Unit 7: Global Conflict

c. 1900 – present | Exam Weight: 8–10%

💣 Unit Overview

The first half of the 20th century was the most destructive period in human history. Two world wars, a global depression, and new totalitarian ideologies killed tens of millions, produced unprecedented atrocities including the Holocaust, and redrew the map of the world. Old empires collapsed; the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers; colonized peoples used the wars to accelerate demands for independence.

Big question: Why did the early 20th century produce two world wars and mass atrocities, and how did these conflicts transform the global political, economic, and social order?

🗓️ Unit 7 Timeline

1904–05: Russo-Japanese War — Japan defeats a European great power.

1911: Chinese Revolution ends the Qing dynasty.

1914: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; World War I begins.

1915: Armenian Genocide begins under the Ottomans.

1917: Russian Revolution; U.S. enters WWI.

1918: Armistice ends WWI; global influenza pandemic.

1919: Treaty of Versailles; League of Nations; May Fourth Movement (China).

1922: Mussolini comes to power in Italy; USSR founded.

1929: U.S. stock market crash triggers the Great Depression.

1931: Japan invades Manchuria.

1933: Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany; New Deal begins in U.S.

1935–39: Italy invades Ethiopia; Spanish Civil War; Germany remilitarizes & annexes Austria and Czechoslovakia.

1937: Japan invades China; Rape of Nanjing.

1939: Germany invades Poland; WWII in Europe begins.

1941: Germany invades USSR; Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; U.S. enters WWII.

1942–43: Stalingrad, Midway, El Alamein — turning points.

1941–45: Holocaust: Nazi Germany murders six million Jews and millions of others.

1945: Germany surrenders; atomic bombs on Hiroshima & Nagasaki; Japan surrenders; UN founded.

1947: Indian independence and partition.

1948–49: Creation of Israel; Berlin Airlift; Chinese Communist Revolution.

Topic 7.1 — Shifting Power After 1900

🔄 Old Empires Crumble, New Powers Rise

Entering the 20th century, the great empires of the 19th century were under stress. Industrialization had produced new powers; nationalism challenged multi-ethnic empires from within; Japan and the U.S. joined the imperial club.

Decline of the Traditional Land Empires

Ottoman Empire: "Sick Man of Europe." Young Turk Revolution (1908) restored the 1876 constitution; nationalist movements in the Balkans broke away (1878 and 1912–1913).
Qing China: Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) humiliated by the Eight-Nation Alliance; 1911 Revolution overthrew the dynasty; Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China.
Russia: Defeated by Japan in 1905; Revolution of 1905 forced the Tsar to accept a Duma; autocracy survived weakened.

Rise of New Powers

Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II pursued Weltpolitik — a global role, large navy, African and Pacific colonies.
United States: victory in the Spanish-American War (1898) produced an overseas empire (Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam); Roosevelt Corollary (1904) asserted hegemony in the Americas.
Japan: defeated China (1895) and Russia (1905), making it the first non-Western industrial power to defeat a European empire — inspiring colonized peoples worldwide.

Revolutionary Currents

Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) — peasant revolt under Zapata and Villa; produced the 1917 Constitution.
Chinese Revolution (1911) ended 2,000+ years of imperial rule.
Widespread labor and socialist movements across Europe, the Americas, and the colonies.

Topic 7.2 — Causes of World War I

🎯 Why 1914?

Franz Ferdinand and Sophie — Archduke **Franz Ferdinand** of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie. Their assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by **Gavrilo Princip** triggered the outbreak of World War I.

Long-Term Causes (The "MAIN" Causes)

Militarism — especially the Anglo-German naval race and glorification of war.
Alliances — Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) vs. Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy) made local crises continental.
Imperialism — colonial rivalries (Morocco, Balkans, Africa) produced repeated war scares.
Nationalism — aggressive state nationalism and ethnic nationalisms in the Balkans.

The Balkans Powder Keg

Ottoman decline in the Balkans created unstable new states (Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece).
Austria-Hungary, a multinational empire, feared Serbian-led South Slav nationalism.
The Balkan Wars (1912–1913) redrew the region and left Serbia strengthened.

The Immediate Crisis

28 June 1914: Assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip (Young Bosnia).
Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia.
Russia mobilized to defend Serbia.
Germany declared war on Russia, then France; invaded neutral Belgium (Schlieffen Plan).
Britain entered to defend Belgian neutrality.
By early August 1914, all the major powers were at war.

Topic 7.3 — Conducting World War I

⚔️ Total War, Global War

British trench on the Somme, 1916 — Men of the Cheshire Regiment in a trench near La Boisselle on the Somme, July 1916. Trench warfare produced years of stalemate and massive casualties on the Western Front.

New Warfare

Trench warfare dominated the Western Front.
Industrial-scale firepower: machine guns, rapid-fire artillery, barbed wire.
New weapons: poison gas, tanks (1916), submarines (U-boats), and airplanes.
Massive battles: Somme and Verdun (1916) each cost about a million casualties.

Total War & Home Fronts

Governments directed economies: rationing, war bonds, price controls.
Propaganda targeted civilians to sustain morale.
Women entered factories, public transport, and nursing in unprecedented numbers — contributing to post-war expansions of women's suffrage (UK 1918/28, U.S. 1920, Germany 1919).
Colonial soldiers & laborers: ~1 million Indians, ~600,000 French colonial troops, African porters, Chinese laborers served on and behind the fronts.

A Truly Global War

Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (1914) — fighting in the Caucasus, Gallipoli, Arab revolt (T. E. Lawrence).
Japan joined the Allies, seizing German possessions in Asia and the Pacific.
Campaigns in East Africa, Mesopotamia, Palestine.
U.S. entry (April 1917) provided decisive manpower and resources.

Russia Exits, Germany Collapses

Russian Revolution (1917): Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in February; Bolsheviks under Lenin took power in October.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) pulled Russia out of the war.
Germany's Spring Offensives (1918) failed; Allied counterattacks forced armistice on 11 November 1918.

Treaty of Versailles (1919)

Placed sole "war guilt" on Germany (Article 231).
Demanded heavy reparations.
Reduced German military, stripped Germany of colonies and territories.
Created new states (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia); redrew Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian borders.
Established the League of Nations — without U.S. membership, weakening it.
Ottoman territories partitioned (Sykes-Picot, 1916; Mandate system): Britain got Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan; France got Syria, Lebanon.

Topic 7.4 — The Economy in the Interwar Period

📉 Boom, Bust, and the Great Depression

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother — Dorothea Lange, *Migrant Mother* (1936). The photograph came to symbolize the human toll of the Great Depression on rural America.

The Roaring Twenties and Its Fault Lines

The U.S. became the world's leading industrial and creditor nation.
Europe's recovery depended heavily on American loans (Dawes Plan, 1924).
Weimar Germany faced hyperinflation (1923), then stabilized — but politics remained fragile.
Agricultural overproduction and farm debt were chronic problems worldwide.

The Great Depression (1929–c. 1939)

Began with the Wall Street Crash (October 1929).
U.S. bank failures, contraction of credit, and trade barriers (Smoot-Hawley Tariff, 1930) turned a U.S. recession into a worldwide depression.
Unemployment: roughly 25% in the U.S., ~30% in Germany.
Global trade collapsed by about two-thirds.
Commodity-exporting economies (Latin America, colonies) were devastated by collapsing prices.

Responses

U.S.: Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (1933) — government jobs, bank reform (FDIC), Social Security, labor protections.
UK and France: more cautious government spending; gold standard abandoned (Britain, 1931).
USSR: insulated from the capitalist depression by the planned economy; Stalin's Five-Year Plans (1928 onward) forced rapid industrialization.
Nazi Germany: public works (autobahns), rearmament, and state-controlled wage and price policies reduced unemployment — but on a war footing.
Latin America: many states adopted import substitution industrialization (ISI), trying to build local industry behind tariff walls.

Ideological Consequences

Many saw liberal capitalism as discredited; fascism and communism gained appeal.
The Depression helped bring Hitler to power in Germany (1933) and strengthened militarists in Japan.

Topic 7.5 — Unresolved Tensions After World War I

⚠️ An Unfinished Peace

Colonial Disillusionment and Nationalism

Wilson's "Fourteen Points" and rhetoric of self-determination raised expectations in colonized societies that were not honored for non-European peoples.
May Fourth Movement (1919, China): protest against Shandong being awarded to Japan at Versailles — radicalized Chinese nationalism and helped birth the Chinese Communist Party (1921).
Egyptian Revolution (1919), Gandhi's satyagraha campaigns in India (from 1919), Indochinese and African nationalist activism.
Pan-African Congresses (W. E. B. Du Bois, from 1919) and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.

Middle East: Mandates and Conflict

The Balfour Declaration (1917) supported a Jewish national home in Palestine — while Britain also promised Arab leaders independence.
British Mandate of Palestine became a zone of Arab-Jewish conflict.
Atatürk's Republic of Turkey (1923) emerged from the Ottoman collapse — secular, nationalist, modernizing.

Rise of Authoritarianism and Ideology

Italian Fascism: Mussolini's March on Rome (1922); corporatist, nationalist, militarist.
Nazism: Hitler's NSDAP combined extreme racial nationalism, antisemitism, anti-communism, and violent mass politics.
Stalinism: USSR under Stalin (from 1924) combined planned economy, forced collectivization, and terror.
Japanese militarism: elected government increasingly dominated by military and ultranationalist circles.

Failures of Collective Security

The League of Nations lacked U.S. membership and real enforcement power.
It failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria (1931), the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (1935), German remilitarization of the Rhineland (1936), or the Anschluss (1938).
Britain and France's appeasement — epitomized by the Munich Agreement (1938) surrendering the Czech Sudetenland — emboldened Hitler.

Topic 7.6 — Causes of World War II

🔥 The Road to 1939–41

Unresolved Issues from WWI

Resentment of the Versailles settlement.
Economic collapse of the Depression.
Weak international institutions.

Ideological Drivers

Nazi ideology: racial hierarchy, Lebensraum ("living space") to be conquered in Eastern Europe, destruction of "Judeo-Bolshevism."
Italian Fascism: Italia Irredenta, "New Roman Empire" in the Mediterranean and Africa.
Japanese ultranationalism: "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," aspiration to replace European empires in Asia.

Japanese Expansion in Asia

Invasion of Manchuria (1931) and creation of Manchukuo.
Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945): full invasion of China, including the Rape of Nanjing (1937–38).
Occupation of French Indochina (1940–41) pushed Japan and the U.S. toward conflict.

European Expansion and Alliances

Germany remilitarized the Rhineland (1936), annexed Austria (Anschluss, 1938), took the Sudetenland (1938), then the rest of Czechoslovakia (1939).
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939) — Nazi-Soviet non-aggression and secret partition of Eastern Europe.
Invasion of Poland, 1 September 1939. Britain and France declared war two days later.

U.S. and USSR Enter

Operation Barbarossa (June 1941): Germany invaded the USSR, breaking the pact.
Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941): Japan attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet; Germany declared war on the U.S. four days later.
By December 1941, the Allies (U.S., UK, USSR, China, and many others) faced the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan).

Topic 7.7 — Conducting World War II

🌐 Total War on a Global Scale

Soviet flag over the Reichstag, 1945 — Yevgeny Khaldei, *Raising a flag over the Reichstag* (2 May 1945). The Soviet capture of Berlin ended the European war. The USSR lost an estimated 27 million people.

The European Theater

Blitzkrieg: fast combined-arms offensives swept through Poland (1939), Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, and France (1940).
Battle of Britain (1940): RAF repelled the Luftwaffe.
Operation Barbarossa (June 1941): largest invasion in history. Stalingrad (1942–43) was the turning point — Soviet victory shattered the Wehrmacht.
North African campaign (El Alamein 1942); Italy invaded 1943.
D-Day (6 June 1944): Allied invasion of Normandy.
Soviet advance to Berlin; Germany surrendered 8 May 1945 (V-E Day).

The Pacific Theater

Japan overran Southeast Asia and Pacific islands (Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Burma) by mid-1942.
Midway (June 1942) halted Japanese expansion.
Island-hopping campaign pushed U.S. forces toward Japan.
Soviet entry (August 1945) and U.S. atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) precipitated Japan's surrender 15 August 1945.

Atomic cloud over Hiroshima, 1945 — Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. The atomic bombings killed over 200,000 people and ushered in the nuclear age.

Total War and Home Fronts

Civilian economies fully mobilized; women joined war industries (e.g., "Rosie the Riveter" in the U.S., massive Soviet conscription of female labor).
Strategic bombing of cities (London Blitz, Dresden, Tokyo) made civilians direct targets.
Japanese American internment (U.S., 1942–45) forcibly relocated ~120,000 people of Japanese descent.
Colonial contributions: India sent ~2.5 million soldiers; African soldiers fought for Britain and France.

New Technology and Scale of Destruction

Aircraft carriers, submarines, long-range bombers, radar, jet engines, V-2 rockets, atomic weapons.
Perhaps 60–80 million people died, the majority civilians.

Topic 7.8 — Mass Atrocities After 1900

💀 Industrial-Scale Violence Against Civilians

Armenian Genocide (1915–1923)

Ottoman government deported and killed ~1–1.5 million Armenians.
Often cited as the first modern genocide and a precursor to later state-organized mass murder.

Holodomor (1932–1933)

Soviet forced collectivization and grain requisitions produced a man-made famine in Ukraine.
Estimates of deaths range from about 3 to 5 million or more.
Widely recognized as a genocide by many states and scholars.

The Holocaust (Shoah, 1941–1945)

Nazi Germany murdered approximately six million Jews — two-thirds of European Jewry.
Also murdered millions of Roma, Soviet POWs, Poles, disabled people, homosexuals, and political dissidents.
Industrial methods: Einsatzgruppen mass shootings; ghettos; extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor) using gas chambers.
Wannsee Conference (January 1942) formalized the "Final Solution."

Selection at Birkenau — "Selection" on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau (May 1944). SS officers separated new arrivals into those sent to forced labor and those sent immediately to the gas chambers.

Japanese War Crimes

Rape of Nanjing (1937–38): mass murder and rape of up to 300,000 Chinese civilians.
"Comfort women" — up to ~200,000 women, especially from Korea and China, forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.
Unit 731 biological and chemical experimentation in Manchuria.

Postwar Responses

Nuremberg Trials (1945–46) and Tokyo Tribunal (1946–48) prosecuted war criminals.
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and Genocide Convention (1948).
State of Israel established (1948), partly in response to the Holocaust; deep and lasting impact on Middle East politics.
Cold War context often limited prosecutions; some atrocities (Unit 731, Soviet Holodomor) were downplayed.

Topic 7.9 — Causation in Global Conflict

🔄 Synthesizing Unit 7

Feature	World War I	World War II
Main cause	Alliance/imperial/nationalist rivalries + Balkan crisis	Axis revisionism (Germany, Italy, Japan) unchecked by weak collective security
Ideology	Nationalism, militarism	Fascism vs. liberal democracy vs. communism
Fronts	Mainly Europe & Middle East	Truly global: Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Atlantic
Technology	Trenches, machine guns, gas, early tanks and planes	Blitzkrieg, aircraft carriers, strategic bombing, atomic weapons
Civilian impact	~10 million military dead; significant civilian	60–80 million dead; majority civilians; Holocaust
Peace settlement	Versailles — punitive, unstable	UN, Bretton Woods, division of Germany, bipolar world
Empire effect	Old land empires collapsed (Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian, German)	European overseas empires fatally weakened; decolonization accelerates

Continuities 1900 → 1945

Great-power rivalries driven by industrial and imperial competition.
Rising nationalism (European and non-European).
Industrial technology applied to warfare at ever-greater scale.
State-directed economies in wartime (and beyond).

Major Changes

New superpowers: U.S. and USSR replaced Britain and France as global powers.
Nuclear age (August 1945): weapons capable of ending civilization.
International institutions: UN, Bretton Woods (IMF, World Bank), GATT.
Human rights framework: Universal Declaration (1948), Genocide Convention (1948).
Decolonization accelerated rapidly after 1945 (→ Unit 8).

📚 Key Vocabulary

Total warMobilization of entire society and economy for war.

MilitarismGlorification of the military and aggressive war preparation.

Triple EntentePre-WWI alliance: Britain, France, Russia.

Triple AlliancePre-WWI alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy.

Central PowersWWI: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria.

Allied PowersWWI: UK, France, Russia (until 1917), Italy (after 1915), U.S. (after 1917), etc.

Schlieffen PlanGerman plan to knock France out quickly before fighting Russia.

Trench warfareStalemated Western Front warfare from entrenched positions.

Armenian GenocideOttoman campaign (1915–23) killing ~1–1.5 million Armenians.

Russian Revolution1917 overthrow of the tsar and Bolshevik seizure of power.

BolsheviksLenin's radical Marxist faction that took power in October 1917.

Fourteen PointsWilson's WWI peace program emphasizing self-determination.

Treaty of Versailles1919 peace treaty imposing heavy terms on Germany.

War guilt clauseArticle 231 of Versailles assigning sole blame to Germany.

League of Nations1920 international body; predecessor of the UN; lacked enforcement.

Mandate systemLeague-approved European rule of former Ottoman and German colonies.

Sykes–Picot Agreement1916 secret Anglo-French partition of the Ottoman Middle East.

Balfour Declaration1917 British statement supporting a Jewish home in Palestine.

May Fourth Movement1919 Chinese nationalist protest against Versailles.

Mexican Revolution1910–20 revolution producing the 1917 Constitution.

Great DepressionWorldwide economic collapse beginning in 1929.

New DealFDR's depression-era program of U.S. government reforms.

Keynesian economicsGovernment spending to stabilize demand in downturns.

FascismUltra-nationalist, authoritarian ideology (Italy, Germany, etc.).

NazismGerman fascism adding extreme racism and antisemitism.

LebensraumNazi doctrine of conquering "living space" in Eastern Europe.

Five-Year PlansStalin's forced industrialization of the USSR.

CollectivizationSoviet consolidation of peasant farms into state farms.

HolodomorSoviet man-made famine in Ukraine, 1932–33.

AppeasementBritish/French policy of concessions to Hitler before 1939.

Munich Agreement1938 deal handing Czech Sudetenland to Germany.

BlitzkriegFast combined-arms German offensive strategy.

Axis PowersWWII: Germany, Italy, Japan (and allies).

Holocaust (Shoah)Nazi genocide of ~6 million Jews and millions of others.

Rape of Nanjing1937–38 mass atrocity by Japanese forces in China.

Comfort womenWomen forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military.

Nuremberg TrialsPost-WWII trials of Nazi leaders for war crimes.

United NationsInternational body founded 1945 to prevent war and protect rights.

📝 Multiple Choice Practice

Three questions per sub-topic (27 total). Click an answer to check it.

Topic 7.1 — Shifting Power After 1900

1. Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) was significant because it

(A) Created a European superpower.

(B) Was the first time a non-Western industrialized state decisively defeated a European great power, shifting perceptions of global power.

(D) Restored Qing rule in China.

Answer: B. The Japanese victory shocked colonized peoples and European audiences, demonstrating that European dominance was not inevitable.

2. The 1911 Chinese Revolution is BEST described as

(A) A communist revolution.

(B) The overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of a republic under nationalist leaders like Sun Yat-sen.

(D) An Ottoman-backed coup.

Answer: B. The Xinhai Revolution ended 2,000+ years of imperial rule and established the Republic of China.

3. Which of the following describes the condition of the great land-based empires (Ottoman, Russian, Qing) circa 1900?

(A) All three were industrial leaders.

(B) All three were under severe internal and external pressure and would collapse within a generation.

(D) All three had abolished their monarchies by 1900.

Answer: B. Ottoman, Qing, and Russian empires all fell between 1911 and 1922, under pressure from nationalism, economic strain, and (for Russia) war and revolution.

Topic 7.2 — Causes of WWI

4. The pre-war alliance systems contributed to WWI primarily because

(A) They prevented any war from occurring.

(B) They turned a local Balkan crisis into a continent-wide conflict by binding great powers to go to war together.

(D) They replaced nationalism.

Answer: B. The Triple Entente and Triple Alliance linked the fate of each power to the others — escalating the Sarajevo crisis into WWI.

5. Pre-war militarism in Europe is BEST illustrated by

(A) German and French disarmament.

(B) The Anglo-German naval arms race and the glorification of war in public culture.

(D) Widespread pacifist governments.

Answer: B. The naval race (dreadnoughts) and cultural glorification of war are hallmark features of pre-WWI militarism.

6. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914

(A) Was the sole cause of WWI.

(B) Was the immediate trigger that activated existing alliance and mobilization plans, launching the July Crisis.

(D) Had no connection to the war.

Answer: B. Historians distinguish the trigger (the assassination) from long-term causes (alliances, imperialism, nationalism, militarism) — both mattered.

Topic 7.3 — Conducting WWI

7. Trench warfare on the Western Front primarily produced

(A) Rapid decisive victories.

(B) A lengthy stalemate with enormous casualties and limited territorial change.

(D) Quick German defeat.

Answer: B. Industrial firepower (machine guns, artillery) combined with trenches and barbed wire produced years of grinding stalemate.

8. "Total war" on the WWI home front meant that

(A) Only soldiers were mobilized.

(B) Governments directed whole economies, used propaganda, rationed goods, and drew women into industrial labor to support the war effort.

(D) Only the U.S. mobilized.

Answer: B. Total war fused civilian and military spheres — with lasting effects on women's rights and the size of government.

9. Which statement about the Treaty of Versailles is MOST accurate?

(A) It created a stable, lasting peace.

(B) It imposed heavy reparations and territorial losses on Germany and created a framework (League of Nations, mandates) that contributed to later instability.

(D) It abolished all European armies.

Answer: B. The punitive terms and weak enforcement helped produce grievances and power vacuums that fed into WWII.

Topic 7.4 — Interwar Economy

10. The Great Depression spread worldwide primarily because

(A) Countries had unrelated economies.

(B) The world economy was tightly linked by finance and trade, so a U.S. banking/credit collapse propagated through American loans to Europe and the gold standard.

(D) Of communist intervention.

Answer: B. Interwar globalization (especially the U.S. creditor role and the gold standard) transmitted the shock worldwide.

11. The U.S. New Deal (1933–) is BEST described as

(A) Laissez-faire retreat from the economy.

(B) Expanded federal government involvement: work programs, banking regulation, Social Security, and protections for labor.

(D) A communist revolution.

Answer: B. The New Deal significantly expanded federal activity while preserving capitalism.

12. Stalin's Five-Year Plans aimed to

(A) Privatize Soviet industry.

(B) Rapidly industrialize the USSR through central planning and forced collectivization of agriculture.

(D) Liberalize Soviet politics.

Answer: B. The Plans built heavy industry at enormous human cost, including the Holodomor famine.

Topic 7.5 — Unresolved Tensions

13. The May Fourth Movement in China (1919) was primarily a response to

(A) The Russian Revolution.

(B) The Versailles settlement's transfer of German rights in Shandong to Japan — seen by Chinese as a betrayal of Wilson's self-determination rhetoric.

(D) The founding of the Qing dynasty.

Answer: B. The movement radicalized Chinese intellectuals and contributed to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

14. Which is an example of the failure of collective security in the 1930s?

(A) The founding of NATO.

(B) The League of Nations' inability to stop Japan's invasion of Manchuria (1931) or Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935).

(D) The Marshall Plan.

Answer: B. The League's lack of enforcement and great-power unity showed the weakness of the interwar order.

15. The Balfour Declaration (1917) contributed to long-term Middle East tension by

(A) Establishing a pan-Arab state.

(B) Expressing British support for a Jewish "national home" in Palestine while Britain also made conflicting promises to Arab leaders.

(D) Abolishing the Ottoman Empire.

Answer: B. Balfour, Sykes-Picot, and the Hussein-McMahon correspondence produced overlapping promises that drove later Palestinian/Israeli conflict.

Topic 7.6 — Causes of WWII

16. Which statement BEST captures how WWII began in Asia?

(A) With the Battle of Britain.

(B) With Japan's invasion of Manchuria (1931) and the full invasion of China (1937).

(D) With the atomic bombs.

Answer: B. The Asian front of WWII had already begun well before Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland.

17. Appeasement policies of Britain and France in the 1930s

(A) Stopped Hitler's aggression decisively.

(B) Sought to avoid another great war through concessions, most notably at Munich (1938), but ultimately emboldened Axis expansion.

(D) Had no effect on events.

Answer: B. The lesson drawn from Munich shaped Cold War-era "hawkish" resistance to dictators.

18. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939)

(A) Was an Anglo-French alliance.

(B) Was a Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact with a secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR.

(D) Ended World War I.

Answer: B. The pact allowed Hitler's invasion of Poland and Soviet occupation of the Baltics and eastern Poland.

Topic 7.7 — Conducting WWII

19. The turning point of the European war on the Eastern Front was

(A) The Battle of Britain.

(B) The Battle of Stalingrad (1942–43).

(D) The Munich Agreement.

Answer: B. Stalingrad halted the German advance and began a long Soviet counter-offensive that reached Berlin.

20. The U.S. justification for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) most commonly emphasized

(A) Punishing Germany.

(B) Forcing Japan to surrender without a bloody invasion and ending WWII quickly.

(D) Helping the Japanese economy.

Answer: B. This was the main U.S. rationale, though historians debate its adequacy, and the bombings also shaped early Cold War dynamics.

21. Which of the following BEST describes the role of colonial soldiers and labor in WWII?

(A) Colonial empires fought alone without any colonial soldiers.

(B) Millions of Indian, African, Caribbean, and other colonial troops and laborers served, strengthening nationalist demands for postwar independence.

(D) Colonies refused to participate.

Answer: B. Colonial contributions to a war fought for "freedom" accelerated demands that freedom extend to the colonies.

Topic 7.8 — Mass Atrocities

22. The Holocaust (1941–1945)

(A) Was an unplanned accident of the war.

(B) Was the systematic, state-organized murder of about six million Jews and millions of others by Nazi Germany, using industrial methods.

(D) Ended before 1939.

Answer: B. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau were central instruments of state-planned genocide.

23. The Armenian Genocide (1915–1923) is considered significant in the history of 20th-century atrocities because

(A) It was a local quarrel of no lasting importance.

(B) It was one of the first modern state-organized genocides and helped shape later international debates about defining and preventing genocide.

(D) It was universally recognized and prosecuted immediately.

Answer: B. The genocide is often invoked alongside the Holocaust in discussions of state-organized mass murder.

24. Which of the following BEST describes the postwar international response to mass atrocities?

(A) No response at all.

(B) The Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Genocide Convention (1948).

(D) The Congress of Vienna.

Answer: B. These institutions formed the backbone of the modern human rights regime.

Topic 7.9 — Causation in Global Conflict

25. Which of the following is a major CONTINUITY between WWI and WWII?

(A) Use of atomic weapons.

(B) Industrial mobilization of society for "total war," including civilians as targets and participants.

(D) End of imperialism.

Answer: B. Both conflicts used whole-of-society mobilization; A is WWII-specific.

26. Which outcome of WWII most directly shaped the Cold War?

(A) The abolition of all armies.

(B) The emergence of the U.S. and USSR as superpowers with opposing ideologies and the division of Germany and Europe.

(D) The revival of the League of Nations.

Answer: B. The bipolar order of 1945–1991 grew directly out of WWII's ending.

27. Which of the following BEST explains why decolonization accelerated after WWII?

(A) European colonial powers were enriched by the war.

(B) European powers were economically exhausted; wartime rhetoric of freedom, colonial military service, and strong nationalist movements made continued empire unsustainable.

(D) Nationalism disappeared after 1945.

Answer: B. All three factors — exhaustion, ideology, and organized nationalism — combined to make postwar decolonization rapid (→ Unit 8).

✍️ Short-Answer Practice (SAQ)

SAQ 1 — WWI and its Aftermath (No Stimulus)

Identify ONE long-term cause of World War I.
Explain ONE way that the aftermath of WWI contributed to conditions that led to WWII.
Explain ONE way that WWI affected a region OUTSIDE Europe.

Click to see a sample response

(a) The alliance system — especially the Triple Entente and Triple Alliance — transformed a local Balkan crisis in 1914 into a continent-wide war by binding each great power to defend its allies.

(b) The Treaty of Versailles imposed heavy reparations and "war guilt" on Germany, producing resentments and economic instability that Hitler and the Nazi Party later exploited to win power in 1933.

(c) WWI fueled Chinese nationalism: the 1919 Versailles decision to transfer German concessions in Shandong to Japan (rather than return them to China) sparked the May Fourth Movement, which radicalized students and intellectuals and helped lead to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

SAQ 2 — Stimulus (Churchill on Appeasement)

"You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war."
— Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons on the Munich Agreement, 1938

Identify the historical event that Churchill is commenting on in this quotation.
Explain ONE reason British and French leaders pursued the policy Churchill is criticizing.
Explain ONE consequence of that policy for the outbreak of World War II.

Click to see a sample response

(a) Churchill is criticizing the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France agreed to allow Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

(b) British and French leaders sought to avoid another catastrophic war like WWI; memory of the enormous casualties of 1914–1918 and weak rearmament left democracies unwilling to confront Hitler militarily over eastern Europe.

(c) Appeasement emboldened Hitler by showing that western democracies would not resist aggressive expansion; within six months he seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, and in September 1939 his invasion of Poland triggered WWII.

⭐ Key Takeaways

Old empires collapsed. WWI ended the Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg, and German imperial monarchies.
Industrial total war reshaped modern conflict. Machine guns, trenches, poison gas, and strategic bombing redefined the scale and character of war.
The Versailles settlement was unstable. Reparations, the mandate system, and U.S. absence from the League weakened the interwar order.
The Great Depression fueled radicalism. Economic collapse helped bring fascists to power and discredited liberal capitalism.
WWII was truly global and more destructive. 60–80 million dead, mostly civilians.
Mass atrocities marked the era. Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, Holocaust, Rape of Nanjing, comfort women, and more.
New international order emerged in 1945. UN, Bretton Woods, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, superpower bipolarity.
Setup for Unit 8. Weakened European empires, mobilized colonial populations, and new superpower rivalry drove postwar decolonization and the Cold War.

← Back to AP World History: Modern