
The Church and Women
The Church had offered some women an aletrnative to home, marriage, family, and rural life. In Buddhist lands, a substantial number of women, mostly from aristocratic families, were attracted to the secluded monastic life of poverty, chastity, and obedience within a convent which gave them relative freedom from male control that it offered. This is just one example of the religious opportunities women were able to have.
Reason and Faith
Some early Christian thinkers sought to maintain a clear separation between the new religion and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. There was an intellectual tension between the claims of human reason and those of faith. There was also a notion that Greek philosophy could serve as a "handmaiden" to faith, disclosing the truths of Christianity. European Christian thinkers, a small group of literate churchmen, began to emphasize the ability of human reason to penetrate divine mysteries to grasp the operation of the natural order. Logically, philosophy and rationality would operate in service to Christ. European intellectuals applied their newly discovered confidence in human reason to law, medicine, and the world of nature, exploring optics, magnetism, astronomy, and alchemy. The scientific study of nature gradually began to separat itself from theology, although never completely. The integration of political and religious life in the Islamic world (Byzantium) contrasted with their separation in the West, where there was more space for the independent pursuit of scientific subjects.
Many of the characteristic features of Christendom, which emerged during the era of the third-wave civilizations have had a long life and have extended into modern era. Much of what occurred during this time regarding religion contributed to the study of history with linking the past to what came later, helping the people with human understanding. Because we have our histories, we are limited and shaped by it.
The history of Islam is one that reveals a great history of diversity and debate. Islam played a central role in the Afro-Eurasian world for a thousand years or more. From 600 to 1600 or later, it was a proud, cosmopolitan, often prosperous, and frequently powerful civilization that spanned Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The early Islamic community also associated with Medina, Mecca, and Muhammad as a model for Islamic renewal in the present. Sharp religious differences between Sunnia and Shia understandings of the faith, differences in emphasis between advocates of the sharia and of Sufi spirituality, and more divided the umma.
Ch. 10
Over the past thirty years, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and parts of India all hosted substantial Christian communities. Yao Hong, a Chinese woman, became a Christian sometime around 1990 after discovering her husband was having an affair; and she was devastated. She is one of the many millions who has made Christianity a rapidly growing faith. The non-Muslim regions of Africa also witnessed an explosive advance of Christianity during the twentieth century. And Latin America has experienced an incredible growth of Pentecostal Protestant Christianity since the 1970s.
In the early twenty-first century, over 60% of the world's Christians lived in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. The sixth- and seventh-century world of Christendom revealed flourishing communities in Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Ethiopia, Nubia, Syria, Armenia, Persia, India, and China, as well as Europe. Over the course of a thousand years, changes that occurred shaped the Christian World. The African and Asian posts largely vanished, declined, or were marginalized; and Christianity became primarily a European phenomenon for the next thousand years or more.
Byzantine Christendom
Byzantium had no clear starting point, unlike most empires. It was simply viewed as a continuation of the Roman Empire. Some historians date its beginning to 330 C.E. when the Roman emperor Constantine, who began to favor Christianity during his reign, established a new capital, Constantinople, on the site of an ancient Greek City - Byzantium. At the end of this century, the Roman Empire was formally divided into eastern and western halves - launching the division of Christendom which lasted into the twenty-first century.
While the western Roman Empire collapsed during the fifth century, the eastern side lasted for another thousand years.
Late Rome with its roads, taxation system, military structures, centralized administration, imperial court, laws, and Christian persisted in the east for many centuries. Emperors, who feared contamination by "barbarian" customs, forbade the residents of Constantinople from wearing boots, trousers, clothing made from animal skins, and long hairstyles, which were all associated with the Germanic peoples. The Byzantine Empire became known as the home of a distinctive civilization.
Political Life in Europe
The traditional date marking the collapse of the empire was 476 when the German general Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor in the west. Disease and warfare reduced Western Europe's population by more than 25%. Land under cultivation contracted and forests, marshland, and wasteland expanded. Urban life also dimished and Europe veered off to a largely rural existence. On a political front, a series of regional kingdoms emerged to replace Roman authority and these were: the Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France, Lombards in Italy, and Angles and Saxons in England. Contact with the Roman Empire in the first seven centuries C.E. genderated more distinct ethnic identities among them, militarized their societies, and gave greater prominence to Woden, their god of war. When Germanic peoples migrated into or invaded Roman lands, many of them were deeply influenced by Roman culture, especially if they served in the Roman army. As leaders of their own kingdoms, the Germanic rulers acticely embraced written Roman law, used fines and penalties to provide order and justice in their new states in place of feuds and vendettas.
The Church and Women
The Church had offered some women an aletrnative to home, marriage, family, and rural life. In Buddhist lands, a substantial number of women, mostly from aristocratic families, were attracted to the secluded monastic life of poverty, chastity, and obedience within a convent which gave them relative freedom from male control that it offered. This is just one example of the religious opportunities women were able to have.
Reason and Faith
Some early Christian thinkers sought to maintain a clear separation between the new religion and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle. There was an intellectual tension between the claims of human reason and those of faith. There was also a notion that Greek philosophy could serve as a "handmaiden" to faith, disclosing the truths of Christianity. European Christian thinkers, a small group of literate churchmen, began to emphasize the ability of human reason to penetrate divine mysteries to grasp the operation of the natural order. Logically, philosophy and rationality would operate in service to Christ. European intellectuals applied their newly discovered confidence in human reason to law, medicine, and the world of nature, exploring optics, magnetism, astronomy, and alchemy. The scientific study of nature gradually began to separat itself from theology, although never completely. The integration of political and religious life in the Islamic world (Byzantium) contrasted with their separation in the West, where there was more space for the independent pursuit of scientific subjects.
Many of the characteristic features of Christendom, which emerged during the era of the third-wave civilizations have had a long life and have extended into modern era. Much of what occurred during this time regarding religion contributed to the study of history with linking the past to what came later, helping the people with human understanding. Because we have our histories, we are limited and shaped by it.
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