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The Taiping Rebellion is estimated to have cost over 20 million lives at a minimum. For comparison, the Napoleonic Wars, conflicts between the French Empire and various European powers from 1803-1815, claimed over 5 million lives and the American Civil War, a conflict over the issue of slavery, claimed over one million lives.

The rebellion occurred in China from 1850-1864. The conflict was between the ruling Qing Dynasty and a group of christian forces called the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom led by Hong Xiuquan. Hong believed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ and convinced his followers they were the future of the country. They believed it was their responsibility to bring about the transformation of the country.

The rebellion began in the south and over the next decade skirmishes extended into the rest of the country. An attempt by the Heavenly Kingdom to overtake Shanghai was thwarted by Qing forces with the help of French and British troops. The rebellion remained a threat to the Qing Dynasty until Hong’s death in 1864 but pockets of forces continued to fight until 1871.

The Berlin Conference was organized in 1884 in an effort to avoid conflicts between major European powers all scrambling for African colonies. Fourteen countries, none of which represented Africa, divided the continent over a three month period. They created arbitrary borders which ignored the history of African society. Ethnic groups and existing trade routes found themselves split among multiple countries if they happened to straddle a border between separately owned colonial powers. The member of the conference made traditional African rulers sign treaties of compliance, under force if necessary.

The results of these arbitrary borders, borders that only existed on paper, have bled into modern times. An example is the Rwandan Genocide. By forcing both tribes to exist within the same borders the Berlin Conference laid the groundwork for a power struggle between the two groups. This is an extreme example but an important one to understand the struggles some African countries must face as they try to modernize and join the rest of the developed world.

The Great Leap Forward occurred in China between 1958-1962 under Chairman Mao Zedong's plan to modernize China. Part of his initiative was to turn agriculture from a private enterprise to a collective institution. Groups of farmers were forced to work in groups to cultivate the land and any workers deemed superfluous were transitioned from grain production to steel production.

In an effort to please the ruling party and report on the successful implementation of new farming techniques, local officials exaggerated their results of increased production. In reality the new farming techniques, founded on faulty science, actually led to decreased production. This exaggeration continued at each rung up the ladder until the leadership, convinced they had more grain than they actually possessed, made deals to export the grain and left their own peasants without food to eat.

Other influences contributed to decreased production, such as floods from mismanaged irrigation projects and locust swarms from the removal of sparrows (a natural predator of locusts).

It is estimated that tens of millions of people died as a result of the famine.

Followers of Jainism, an ancient Indian religion, live according to five Great Vows:

To injur no living being in action or thought

To speak only truth

To take nothing unless it is given

Celibacy in action, word, and thought

Renunciation of worldly items

Jain monks carry their religion’s requirements to the extreme, even going so far as to cover their faces in order to avoid the accidental consumption of insects. They also avoid eating root vegetables because, as host to fellow living beings such as bugs and microbes, they are not to be disturbed.

In 1989 the leader of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu, gave his annual speech in Bucharest just days after an anti-government protest in the city of Timisoara that left a number of people dead. The speech was broadcast live to the entire country. Thousands of people were transported into the square to give the impression the people supported the government. For the first few minutes the speech went off without incident until shots were fired in the distance. Shouting began and chants of "Timisoara" rose from somewhere in the crowd; in short, all hell broke loose. Ceausescu raised a hand to calm the crowd but once the people found their voice they couldn’t be silenced. The camera began filming the sky while audio continued to record.

This speech kicked off the Romanian Revolution, right in front of the dictator’s eyes. The next day he was evacuated by helicopter along with his wife. Within days the two of them were captured, put on trial, and executed. Only four days passed between the failed speech and the leader’s execution.

Scores of people tried to flee to the neutral country of Portugal when Nazi Germany began their takeover of Europe. In an effort to stem the flow of migrants, the Portugese government closed the border between France and Spain. The only way across the border was to have a government issued visa. The consul stationed in Bordeaux, France, Aristides de Souda Mendes, defied the orders of the Portuguese government and issued visas to thousands of fleeing refugees. His final count of issued visas numbered approximately 10,000 Jews (and ~30,000 people total) giving these displaced people the ability to cross the border and escape the spread of Nazism. His actions were the largest rescue of refugees by a single individual during WWII.

A welfare state is defined as a social system based on the assumption by a political state of primary responsibility for the individual and social welfare of its citizens. Otto Van Bismarck, the chancellor under three successive German Emperors, created the first modern version in the 1880’s. He created the concept of state pensions and social security as a way to draw support away from the Socialists, not because he cared about the well-being of Germany’s citizens.

The welfare state present in the United States was introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he signed the new deal during the Great Depression.

The infected slave, Francisco de Eguía, was brought over from Cuba to the mainland by a Spanish ship in March of 1520. The indigenous population had no immunity to smallpox and it spread like wildfire. By October of the same year smallpox had entered into the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and killed a third of the citiy’s population, including the emperor. By December, 9 months after the deadly had been introduced, the population of native Mexicans had fallen from 22 million to 14 million.

A Spanish monk who witnessed the epidemic said: “It became such a great pestilence among them throughout the land that in most provinces more than half the population died; in others the proportion was less. They died in heaps, like bedbugs.”

The famine was brought about from a change in Europe’s climate. The springs and summers were colder than average and not enough crops could be grown to feed the population after two consecutive years of a shortened growing season.

Yuval Noah Harari quotes a French official in the town of Beauvais describes the scene in the beginning of his book Homo Deus. He writes about how citizens would eat cats and strips of horse flesh. From the slaughter of livestock people would consume the entrails and drink the blood. Nettles, weeds, roots, and herbs would be boiled in water, all in an attempt to get enough calories to see another day.

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