chapter 23

• Major drives of the past century

  • Population growth
  • Widespread movement of people (rural occupants move to cities)
  • Changing patterns of cultural identity (literacy)
  • Environmental degradation
  • Unprecedented human impact on environment
• Population growth


  Quadrupling of human numbers
• Population Explosion


  1. Rapid growth of people unseen in any previous generation

  2. Happened largely in developing countries

  3. Led to having more mouths to feed and deforestation to feed them

  4. Contributing factors: lowered infant mortality, heightened life spans, development of new medical practices and technologies
• Second agricultural revolution (Green revolution)


  1. Heightened the amount of food outputted through technological and chemical developments

  2. Required less farmers leading to an unheard amount of urban living
• End of 20th Century slowed birth rates which began in the industrial countries due to birth control, feminism, and the idea of a family as a financial burden
• In many countries population began to decline starting in developing countries
• Reasons for population decline in developing countries

  • Urbanization
  • Female education, careers
  • Family planning places (China 1 Child)
• Overall population is still rising
• Urbanization


  Shift in the majority of people now living in cities after 1900s, up to 50% of people in 2007
• Megacities


  Cities with populations over 10 million
• Obstacles and variations of urban growth

  • World War One and Depression
  • World War Two destroyed many European, Soviet, and East Asian cities
  • No migration in communist cities
  • Latin America had major growth
  • Passports and residencies regulated migration in Soviet Union
  • 1958 China household registration system to limit movement of farmers to cities, but loosened control around 1980 creating large migration to cities
  • Communists embraced urban living and built 1,000 planned cities
  • Cities grew twice as fast after industrialization of Global South in comparison to the already industrialized cities
• The decline of manufacturing allow for companies to reinvent themselves as knowledge or service based companies like education, or health care
• Cities attracted primarily young people from the countryside looking for better job prospects and educational, social, and cultural opportunities
• Impacts of urbanization on the environment

  • More people means more mouths to feed, more food, water and energy into sewage, garbage, and Carbon dioxide
  • Loosely regulated manufacturing companies created ecological disasters that destroys environment and health of residents
  • Rich neighborhoods bragged about safe water, sewage systems, electricity, fire and police services
  • City living reduced electricity consumption and carbon emissions due to public transportation, smaller families, and energy-efficient residencies
• The rich and poor often lived close to one another
• Public and private transport improvements allowed for cities to spread like never before
• Rise in middle class suburban communities globally
• Population growth and the rise of cities did not solve, and probably exacerbated in many places, the problem of urban poverty
• Changes in migration patterns in the 20th century

  • Number of migrants from Africa and Latin America grew
  • Europe used to be where immigrants migrated from but now were they were migrating to
  • Percentage of female migrants grew and eventually took up half of migrants
  • Now driven by war, revolutions, ends of empires, new nation states, violence, political oppression (examples: Jews in Holocaust, end of Ottoman empire)
• The most significant pattern of change since the 1960s has featured a vast movement of people from the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the industrialized world of Europe and North America
• State control of migration

  • Required passports
  • Created categories for migrants
• Border regulations has created increases in refugees, as desperate people are unable to fly away
• Millions ended up in refugee camps for generations because their homes were unsafe
• Labor Migration


  The often dangerous, expensive, and illegal movement of unskilled workers trying to escape poverty in the developed country in search for a better life portrayed by westernization
• A pattern that persisted into the 20th century is immigrants moving into local societies without fully loosing their cultural identities; some took advantage of their middlemen identities and created links between groups in society as merchants, traders, or financiers
• The growth of national identities led to persecution against minorities
• Important countries of arrival for twentieth century immigrants

  • U.S
  • Canada
  • Australia
  • Western Europe (since the 1960s)
• Many migrants agreed viewing assimilation as a pathway to better economic opportunities and social status
• Migrants also kept aspects of their culture which were embraced; opening new restaurants
• Tensions and conflicts over cultural migration

  • France: Muslim integration tensions over women's clothing, law saying no head scarves in public schools, undermined freedom of religion
  • Tension for English to become the designated language in U.S. due to Latin Americans
  • Fears of immigrants being openly hostile to western values and terrorism caused by limit of Islamic refugees
• International Tourist numbers have grown significantly from 21 million to 988 (business, study abroad)
• An unprecedented new era of transnational ties and mobility
• The Influenza Pandemic


  Worst pandemic in human history, carried out in three waves, global disease carried by released soldiers, refugees, and other scattered people after World War I, killed between 50-100 million people which was five time the amount of people dead from the first world war
• HIV/AIDS


  Another pandemic of HIV which was another virus that triggered an immune deficiency syndrome known as AIDS, began in the 1980s in sub-Saharan Africa, picked up mainly through sexual contact, contaminated blood products, sex workers and truck drivers, or drug users sharing equipment, quickly became global killing tens of millions of people, now survivable and manageable disease thanks to medical developments
• The worlds connected viruses also had connected solutions
• Communication developments allowed for health news to spread faster than ever before. Now we have border checks and quarantines to prevent excess spread of new diseases
• The world health organization was put in place to protect and fight diseases as well as prevent the economic, social and political effects of pandemics. They identify, track, and stop spreads of diseases
• The more connected and modernized world of recent times has left us more vulnerable to such outbreaks than in the past
• Older patterns of cultural identity have been challenged as individuals have come up against people and cultures quite different from their own
• Race


  Ideology developed in nineteenth century Europe based on supposed biological differences to differentiate humans