Ch.13 The Old-Fashioned Emper...

Ch.13 The Old-Fashioned Emperor and the Red Sultan

Brazil’s Republic

- Brazil had been ruled by only two emperors in its short history. The first emperor of Brazil, Pedro I, was the son of the king of Portugal. When Pedro was a little boy, Brazil wasn’t even a country. It was a Portuguese colony.
- Pedro grew up in the colony of Brazil. When he was twenty-three, his father (the king of Portugal) gave him the job of governing Brazil. A year later, Pedro led Brazil in declaring independence from Portugal-and from his father. He became Pedro I, the first emperor of an independent Brazil.
- In 1889, the year after slavery was made illegal, Pedro II realized that he would not be able to keep his throne any longer. He was now sixty-three years old. He had spent his life working to make Brazil a rich, free, well-educated, modern country-a modern country that no longer wanted to be ruled by an old-fashioned emperor.


Abdulhamid the Red

- The Ottoman constitution lasted for exactly one year. Then Abdulhamid ordered it dissolved. Now he would rule like an old-fashioned sultan, with no constitution or parliament to limit his power.
- Many Armenians were killed by Abdulhamid‘s soldiers. Others were forced to march out of the Turkish territory, and died of starvation and weariness on the long walk. The killing went on for three years. No one knows exactly how many Armenians were killed, but at least a hundred thousand men, women, and children died.
- The people of Turkey called themselves the ˝Committee of Union and Progress.˝ But others called them the ˝Young Turks”.

Ch.12 Unhappy Unions Ireland...

Ch.12 Unhappy Unions

Ireland’s Troubles

- The quarrel between Ireland and England had been going on for hundreds of years. In 1541, the English king Henry VIlI had claimed Ireland as his own. Even though Henry VIII became a Protestant, most of Ireland remained Catholic.
- One September morning in 1845, an Irish farmer in his field pushed his hand into the ground to check on his potatoes. His fingers found only soft, rotten mush. Desperately, he began to dig. A horrible stench rose up out of the ground. All of the potatoes beneath the thick stem had rotted away in the ground. The blight had come to Ireland.


The Boers and the British

- The people of the Transvaal could see that the British intended to take over their country and the Free State as well. So in 1899, the Afrikaners in both the Transvaal and the Free State declared war on Great Britain. The British called this war the ˝Boer War.˝

Ch.11 The Far Parts of the Wo...

Ch.11 The Far Parts of the World

The Iron Outlaw

- Australia
- One of Famous ”Bushrangers”, Ned Kelly
- Ned Kelly was sentenced to be hanged. Thirty thousand Australians signed a petition, asking the governor of Melbourne to save Ned Kelly from death. But the governor refused. In 1880, Ned Kelly was executed.
- For a hundred years, Australians wrote stories and poems about Ned Kelly. Some Australians insisted that Ned Kelly was just a common criminal. But others believed that Kelly Was a brave man, fighting against unjust laws that Great Britain forced Australians to obey.


Carving Up Africa

- Berlin Conference
- By 1900, every mile of Africa-except for Ethiopia, on the eastern coast, and the little country of Liberia, on the western coast-had been claimed by a European country. The enormous continent of Africa had been divided: Germany, Italy, Britain, Portugal, Spain, and France had taken every square inch.

Ch.10 A Canal to the East and...

Ch.10 A Canal to the East and a Very Dry Desert

The War of the Pacific

- Miners from Chile went into the Atacama Desert to dig for copper and for sodium nitrate. But Bolivia claimed that, since part of the desert belonged to Bolivia, the miners should pay taxes to Bolivia when they sold the copper and sodium nitrate that they found.
- Bolivia (with its alley, Peru) declared war on Chile.
- Chile won the war.
- Peru had to agree to sign a peace treaty that gave the southern part of its coastline to Chile. Bolivia also had to give up land- its entire coastline! From that day on, Bolivia was ˝landlocked.˝ It had no way to get to the sea. And Chile had won the rights to the Atacama Desert and all of its mines.


The Suez Canal

- Egypt became a far-away part of the Ottoman Empire a part that no one really paid very much attention to.
- In 1805, an officer, Muhammad Ali in the Ottoman army seized the throne of Egypt. He made Egypt growing stronger and more modern.
- His son, Said Pasha gave a French company permission to start digging a canal from the southern banks of the Mediterranean Sea, down to the left-hand tip of the Red Sea. A Suez Canal.
- Ismail Pasha (Said’s nephew) spent too much money on his projects. He had to start borrowing money from France and Great Britain. Finally, Ismail had to sell control of the Suez Canal to the British and eventually the control of Egypt’s government.

Ch.9 Two More Empires, Two Re...

Ch.9 Two More Empires, Two Rebellions

The Dutch East Indies

- In 1824 the two countries came to an agreement. The Dutch would promise never to attack Singapore, and they would give the British all of the Dutch ports and settlements in India. In return, the Dutch could have Sumatra as their own. But there was a catch: the Dutch had to allow the kingdom of Acheh, on the northern end of Sumatra, to stay independent. That way, Acheh would be like a “neutral zone” between the British in Singapore and the Dutch in Sumatra.
- In 1873 the Dutch invaded Ache with three thousand men. They didn‘t realize that the fighting would go on for more than thirty years.
- In 1903, the Dutch finally gained control over Acheh. But the long war had been so expensive that the Dutch government had been forced to spend all the money it had made from the East Indies.


The Sick Man of Europe
- The Russians had not given up the idea of attacking the Ottoman Empire, the “sick man of Europe”, again. In 1876, Russia got its chance.
- By January of 1878, the Ottoman forces had begun to crumble. By March, it was clear that Russia had won the war. Abdulhamid was forced to sign a treaty that would give Bulgaria its independence. Russia took part of Anatolia for itself. Under the treaty, the Ottoman Empire lost half of its territory!