Feb 2

To make heavy payments, Haiti took out huge loans from German, French, and North American banks. Repaying those loans in 1915 cost 80 percent of the government’s revenue. Over 100 prominent people in 2010 signed an international petition that asked the French Government to repay about $17 billion. In 1772, the French intellectual Voltaire asked his dear philosopher, if this appears to be the century of revolutions. From early eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, political and social upheaval was witnessed by many parts of the world. By the 1730s, the Safavid dynasty which ruled for several centuries in Persia had completely collapsed. Meanwhile the Wahabi movement, which took place in Arabia seriously threatened the Ottoman Empire, as well as Central Asia. Under Catherine the Great, the Russian Empire experienced some peasant uprisings, including one led by Pugachev in 1773 - 1774. “In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Strayer, 782) China also hosted a number of unsuccessful rebellions. One of the major rebellions was the Taiping revolution of 1859 - 1864.

PS: This document was typed on Sunday, but the internet was down and I could not post my blog.