Exam 14: Cultures of Splendor and Power, 1500-1780

A) Chinese maps exhibited a higher degree of geometric and mathematical precision.
B) The Chinese knew that the earth was round, and they ridiculed the flat earth shown in Ricci's maps.
C) The Chinese believed that Ricci's maps made China seem an unimportant country on the edge of the world.
D) Chinese maps reflected more knowledge of other parts of the world.

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Captain Cook was a symbol of his age in two ways. He represented the European wish to colonize and control other parts of the world, and he represented the wish to observe, experiment, and contribute to the assembly of universal knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment. His voyages of exploration served both of these objectives. The first voyage had an advertised, scientific goal and included several scientists sent to observe and describe the plants, animals, and natural phenomena of the Pacific, but also had a secret mission to claim the unknown Southern Continent for Great Britain before the French or Dutch could do so. His third voyage, more explicitly combining the two elements, carried a cargo of European domestic plants and animals with which to seed the Pacific. In particular, Australia was deeply affected by this type of expansionism. After the British officially took possession of eastern Australia, they planned to make it a source of needed raw materials as well as a strategic outpost. They introduced sheep for wool and intended to harvest timber and flax. They also introduced people, including a colony of British convicts as well as free migrants, who increased in numbers to over 1 million in less than a century. The remaining indigenous Aborigines, a group already decimated by Afro-Eurasian diseases to which they had no immunity, were forced from their land by a colonization that was, compared to that of the Americas, faster and more decisive. Cook and other Pacific explorers also provided written accounts that introduced Europeans to the Australian Aborigines, Hawaiians, and other indigenous peoples of Oceania. This information, like their botanical and zoological discoveries, was incorporated into the universal knowledge-gathering project of Enlightenment-era scientists and social scientists. Thinkers like Bernier, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, and the Comte de Buffon used Cook's discoveries to fit Pacific peoples into their project of classifying all the world's peoples according to a combination of physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture, and social characteristics like their type of government. In this system of racial classification and hierarchy, Pacific peoples fit somewhere in the middle, between Europeans top) and Africans bottom). In some cases, their homes on isolated tropical islands led European observers to consider them as "noble savages," people who had not been corrupted by culture and society. However, Captain Cook made a final contribution to the attitudes of Europeans with his violent death at the hands of the Hawaiians in 1779; afterward, Pacific cultures were viewed as "darker" by European colonizers and seekers of universal knowledge.

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In both Tokugawa Japan and Enlightenment...

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A) They wanted to decipher the mysteries of the universe and gain greater control over nature.
B) They believed that the stability of the kingdom depended on the emperor's ability to calculate correct dates for festivals, court sessions, mourning periods, and agricultural work.
C) They needed a clear understanding of the constellations and other celestial features in order to navigate the world's oceans.
D) They believed that astronomy was the key to a universal and objective understanding of the natural world.

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A) artistic ability and linguistic sophistication
B) form of governance and linguistic sophistication
C) physical appearance and form of governance
D) linguistic sophistication and physical appearance

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A) The Islamic world reunified under a single political authority, the caliphate.
B) The Islamic world began a program of overseas expansion.
C) The Islamic world lost its ability to make beautiful textiles and other products for trade.
D) The Islamic world developed three distinctive cultural traditions centered on the Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid Empires.

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A) They sought to gather all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth and to present it in useful form.
B) They sought to create a catalog of all of the works of western authors.
C) They wanted to portray all other cultures as being inferior to European culture.
D) They wanted to evaluate the world's regions according to their adherence to rational science.

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A) the palace at Isfahan
B) the empire's legal system
C) the Taj Mahal
D) the peacock throne

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A) Missionaries to the Americas were backed up by colonial officials and military power.
B) Missionaries to East Asia were more willing to accept the blending of multiple religious traditions.
C) Missionaries to the Americas were more successful at impressing their audiences with examples of European cartography.
D) Missionaries to East Asia failed to learn anything about the people they sought to convert.

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A) Tribute from the conquered peoples in central Asia provided the funds for extravagant buildings such as the Taj Mahal.
B) Foreign trade brought in silver and advanced the money economy, which helped the nobility prosper.
C) Confiscatory taxation on farmers funded the Mughal military-based nobility.
D) Mughal nobles were entitled to collect a tithe from all non-Muslims.

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A) The most popular plays were those that made fun of the shogun.
B) It idolized groups such as actors, musicians, and courtesans, who were ordinarily at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
C) It argued that people should be able to rise in the social hierarchy through attention to propriety and virtuous behavior.
D) It offered women opportunities for independence and autonomy.

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A) Foreign powers forced Japan to modernize by adopting "modern" science and culture.
B) Before the seventeenth century, Japan had not come into contact with foreign ideas or culture.
C) Earlier, foreign ideas rarely traveled beyond coastal regions, but by the eighteenth century, expanded networks of exchange facilitated their spread throughout the country.
D) Members of middle class idealized foreign culture, leading the shoguns to fear that learning about Enlightenment ideals might lead the merchants to overthrow the emperor.

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A) Many governments employed censors and punished radical thinkers.
B) Riots occurred in university towns against the imposition of secular knowledge in the schools.
C) Artisans guilds passed rules against applying Newtonian physics to their crafts.
D) Women wrote in their journals that they refused to conduct experiments because they feared a loss of femininity.

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A) All people have an innate drive to truck, barter, and exchange.
B) There are rules organizing innate cultural differences between different ethnic groups.
C) The only way to maintain the state's relationship with citizens is through harsh punishments.
D) People have a right to rebel against corrupted government.

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The term Enlightenment describes a period of cultural flowering in European history during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It can be used to refer to the intellectual trends of the day, which emphasized the power of human reason, the perfectibility of humankind, the presence of universal rights, and the existence of universal laws to explain the workings of the universe and all human societies. It can also refer to the environment in which those ideas flourished, which was marked by a rise in literacy, a decline in religious persecution, and the growing popularity of scientific experimentation. The Enlightenment was a movement of elites, since most of the common people in western European societies continued to interpret the world using religious and folk traditions. However, the Enlightenment proved a very expansive movement. Its ideas, which sought to replace traditional distinctions of social status based on rank with recognition of individual merit, appealed to many literate people, spreading through port cities, commercial centers, and venues such as coffeehouses and salons. They also contributed to a broader cultural climate that questioned conventional wisdom and defied established beliefs and institutions such as the church and the monarchy, coexisting with political satirists, exposers of financial fraud, and the authors of bawdy tales that ridiculed authority figures. For their criticism of superstition and corruption, some Enlightenment intellectuals were imprisoned. Some of their ideas-like the pursuit of objective, verifiable knowledge- appealed to absolutist monarchs, and the movement depended on the patronage of royal, aristocratic, and commercial elites. But the latter did not approve of criticism that was too pointed in its attacks on established systems of religion or governance. Despite this potential for subversion, Enlightenment ideas emerged in response to a time of religious and political conflict in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Europe, when the wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation caused great destruction to large parts of the continent. The Protestant Reformation had encouraged the spread of literacy and the diffusion of new ideas, which now came to include a wish for a world with less religious strife. Enlightenment thinkers also drew upon the tradition of experimental science, coming to believe that knowledge came from collecting and organizing data rather than studying established authority. Finally, Europe's increasing contact with and knowledge about other parts of the world encouraged the wish for universal knowledge and the need to make sense of the diversity of the cultures they encountered. Here the limitations of Enlightenment principles become evident-although they sought objective knowledge and universal laws, their thoughts about other cultures reflected Europeans' sense that their own ways were superior. Likewise, although Enlightenment ideas encouraged residents of Europe's overseas colonies to assert their own rights to equality and self-determination, the movement resisted extending those privileges to women, the lower classes, and nonwhite peoples.

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The new system for classifying the world...

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A) Elite women's success as writers, readers, and editors encouraged them to assume a wider range of social roles.
B) Elite women read about the lives of poor women and developed a new sense of female solidarity that crossed class boundaries.
C) Elite women were generally able to participate as writers, readers, and editors, despite increasing constraints on their lives.
D) Elite women were not encouraged to participate in literary culture, but the most popular books had strong female characters.

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