History

1 page per question, 6 questions. You do not have to cite sources. Be sure to answer all parts of each question asked. Thanks.

1. Europeans began colonizing the rest of the world in the sixteenth century, yet they only got started to “Scramble for Africa” in the nineteenth century. What prevented them from fully exploiting that continent until that time, what motivated them to eventually do so, and how did they finally go about doing it?
2. In 1914 the world was essentially ruled by or otherwise dominated by the empires of Europe (plus the young, rising powers of Japan and the United States), but merely four years later many of those empires had collapsed and the surviving ones were permanently shaken. How did the First World War come about, why was it so devastating, and how did it affect the world beyond Europe when it was all over?
3. Japan fought alongside the Allies in the First World War and considered itself an equal partner with them in world affairs afterward, but by the early 1930s it had distanced itself from its former allies and moved closer to rogue nations like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. What factor both domestic and international caused Japan to do so, and what larger consequences did this have toward the coming of a Second World War?
4. The twentieth century was marked as much as anything by the rise of new political and economic ideologies, notably in two new, large communist regimes in Soviet Russia and China. How and why did these two regimes come to power, and how did the initial leaders in each attempt to deal with the comparative backwardness of the economies they inherited?
5. Consider the world of colonized Africa and Asia immediately after World War II. How did the states that emerged from the wreckage of the European empires do so, and what complications did national leaders face in their respective national liberation struggles during that period?
6. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union was in crisis, though very few if anyone at the time expected it to quickly collapse. What caused such problems for the USSR, how did Soviet leaders attempt to deal with them, and what were some of the unintended consequences of their failure to do so and the subsequent, startlingly-fast disintegration of the Soviet-led Eastern Bloc?