A generation before the French Revolution, Prussia, under the ruling house of Hohenzollern, had established herself as Europe’s newest great power, having won a series of costly and exhausting wars in which she had taken on and defeated practically every major state on the Continent. Frederick the Great had inherited from his father, Frederick William (1713-40), a highly militarized, extremely efficient state where the landed aristocracy and king enjoyed a close relationship. The aristocracy were freeholders of their land and, in effect, over their peasants as well. In return, the crown taxed the nation heavily in order to maintain a standing army proportionally much larger than that of any other European state. Frederick used that army aggressively: he invaded Austrian Silesia in 1740, and thus began the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48). This was followed by the Seven Years’ War (1756-63) (see Osprey Essential Histories,The Seven Years’ War, by Daniel Marston) in which Prussia used her formidable army for the glory of the nation and to consolidate her territorial gains, generally at the expense of Austria. During the Seven Years’ War Frederick fought the greatest coalition ever seen in Europe – Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and most of the German states of the Holy Roman Empire – and survived intact. It was the hard-fought bloody encounters of this war that confirmed for Prussia her place among the Great Powers.

The Russian Empire covered a vast stretch of territory containing at the turn of the century about 48 million subjects, over half of whom were serfs tied to the land. The autocratic Romanov dynasty had ruled since the early 17th century. Russia’s military reputation had been won under Peter the Great, who had defeated the Swedes in the Great Northern War (1700-21). Although Russia had briefly fought Prussia in the later years of the Seven Years’ War, her territorial gains were made at Polish and Turkish expense during the reign of Catherine the Great (1762-96), particularly during the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and in the annexation of the Crimea, an Ottoman possession, in 1783. Russia fought simultaneous conflicts with Sweden (1788-90) and, in alliance with Austria, Turkey (1787-92). She was ultimately successful in both of these conflicts. When the French Revolutionary Wars began, Catherine the Great remained neutral and she died four years later in 1796 without having challenged the Revolution. That task was left to her son and successor, Paul I, who would finally face France during the War of the Second Coalition (1798-1802). Paul was known for his mental instability and obsession with military matters and was assassinated in 1801.

The Second Fleet arrived in 1790 with more convicts and some supplies, and a year later, following the landing of the Third Fleet, the population increased to about 4300 convicts and military personnel. As crops began to yield, New South Wales became less dependent of Britain for food. There were still, however, huge social gulfs in the fledgeling colony: officers and their families were in control, clinging to a civilized British upper class lifestyle; soldiers, free settlers, and even emancipated convicts were beginning to eke out a living; nevertheless, the majority of the population were still in chains, regarded as the dregs of humanity and living in squalid conditions.

Little of the country was explored during the first years and few people ventured further than Sydney Cove. Philip believed New South Wales would not progress if the colony continued to rely soley on the labor of convicts, who were already busy constructing government roads and buildings. He believed that prosperity depended on attracting free settlers, to whom convicts could be assigned as laborers and on the granting of land to officers, soldiers, and worthy emancipated convicts. This began to happen when Philip returned to England, and his second in command, Grose, took over. Grose tipped the balance of power further in favor of the military by granting land to officers of the New South Wales Corps. With money, land, and cheap labor suddenly at their disposal, the so-called Rum Corps became exploitative, making huge profits at the expense of the small farmers; they began to pay for labor and local products in rum, and were soon able to buy whole shiploads of goods and resell them at two or three times their original value. New South Wales was becoming an important port on trade routes as whaling and sealing were increasing.

The dismal Australian continent was forgotten until 1768, when the British Admiralty instructed Captain James Cook to lead a scientific expedition to Tahiti, to observe the transit of planet Venus, and begin a search for the Great South Land. On board his ship Endeavour were also several scientists, including an astronomer and a group of naturalists and artists led by Josephs Banks. After circumnavigating both islands of New Zealand, Cook set sail in search of the Great South Land, planning to head west until he found the unexplored east coast of the land known as New Holland. On April 19, 1770, the extreme southeastern tip of the continent was sighted and named Point Hicks, and when the Endeavour was a navigable distance from the shore, Cook turned north to follow the coast and search for a suitable landfall. It was nine days before an opening in the cliffs was sighted and the ship and crew found sheltered anchorage in a harbor they named Botany Bay.

When it came to foreign policy, Jimmy Carter was too idealistic and naive, lacking an insight into the different historical and political processes of the world’s nations, each with its own cultural and social background. By the end of 1978, an Islamic fundamentalist revolution broke out in Iran that ousted Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, from power. In response to the political asylum (temporarily to receive cancer treatment) granted to the Shah of Iran by the United States, the Iranian Muslim militants seized the American embassy in Teheran in November 1979, taking 52 Americans hostage. The Iranians demanded the return of the Shah to Iran for trial; the return of the Shah’s wealth to the Iranian people; and an admission of guilt by the United States for its past actions in Iran. This became known as the hostage crisis, which the Carter Administration was incapable to solve. The hostage crisis continued during the last year of Carter’s presidency, whose responses to the crisis were largely seen as contributing to Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election. The release of the hostages was negotiated and secured at the end of the Carter administration, but not before giving in to the Islamist government demands. The Shah had died in Egypt in 1980 and could not be turned in to the fundamentalists, but the United States released all assets belonging to both the Shah and Iran to the Ayahatolah government, sending a secret deplomatic message apologizing for "its past actions in Iran".

The Human Rights policy of Jimmy Carter consisted in demanding many foreign governments the respect of human rights of leftist terrorist organizations members who had been arrested and prosecuted for murder and terrorist acts in these countries, specially Latin American countries. But the Carter Administration never moved a single finger or spoke a single word to defend the human rights of the victims of these leftist terrorist organization members. For example, in Argentina, thousands of people (businessmen, political and labor union leaders, military personnel, innocent bystanders, etc.) were kidnapped, tortured, murdered, or mangled to smithereens in bomb blasts perpetrated by Montoneros, ERP, and other extremist clandestine organizations. Thousands upon thousands of victims of human rights violations committed by extreme left movements in Latin America were forgotten by the Carter Administration. So concerned was president Carter for the human rights of leftist guerrilla fighters and urban terrorists that he let go of Nicaragua to the Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega, who once in power murdered more people without a fair trial than the former dictator Anastasio Somoza. For real fairness and justice, the world had to wait for the arrival of a new kind of president in the White House: Ronald Reagan, a real leader the Western Civilization miss today.

Jimmy Carter Administration Cabinet

In 1864, after a series of military engagements, France, ruled by Emperor Napoleon III, acquired Indochina in South East Asia. However, non-European armies did, occasionally, emerge victorious. In 1896 the Italians were defeated at Adowa by an Ethiopian army armed with 100,000 rifles that the French governor of Somaliland had obligingly sold to them. Where native armies adopted guerrilla warfare, such as Samori Touré in West Africa in the 1880s and 1890s, European tactics struggled to overcome them. Eventually, however, even stubborn resistance was not enough. The Europeans or Americans had superior industrial and demographic resources, and could weather defeats their opponents could not.