Modern World Terms
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1. War of the Spanish Succession- (1701-14), conflict that arose out of the disputed succession to the throne of Spain following the death of the childless Charles II, the last of the Spanish Habsburgs. The battles raged across Europe for eleven years. In an effort to regulate the impending succession, to which there were three principal claimants, England, the Dutch Republic, and France signed the First Treaty of Partition, agreeing Prince Joseph Ferdinand, should inherit Spain.
2. War of the Austrian Succession- (1740-1748). Maria Theresa of Austria succeeded her father Charles VI. She, as a woman, was seen as weak, and some other princes alleged rights to the thrown. The hostilities began with the invasion of Silesia by King Frederick II of Prussia and only ended with peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Most of the military interest of the war lies in the struggle of Prussia and Austria for Silesia.
3. Seven Years War- (1754 and 1756-1763). decisive round in the Franco-British competition for colonial empire. With the Treat of Paris (1763) France lost all its possessions on the mainland of North America and gave up most of its holdings in India as well. By 1763, Britain had realized its goal of monopolizing a vast trade and colonial empire for its benefit.
4. cottage workers- workers who were paid to work in villages. Worked in spurts where the man tended to drink after they were paid.
5. enclosure system- authorized the fencing of open fields in a given village and the division of the common in proportion to ones property in the open fields. It marked the completion of two major historical developments in England: the rise of market oriented estate agriculture and the emergence of a land less proletariat
6. domestic system- also known as the putting out system was a popular system of cloth production in Europe. It existed as early as the 1400s but was most prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries. Workers would work from home, manufacturing individual articles from raw materials, then bring them to a central place of business, such as a marketplace or a larger town, to be assembled and sold.
7. “spinsters”- widows and unmarried women who spun for their living
8. agricultural revolution- produced a transformation of human society brought about by the invention of the plow, making large scale agricultural production possible and leading to agrarian societies. Many people call it the “dawn of civilization.” During the same time period that the plow was invented, the wheel, writing, and numbers were also invented.
9. mercantilism- a system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the state. What distinguished English mercantilism was the unusual idea that government economic regulations could and should serve the private interests of individuals and groups as well as the public needs of the state.
10. the “asiento”- Spain was compelled to give Britain control of the lucrative West African slave trade.
11. Industrial Revolution- the application of power-driven machinery to manufacturing. In the eighteenth century all of western Europe began to industrialize rapidly, but in England the process was most highly accelerated. Workers became more productive and since more items were manufactured, prices dropped, making exclusive and hard to make items available to the poor. The big new cotton mills marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in England. By 1831 the largely mechanized cotton textile industry towered above all others.
12. protective tariff- a tariff or duty tax placed in imports, usually calculated as a percent of the price charged for the goods by foreign suppliers. Established by Hamilton which forced overseas manufacturers who wanted to access the U.S. markets to pay an import tax.
13. Chartist movement- The “Peoples Charter” drafted in 1838 by Lovette, was the heart of a radical campaign for parliamentary reform of the inequities remaining after the Reform Act of 1832.
14. energy crisis of the eighteenth century- the shortage of energy had become particularly severe in England. Because of the growth of population, most of the great forests of medieval England had long ago been replaced by fields of grain and hay. Processed wood (charcoal) was the fuel that was mixed with iron ore in the blast furnace to produce pig iron.
15. real wages- income of an individual, organization, or country, after taking into consideration the effects of inflation on purchasing power.
16. “body linen”- underwear made from expensive linen cloth
17. Jethro Tull- major pioneer in the modernization of agriculture. Tull published his ideas about farming and plant nutrition
18. Charles Townsend- one of the pioneers of English agricultural improvement. He learned about the turnips and clover while serving as English ambassador to Holland. He used Dutch techniques.
19. Thomas Malthus- argued that population would always tend to grow faster than the food supply. The only hope of warding off “positive checks” to population growth ash as war, famine, and disease was “prudential restraint”