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Chapter 8 Online Commentary

Chapter 8 titled "China and the World" was exactly that, a description of how China's influence spread throughout the world and how the world influenced China as well. After reading this chapter, I couldn't help but wonder why China never became the leader of all countries.  We look at the United States as the world power, but China definitely was the head of many "firsts" that changed the way others lived their lives.  The movable type printing press, first established by the Chinese, was given credit to Johannes Gutenberg who was probably unaware that it had already been discovered elsewhere.  We all know it now, though.  The production of salt by solar evaporation spread to Islamic countries and Europe.  Papermaking was the highlight of it all for this innovation spread to Korea, Vietnam, Japan, India, Islamic countires, Spain, France, Germany, and England.  How one country, China, altered the way of living of so much of the world is absolutely phenom...
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Chapters 19, 20, & 21 Online Commentary

In this series of chapters, what I found most interesting was the comparison of the Chinese, Ottoman, and Japanese Empires.  Europe had a strong influence on the way these Empires conducted business, even to the point of forcing their will upon them.  China was a very good example of that. I find it ironic that China, with all of its technology and intelligence, found itself conquered by the Europeans at that time and never truly recovered from that.  China grew in population, yet was unable to accommodate this influx of people.  Resources were scarce and so were opportunities.  With the economic state in disarray, peasants revolted.  This event caused the necessary use of monies and other resources to defend itself from its own people that in the end, the state had significantly weakened.  This opened the door for outside influences to enter, and that's exactly what they did. The Ottoman Empire was no less fortunate.  It went from being a pow...
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Chapter 3 Journal Commentary

So, as I've previously mentioned, History has never been one of my strong points.  Chapter 3, while interesting at best, did have me flipping pages back and forth to the map illustrations just so I could visualize exactly where all of the cities and empires that the chapter was referring to were situated. The text begins this chapter with the Persian Empire, which was the largest and perhaps greatest of empires that ever existed.   The map depicting the area that this empire encompassed was amazing. The Persians, ruled by a king, were able to acquire more and more land through their conquests making them unsurpassable. The Persians created a successful system of government that was the foundation for future administrations to follow.  There were officials that ran certain departments, so to speak, such as tax collecting, record keeping, etc.  It is from here that I can see the origins of the systems we have in place today.  They also tried to promote the cus...
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