1750 to 1900 xxxiii former slave states (and some states outside the Confederacy) instituted new codes of inequality, known as Jim Crow laws, enforcing them with terror tactics, including lynching Czar Alexander II’s emancipation of the serfs, who represented one-third of Russia’s population, created problems of land distribution that would feed unrest leading to revolution in 1917 Worldwide pressure on agricultural land and commodity prices pushed many millions to emigrate for economic survival Those who continued to farm often found themselves in a spiral of debt and threatened with foreclosure In the United States, farmer campaigns, including the Populist political movement of the 1890s, brought white and black, midwestern and southern, together to propose bold solutions to these problems—most of which required state or federal government activism The movement ended after the elections of 1896 with recriminations over currency reform and an upsurge of racism that tore apart the fragile coalition Anti-Jewish prejudices, long traditional in Christian Europe, intensified, especially as Jews left their ghettoes to pursue education and professions long closed to them As anti-Semitism, in the form of terror attacks called pogroms, increased in Russia and eastern Europe, thousands of Jews fled, mostly to the United States, where some became active in socialist movements In France, the 1894 court-martial and deportation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish army officer who proved later to be innocent of treason, revealed persecution of Jews amid rising nationalism Despite these “worst of times,” as British Victorian novelist Charles Dickens described the French revolutionary era, there were also advances—for a growing middle class, for children, and for women— in Western nations Although aggressive nationalism was an increasing problem, religious tolerance generally expanded despite such setbacks as the Dreyus affair Victorian elites clung to a stratified class structure with rigid rules of etiquette and clear divisions between upstairs and the servants below, but class relationships were changing The Industrial Revolution fueled a major expansion of the bourgeoisie Emerging along with a substantial professional class were greater comfort, better education, lower birthrates and infant mortality, and new respect for childhood Calls for women’s suffrage, by both women and men, increased Immigration, often the choice of desperate people, did offer mobility and opportunity to many millions, even if their new streets were not paved with gold Although women and children were still viewed as property in much of the world, there were strong indications that attitudes were beginning to change In the Ottoman Empire there was considerable upward mobility and religious tolerance; minorities fared quite well, especially in contrast to much of the rest of the world Women in the Islamic world had property rights and legal standing, but traditional mores often took precedence over religious laws regarding women’s status In British-ruled India, Hindu reformers began reexamining the traditional caste system Modernizing educational practices produced Western-oriented Indian men and women, many of whom began to demand participation in their government India’s Muslims were slower to adopt modern education In China, failure of the Qing (Ch’ing) dynasty in the late 19th century led to the emergence of modern Chinese nationalism in opposition to the Manchu, the ethnic minority that had established its dynastic rule in 1644 Oriented toward modern Western political forms, nationalists began to demand the emancipation of women even as they struggled with incursions of Western and Japanese imperialism In Japan, the Meiji Restoration ended the feudal system, abolished the traditional hierarchy of classes, and created universal conscription Some male taxpayers were allowed to vote after 1889 Girls’ schooling was made mandatory, and some professions were opened to women, although they did not win the vote TRADE AND CULTURAL EXCHANGES By 1750 improved transportation and aggressive exploration by Western countries had dislodged the Ottoman Empire’s long-standing monopoly on East-West land trade routes New sea routes, established by the Portuguese and others, focused on Africa and the New World and helped to shift the economic balance of power toward Europe and away from Asia So did the extraction of large quantities of silver and gold from the Western Hemisphere that, for a time, made Spain Europe’s wealthiest and most powerful nation