Sir John Chardin
(1643-1713) was the son of a wealthy French jeweler who spent much of his life traveling through the
Near East. After fleeing France because of the persecution of the Huguenots, he settled in England where he became
jeweler to the king. He was later knighted. Because of his high court connections, Chardin traveled in the best
royal circles and subsequently recorded much of what he saw of seventeenth-century Persian (Safavid) life. His numerous,
and lengthy, travel accounts remain an important historical source.
Although most
Americans are aware of Commodore Matthew Perry's visit to Japan in 1854 that
lead to the "opening" of Japan, Japan was not always closed to
Europeans and Americans. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, Japan
was often visited by foreigners, and it was there that the Church had carried out
some spectacular missionary activity. But at the start of the
seventeenth century, the Tokugawa exclusionary edicts changed
all that and closed Japan to foreign contact.
The Industrial Revolution first began in England in the middle of the
eighteenth century with the gradual introduction of mechanized means of
production to replace manual production. This occurred first in the textile industry. By the nineteenth
century the revolution was well underway as factories had appeared
everywhere; factories with large machines now powered by steam
engines. Those factories demanded a lot of labor, and people
swarmed from the countryside into the cities to work in the
factories. Much of that early factory labor was provided by
women and children.
The term Genocide
was the invention of a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), which he
explained in his book about Axis rule in Europe (1944). Thus, from the start,
"genocide" was most closely used to apply to the Jewish Holocaust carried out by the Nazis. In
1948 the United Nations adopted a Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, into effect
in 1951, with a specific definition of genocide. Despite that convention,
and the agreement of the signers to abolish genocide, it has continued to
take place over the last fifty years in a variety of locales across the
world. |