155 of the History glossary’s terms, each with the part of the syllabus where you first meet it.
The secret missionary and propaganda network that recruited support for the Abbasid movement in Iraq and Khurasan for about thirty years before the revolt of 747.
A title given to the living father of a Korean king who had not reigned himself; it usually refers to Yi Ha-eung, regent for his son Gojong from 1864 to 1873.
A lord who ruled one of the roughly 260 domains (han) of Tokugawa Japan, with his own samurai, laws and taxes, under the control of the shogun.
The name, meaning "broken" or "oppressed", used by people formerly called "untouchables" in the Indian caste system.
Tribute paid by English kings to Viking raiders in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; the name was later given to the land tax.
The work unit in Mao's China, through which urban workers received jobs, housing, rations and welfare, and through which the party watched and organised them.
A Mongol overseer placed over a conquered city or region to supervise local rulers, take the census, collect taxes and keep order.
A movement that fought to make Indonesia an Islamic state, led by S. M. Kartosuwiryo in West Java from 1949 and spreading to Aceh and South Sulawesi; it was defeated in 1962.
A pass issued by the East India Company that exempted its goods from customs duties in Bengal under the Mughal farman of 1717; its abuse by Company servants trading privately caused conflict with the nawabs.
The US law of 1887 that divided reservation land into individual family plots and sold the "surplus" to settlers, aiming to turn Indigenous people into individual farmers; it cost them about two-thirds of their land by 1934.
The 1924 agreement that rescheduled German reparation payments and provided American loans to stabilise the German economy.
Small, often hidden acts of resistance, such as evading tax, working slowly, sabotaging crops or fleeing across borders.
Separation of races that exists in practice without a law requiring it, for example because of housing patterns, lending practices or income.
Separation of races required by law, as under the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States.
The Bolshevik policy of 1919 of mass terror against Cossacks who had fought against Soviet power, including executions and deportations.
The Soviet policy, begun after Stalin's death in 1953 and made public by Khrushchev's Secret Speech in 1956, of ending mass terror, releasing and rehabilitating many victims and dismantling the cult of Stalin, while keeping the one-party state.
The forced marches of concentration camp prisoners away from the advancing Allied armies in 1944–1945, on which many thousands died.
The crisis that began when Mexico announced in August 1982 that it could not pay its foreign debts; lending to Latin America stopped and most countries had to cut spending and accept IMF conditions.
A system in which workers were bound to an employer, usually a large estate, by debts for advances of wages or goods that they could never repay.
The accusation that a lending state, above all China under the Belt and Road Initiative, lends more than borrowers can repay in order to gain influence or control of assets; many researchers dispute it.
Student protests that began in Beiping on 9 December 1935 against Japanese encroachment in north China and the Nationalist government's failure to resist.
The "Tragic Ten Days" of 9–19 February 1913, when an army revolt in Mexico City led to fighting in the city centre and ended with General Victoriano Huerta's seizure of power and the murder of President Madero.
Mahmood Mamdani's term for colonial rule through chiefs who combined executive, judicial and legislative power over rural 'subjects' under customary law.
The campaign of 1793–1794 in revolutionary France to remove Christianity from public life: closing churches, pressing priests to give up their vocation and replacing worship with civic cults.
A formal statement that a territory has separated from the state that ruled it and become a sovereign state.
The statement of principles adopted by the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789, declaring that men are born and remain free and equal in rights.
A Soviet decree of 2 (15) November 1917 that promised equality and self-determination, including the right to secede, to all the peoples of the former Russian Empire.
The statement agreed at Yalta in February 1945 in which the Allies promised to help the liberated peoples of Europe form governments through free elections.
UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 of 14 December 1960, which declared that colonial rule denied fundamental human rights, that all peoples had the right to self-determination, and that a lack of preparation should never be used to delay independence.
The older historical interpretation that the Ottoman Empire declined steadily from the late sixteenth century until its collapse; many historians now prefer to speak of adaptation and transformation.
The process by which colonies gained independence from imperial powers, in Africa mainly between the late 1950s and the 1970s.
Guatemala's agrarian reform law of 17 June 1952, under President Árbenz, which expropriated uncultivated land on large estates, including much United Fruit land, and gave it to peasant families.
An Argentine decree of March 1956 that banned Peronist symbols, songs, images and even the names of Juan and Eva Perón in public.
Yeltsin's decree of 21 September 1993 dissolving the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet, which the Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional and which led to the October crisis.
Lenin's decree of 8 November 1917 (26 October in the old calendar) that abolished landlords' ownership of land without compensation and placed estates at the disposal of peasant committees and soviets.
A term for the unelected institutions of a state, such as the army, security services, courts and bureaucracy, believed to keep power regardless of who governs; used in Egypt for the institutions that survived the 2011 revolution.
A British law of 8 August 1914, extended during the war, that gave the government wide powers to take over industry and land, censor the press and restrict daily life.
The non-violent campaign launched by the ANC and the South African Indian Congress in June 1952, in which volunteers deliberately broke apartheid laws and accepted arrest.
A sustained fall in the general level of prices; in Japan from the late 1990s it encouraged people to postpone spending and increased the real burden of debt.
A decline in industrial or craft production in a region; used of Indian handloom weaving in the early nineteenth century, when cheap machine-made British cloth took its markets.
Belief in a creator God who made the universe as a rational system governed by natural laws, combined with rejection of miracles, revelation and the authority of churches.
The Soviet campaign of 1930–1933 to destroy the 'kulaks' as a class, by seizing their property and deporting about 1.8 million people to remote regions.
A term coined by the political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell for a system with free elections in which the elected president governs with few checks from parliament or the courts.
A great imperial assembly held at Delhi to proclaim or celebrate the British monarch as ruler of India, notably in 1877 (Victoria proclaimed Empress of India) and 1911 (George V, who announced the reversal of the partition of Bengal).
The series of Muslim dynasties (Mamluk, Khalji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi) that ruled from Delhi over much of north India from 1206 until Babur defeated the last Lodi sultan in 1526.
An explanation of innovation that starts from a need or market, such as a shortage, a crisis or customers wanting a product, which made people look for something new.
The part of a manor kept by the lord for his own use and worked by the labour services of his peasants.
The strip of land about 4 km wide and 250 km long that runs across Korea along the armistice line of 1953, from which both sides withdrew their forces. It became one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world.
A stretch of wall in central Beijing where people put up posters criticising the Cultural Revolution and calling for democracy in 1978–1979, until the movement was suppressed.
The criticism that EU decisions are made by bodies that are too remote from, or not accountable enough to, voters.
A Rwandan Hutu armed group formed in eastern Congo in 2000, including former soldiers and militiamen involved in the 1994 genocide.
The official name of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, 1975–1979. After 1979 its representatives kept Cambodia's seat at the United Nations.
A Japanese centre-left party that defeated the LDP in a landslide in 2009 and governed until 2012 under Hatoyama Yukio, Kan Naoto and Noda Yoshihiko.
The communist state proclaimed after the Saur Revolution of April 1978; renamed the Republic of Afghanistan in 1987, it lasted until the fall of Najibullah in April 1992.
The Allied policy after 1945 of removing Nazis from public life and Nazi ideas from German society, through trials, questionnaires and tribunals.
The dating and study of tree rings. Because a tree adds one ring a year, wider in good years and narrower in poor ones, ring patterns date wood exactly and give a record of past climate.
A conservative Sunni Islamic revivalist movement that began at a seminary in Deoband, India, in 1867. Many madrasas in Pakistan that educated the Taliban followed Deobandi teaching.
An administrative division of France. Algeria was organised as three French départements from 1848, so most French politicians saw it as part of France rather than a colony.
The argument, developed by Latin American scholars from the 1950s, that exporting primary products to industrial countries kept Latin America economically subordinate, because profits flowed abroad, local industry stayed weak and economies were exposed to world prices.
The committee of Ethiopian army and police officers that deposed Haile Selassie in 1974 and ruled as a Marxist-Leninist military government under Mengistu Haile Mariam until 1987; the name is often used for the regime until 1991.
A Spanish legal term for disrespect towards public officials; a 1949 law under Perón widened and toughened the offence, which was used against opposition politicians and journalists.
The period of rapid, state-guided economic growth in Spain from about 1959 to 1973, when the Franco regime sought legitimacy through prosperity.
"The shirtless ones": the Argentine urban workers who supported Perón, a name first used as an insult by his opponents and then adopted with pride after 17 October 1945.
The easing of tension between the superpowers in the late 1960s and 1970s, marked by arms-control agreements, summits and increased trade.
The view that events were bound to happen because of the conditions that preceded them, leaving no room for choice or chance.
The royal cult established by Jayavarman II at Angkor in 802, which linked the king's authority to a Hindu god; historians debate whether the king himself was worshipped.
A state that leads economic development directly by planning, directing investment into chosen sectors and building infrastructure, usually while limiting political opposition; Ethiopia under Meles Zenawi followed this model.
A British government statement of 1923 that African interests in Kenya must be paramount where they conflicted with those of immigrant races; it blocked Indian demands but changed little for Africans.
A religious movement in the Netherlands and Germany from the late fourteenth century that stressed personal prayer, moral life and education, through communities such as the Brethren of the Common Life.
A member of a protected non-Muslim community (such as Christians and Jews) under Muslim rule, allowed to keep their religion in return for paying the jizya and accepting some legal restrictions.
A sailing ship with one or more lateen sails used for trade across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, including the transport of enslaved people from East Africa.
The name given in Spain and parts of Latin America to 12 October, celebrated as a day of Spanish language and culture in the Americas; Spain's national day.
A people's communities living outside their homeland. Used of Jews outside the Land of Israel and, after 1948, of Palestinians outside Palestine.
The name given to General Berenguer's government of 1930–1931, which relaxed Primo de Rivera's dictatorship without restoring full constitutional rule; a pun on dictadura (dura, hard; blanda, soft).
The test in the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 under which an officer could require any migrant to write out 50 words in any European language he chose, used to exclude non-Europeans without naming race.
Rule by one person or a small group with unlimited power, not limited by a constitution, elections or courts.
Meetings of the imperial Diet in 1526, which let each ruler act on religion as he would answer to God and the emperor, and in 1529, which reversed this and provoked the protest that gave Protestants their name.
The assembly of the estates of the Holy Roman Empire (the electors, the other princes and the imperial cities), whose consent the emperor needed for imperial taxes and laws.
The spread of an innovation from the people and place where it was first used to others, usually with changes and adaptations along the way.
The gap between people who have access to digital technology such as phones and the internet, and the skills to use it, and those who do not.
German for a dictated order; the name many Germans gave the Treaty of Versailles because Germany was not allowed to negotiate its terms.
A circle of personal disciples of Akbar formed around 1582, with its own rituals of loyalty to the emperor; most historians see it as a discipleship for courtiers, not a new religion.
Chile's secret police from 1974 to 1977, led by Manuel Contreras, which carried out torture, disappearances and murders at home and abroad; it was replaced by the CNI.
The reversal of alliances in 1756, when Austria allied with its old enemy France and Britain allied with Prussia, shortly before the Seven Years’ War.
Protest that confronts an injustice directly, by doing what is forbidden or blocking what is objected to, instead of working only through petitions, courts or elections.
16 August 1946, when the All-India Muslim League called for protests in support of Pakistan; communal violence in Calcutta killed about 4,000 people and spread to other parts of India.
Electric current that flows in one direction only; Thomas Edison's early power networks used low-voltage direct current, which could not be sent far.
Colonial government through European officials and appointed chiefs whose authority came only from the colonial state, as in French West Africa and Portuguese Mozambique.
The government of France from November 1795 to November 1799 under the Constitution of the Year III, with five Directors as the executive and two elected councils as the legislature.
The mass campaign in Brazil in 1984 for the direct election of the president, which failed in Congress but helped bring the military regime to an end.
The name for the campaign of state terror by the Argentine military regime of 1976–1983 against people it accused of subversion, using abduction, secret detention, torture and murder.
A person abducted by state agents, held in secret and usually killed while the authorities denied holding them; the method was used by several Latin American military regimes.
A procedure in the US House of Representatives that forces a bill out of a committee that refuses to act on it, if a majority of members sign.
Disembarkation Resettlement Offers, a scheme from 1979 under which Western states guaranteed to resettle boat people rescued by ships of countries that did not take refugees, so that captains would stop to help. A later companion scheme was called RASRO.
Removing the right to vote from a group. In the US South after 1890 it was done without naming race, through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses and white primaries, backed by violence.
In Allied usage after 1944, a civilian outside their own country because of the Second World War who needed help to return home or settle elsewhere; Germans were excluded. Today the term also covers people forced from their homes who remain inside their own country.
The US law of 25 June 1948, amended in 1950, that allowed displaced persons to enter the United States outside the normal quotas; about 400,000 DPs were admitted under it.
The expression of disagreement with a regime or its policies, in private or in public, without necessarily trying to bring the regime down. A dissident is a person who openly criticises an authoritarian regime.
The selling of shares in companies that do business with a country or regime as a form of pressure; the main tactic of the 1980s anti-apartheid campaign in American universities and cities.
A strategy in which a ruling power weakens opposition by encouraging or exploiting divisions among the people it governs, for example by giving religious or caste groups separate representation.
A form of rule in which the king is believed to have a special relationship with the gods or ancestors, so that the well-being of land and people depends on him.
The doctrine that monarchs receive their authority directly from God and are answerable to God alone, so that resistance to a king is resistance to God.
The revolutionary army of the north led by Pancho Villa from 1913, the largest of the revolution, which moved by railway and destroyed Huerta's army at Zacatecas in 1914 before its defeat by Obregón in 1915.
The splitting of production into separate tasks, each done by a different worker, which Adam Smith argued greatly increases productivity.
A government department or register in the early Islamic caliphates, such as the departments for the army, taxation or correspondence; by extension, the bureaucracy as a whole.
The right to collect the land revenue of a province; the Mughal emperor granted the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the East India Company in 1765.
The States’ Rights Democratic Party, formed by southern Democrats who left the party in 1948 in protest at President Truman’s support for civil rights; its candidate, Strom Thurmond, won four southern states.
The radical Burmese nationalist association founded in 1930, whose members called themselves Thakin (master); its leaders included Aung San and U Nu.
The false accusation, announced in January 1953, that leading Kremlin doctors, most of them Jewish, had plotted to kill Soviet leaders; it was dropped after Stalin's death.
Dalhousie’s policy (1848–1856) of annexing a dependent Indian state when its ruler died without a natural male heir, refusing to recognise an adopted son as successor.
The US law of July 2010 that tightened the regulation of banks and financial markets after the 2008 crisis and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The deflationary programme imposed on Japan in 1949 by the American banker Joseph Dodge: a balanced budget, an end to subsidies and a fixed rate of ¥360 to the dollar; it stopped inflation but caused a recession.
A British law of 1788, introduced by Sir William Dolben, that limited the number of captives a British ship could carry in relation to its tonnage; the first parliamentary regulation of the slave trade.
The foreign policy of President Taft and Secretary of State Knox (1909–1913), which used US loans and investment, backed by the government, to gain influence and stability in Latin America and East Asia.
A huge area of the Congo Free State whose rubber and ivory revenues went directly to Leopold II personally, created in the 1890s and kept secret for years.
The record of the survey of England ordered by William I in 1085 and carried out in 1086, listing landholders, land, resources and values.
The belief, dominant in post-war American culture, that a woman's fulfilment lay in being a full-time wife, mother and homemaker in a single-earner family.
The buying, selling and forced movement of enslaved people within the United States after the import of enslaved Africans was banned in 1808; about a million people were moved from the Upper South to the cotton states.
A party that holds power for a long period through elections that other parties may contest but have little chance of winning, usually because the ruling party controls the state, the media and patronage.
A self-governing country of the British Empire, such as Canada or Australia, which ran its own internal affairs while sharing the British Crown; until the 1920s its foreign policy was set in London.
The belief, stated by Eisenhower in April 1954, that if one country fell to communism its neighbours would follow, like a row of falling dominoes.
A forged document, claimed to be from the fourth-century emperor Constantine, granting the pope authority over the western Roman Empire; Lorenzo Valla proved it a forgery in 1440.
Pippin III's grant to the pope in 756 of lands in central Italy taken from the Lombards, usually seen as the origin of the Papal States.
A Korean religion founded by Choe Je-u in 1860 that combined Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist and folk beliefs, taught the equal worth of all people and opposed Western influence; renamed Cheondogyo in 1905.
The peasant rising of 1894 in southern Korea, led by Jeon Bong-jun and organised through Donghak networks, against corrupt officials and foreign influence; it was crushed by Japanese and government forces.
An Arctic people who lived in parts of Arctic Canada and Greenland before the Thule; the ruins the Norse found in Greenland may have been theirs or those of even earlier cultures.
The burden Haiti carried after 1825 of paying both the indemnity to France and loans, with interest, taken from French banks to pay it.
Frances Beal's term (1969) for the combined oppression of Black women by racism and sexism, together with economic exploitation.
The campaign launched by the Black newspaper the Pittsburgh Courier in February 1942 for victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home.
The money, goods or property that a bride's family gives when she marries; in Song China a wife could keep some control over hers, while in modern India dowry demands became a source of pressure on families with daughters.
A camp in occupied Germany, Austria or Italy that housed, fed and registered displaced persons under Allied military and UN administration after 1945, usually organised by nationality.
The argument, made by Dadabhai Naoroji and others from the 1870s, that British rule drained India's wealth to Britain through payments to London, salaries, pensions and profits.
A battleship of the type introduced by the British HMS Dreadnought in 1906, with a single calibre of heavy guns and turbine engines, which made earlier battleships obsolete.
The body of Aboriginal law, story and ceremony that explains how ancestral beings shaped the land and set down the rules for living on it and caring for Country.
A US Supreme Court ruling of 1857 that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the western territories.
The understanding of 1873 between the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia to consult on common problems and resist revolution, revived as a secret alliance in 1881 and ended in 1887.
Sea ice that moves with currents and winds; ice from the Arctic drifts down Greenland's east coast and around Cape Farewell, and when heavy it blocks shipping.
The defensive alliance of Germany and Austria-Hungary signed in 1879, the core of the Triple Alliance.
The Anglo-French supervision of Egypt's revenue and spending from 1876 to 1882, imposed after Egypt could not pay its foreign debts.
Frederick Lugard's claim, in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), that colonial rule had a double duty: to develop Africa's resources for the world and to advance the welfare of its peoples.
The division of authority in Russia between March and October 1917 between the Provisional Government, which held legal power, and the Petrograd Soviet, which controlled the soldiers and workers.
The arrangement in Bengal from 1765 to 1772 in which the Company collected the revenue while the nawab’s officials remained responsible for justice and order, so that no one was accountable.
NATO's decision of December 1979 to deploy new US medium-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe while offering the Soviet Union talks to limit such weapons.
The system in reform-era China from the mid-1980s under which goods produced under the plan were sold at fixed prices and output above the plan at market prices.
"Leader": the title of Mussolini as head of the Fascist movement and regime, at the centre of his cult of personality.
The Polish state created by Napoleon in 1807 from Prussian (and in 1809 Austrian) partition lands, with the king of Saxony as duke; occupied by Russia in 1813.
The Argentine law of June 1987 that presumed that officers below the senior ranks had acted under orders and could not be prosecuted for crimes of the dictatorship; it was annulled in 2003.
The elected Russian parliament created after the revolution of 1905, which had only limited power over the tsar's government.
A group of early-twentieth-century historians, named after William A. Dunning, who portrayed Reconstruction as a corrupt failure imposed on the South; their views reflected and supported segregation.
One of the three permanent outcomes UNHCR seeks for refugees: voluntary return home, integration in the country of asylum, or resettlement in a third country.
The border between Afghanistan and British India agreed in 1893, which divided the Pashtun lands. Afghan governments refused to accept it as the border with Pakistan after 1947.
The drought-stricken southern Great Plains of the USA in the 1930s, where over-ploughed soil blew away in huge dust storms and hundreds of thousands of families abandoned their farms.
Shared rule. In the Gold Coast from 1951 to 1957, African ministers ran most of the government while British officials kept control of defence, foreign affairs and some finance.
Mande-speaking Muslim traders who carried gold, kola and other goods between the forest and the savanna of West Africa for centuries.