The Context – Inequalities Emerge in World Markets.
Over the course of the 1800’s, all kinds of economic markets expanded in reach, becoming increasingly dependent on one another for determining prices, wages, production quantities, and consumer demand, among other economic variables. In New England of the early 1800’s, for example, surplus laborers from farming towns found work in mill town factories spinning wool and joined whaling crews on voyages throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to earn a living. By the late 1800’s, international consumer demand for coffee, bananas, and hemp, among other goods, drove markets for cheap agricultural labor throughout Central America. With laborers and goods able to travel farther to reach the market, governments sought to regulate trade between each other, always with the goal of securing the best terms for their own subjects and often at the expense of other governments’ subjects. Governments won protections for their subjects from local courts, intervened to make foreign countries pay creditors, and facilitated the granting of economic concessions – a type of monopoly over part of a foreign economy – to their own subjects. The Assignment Read the two documents from Akram Khater’s Sources in the History of the Modern Middle East (pages 36 – 40, 43 – 45) about economic agreements in Qajar Iran. Paying close attention to the articles concerning legal and economic protections, explain how they fit the context above. What do the documents reveal about how markets and governments interacted with one another? In an essay of no more than two pages, you should do the following: 1) Explain the Context in your own words (not the ones from this assignment). You can use examples from this class or a previous one. Or, if you can think of examples in the present day that illustrate the same historical trend, use them too. This should be about a paragraph long. 2) Identify each document – what kind of document is it? Who wrote it? When and where did the events it describe take place? Again, no more than a paragraph per document. Do not analyze the document here. 3) Pick one or two examples appropriate to the Context from each document. Explain what they mean in their own terms. Then say what each tells about the overall Context – how did political and economic developments Iran affect the world around it? Be sure to submit your essay with your name on it to the Blackboard site by the deadline. Double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, regular margins. Cite your sources using the title and page number from Khater. MLA or Chicago is fine. If you will need more time to complete the assignment, please ask the instructor in advance.