ap world history essay examples

ap world history essay examples

Exploring the Impact of Major Historical Events: A Comparative Analysis

1. Introduction

By major historical events, we mean those influences whose exact dates are sui generis in nature, which halt, either temporarily or permanently, the ongoing influences in economic time series. They may be due to demand or supply shifts. Removed of its details, we apply the Runkle econometric methodology to significant historical events previously defined in Keynesian historical terms. This captures the change in the model influence due to the major historical event. A typical application would be the declaration of war, which discontinuously terminates current output and initiates replacement and military output. Another example would be the abolishment of the Corn Laws, which influences prices and outputs. A less abstract example requires the supply model version of the mere presence of a carting points model. The intertemporal substitution model would require a consideration of scarce consumption. Every time t, an output ceases or a price leaps, we monitor this for a structurally deteriorating influence of interest.

Careful selection of historical events and dates is a necessary ingredient in the vast majority of time series of economic variables due to bounded stationarity. However, surprisingly little empirical work has investigated the impact major historical events have on economic time series. An exception is the significant literature on the role of wars on output and prices which has often been motivated by the need to evaluate the validity of Okun’s law. Here, we apply the mere presence of a carting points model of Runkle to a large number of economic time series to provide a comprehensive quantitative summary of the evidence on economic effects of major historical events in the UK and in the US. In total, we examine the impact of 66 such events in the two countries. The major results are on the influence of World War II which entered many models and of specific US political events.

2. The Rise and Fall of Empires: Case Studies

The Ottoman Empire dominated Southeast Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa at the beginning of the 16th century. In fact, it extended its territories further into Europe, reaching Austria in the northwest and almost Byzantium in the west. Yet, it is also true, as Braudel already argued, that it was an “improbably sophisticated and precise equilibrium.” He specifically means that on the one hand, the backwardness of many of its provinces stood in sharp contrast to the economic and cultural superiority of the predominantly Muslim and urbanized Anatolian-Syrian heartland. On the other hand, the weak, decentralized, and fragile control only allowed for the indirect extraction of resources, which is currently hard to reconcile with the high fiscal capacity that large land empires typically had. It distributed power to many local landlords and cut costs. The ensuing precarious political equilibrium resulted in economic and institutional stagnation, all the while offering a window of opportunity for capital to flow to Europe and for the other great land and naval empires of the time. Certainly, the military defeats at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 were the most poignant straws that broke the camel’s back, foreshadowing, as they did, the subsequent decline and disintegration.

In this section, we provide a detailed analysis of two case studies: the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire (the Austro-Hungarian Empire in our period). In particular, we focus on examining the long-run impact of the convergence hypothesis, the growth literature on the determinants of economic growth, institutions, and the impact of empires on economic development. We also highlight how these important historical events are linked to our modern statistical analysis.

3. Revolutionary Movements and Their Consequences

The objectives of this work are to explore scientific and political-legal as well as historical-economic and evolutionary characteristics of revolutionary processes and to reveal their commonality and distinctive features in pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary behavior of people’s communities at the local, regional and state levels.

The impact of revolution on global development is second only to that of a world war. The major 20th-century revolutions were the Mexican (1910-1920), the Russian (1917-1922), the Chinese (1926-1950), the Cuban (1953-1959) and the Iranian (1978-1982). They have been followed by changes in dozens of other states as well. In the past, remains have been left not only by the industrial and agrarian revolutions, but by the technical and information revolutions as well. Memory contains experience, and ascertainment of what occurred is useful for forecasting the path of development for countries going through the transformation phase, especially when their transformation is achieved by non-violent means. In addition, a clearer idea is needed of what can be done for a successful transition between the revolution and formation of a developed structure.

4. Globalization and Its Effects on Societies

For a long time, the trade deficit of the empires and the influx of imports, especially textiles, had been a concern of the ruling elites. In the eighteenth century, many states had even implemented a ban on buying abroad to stem the export of capital. Exchange controls prevented the transfer of capital from society to the hands of the merchants’ guilds. These bans did not help those countries to industrialize and sought the pretext for the existence of the cotton industry in France in the superiority of the product. Given the ‘state of the fecundity of the soil’ and the production techniques then adopted, it was not possible to imitate the British product. But while the import ban was a protection of the large landowners’ income, it was the nascent urban capitalists of the Ottoman Empire who were opposed to the opening of the trade with the foreigner.

The Ottoman Empire came to an end amidst the First World War, and the new establishment of nation-states from the Ottoman territories marked the beginning of an integration of these societies in the international system. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman territories already participated in the commercial globalization – the great divergence of the rates of economic development among world regions was apparently closing once more. This begs the question of what impact the ‘isms’ would have had if the Middle Eastern societies had not witnessed this globalization, if reforms had turned the empires inwards, or if European states had actively hindered the internationalization and integration of these societies.

5. Conclusion and Reflections

This analysis has implications for understanding economic development and regional convergence. Market potential, an inherently good measure, is that aspect of geography that matters for economic development. The results of this paper suggest that market potential measured by population density in the year 1820 is a force explaining the relative lack of convergence between the Atlantic factor cities, and indeed between the entire country. The 336 commercial towns with an income increase less than 75% in the 1820 to 1990 period show a range of closing the gap in average pcinc, ranging from 35% to 150%.

Although it is likely that Salem’s real per capita income never surpassed what it had been in the 1750s, in population density it has much exceeded it throughout the post-1820 period. Of the 336 commercial towns with an increase in per capita income lower than 75%, 82% had a population density below 45 persons per square mile in 1820. And of the 328 commercial towns that stagnated or became non-commercial, 91% had a population density below 45 persons per square mile in 1820. The relationship between growth in per capita income and population density does not provide independent evidence favoring coast access or supply limitation explanations for relative stagnation.