Unit 7.1 — Shifting Power After 1900

Unit 6 closed with the causation skill applied to the Imperial Age's rise. Unit 7 (1900–present) opens by tracking what happened to the older land-based empires that had persisted as a continuity through Units 3–6 (recall Topic 4.8's and 5.10's point that land empires never actually disappeared): by the early 20th century, several of them finally collapsed, while one industrializing Asian power rose to genuine great-power status. Topic 7.1 covers three specific, dated case studies.

The Ottoman Empire: nationalism and territorial loss compound internal weakness

The Ottoman Empire — the "gunpowder empire" you first met in Topic 3.1 — entered the 20th century weakened by a declining economy and a shrinking export base. Internally, rising nationalism (Topic 5.2's ideology, now working against a multi-ethnic empire rather than for a single nation) among Greeks, Arabs, Armenians, and Balkan peoples steadily eroded imperial unity. In 1908, the Young Turks — a movement of military officers and intellectuals — seized power and pushed constitutional reforms, but this internal restructuring couldn't reverse the deeper decline. The Balkan Wars (1912–1913) then stripped away nearly all of the empire's remaining European territory to small Christian nations, a concrete, dated demonstration to the rest of Europe's great powers that Ottoman collapse was no longer a distant possibility but an imminent event — directly setting up the great-power tensions covered in Topic 7.2.

The Qing Dynasty: 2,000 years of imperial rule ends in 1911

The Qing Dynasty — the same empire whose gunpowder-era expansion you met in Topic 3.1 and whose Neo-Confucian legitimacy strategy you met in Topic 3.3 — entered the 20th century compounding the same weaknesses as the Ottomans: military defeats, the unequal treaties and spheres of influence from Topic 6.5, and internal rebellion. A military mutiny in central China in 1911 triggered a rapid cascade of provincial rebellions the Qing state no longer had the military strength to suppress, and within months the dynasty collapsed entirely. Sun Yat-sen became the first president of the new Chinese Republic — a specific, citable endpoint worth naming precisely: for the first time in roughly 2,000 years, China was not ruled by an imperial dynasty at all. This is the single clearest piece of evidence in the entire course that land-based imperial rule, however durable across Units 3–6, was not permanent.

Japan and the Russo-Japanese War (1905): the power shift running the other direction

While the Ottomans and Qing declined, Japan's Meiji-era industrialization (Topics 5.4, 5.6, and 6.2) converted directly into military and diplomatic power: in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan decisively defeated Russia — the first time in the modern era an Asian power had defeated a major European state in open warfare. This victory is worth pairing directly with Topic 6.3's Ethiopian victory at Adwa (1896) as a second, even larger-scale case of a non-European power defeating a European great power outright, and it contributed directly to Russia's own internal instability (feeding into the 1905 Russian Revolution) even as it confirmed Japan's arrival as a genuine world power rather than merely a regional one.

Why this matters for the exam

Topic 7.1 sets the geopolitical board for the rest of Unit 7: an Ottoman Empire fatally weakened by nationalism and the Balkan Wars, a Qing Dynasty that collapsed outright in 1911 ending millennia of imperial rule, and a Japan whose 1905 victory over Russia signaled a genuine shift in which powers commanded real global military weight. Expect this topic cited directly as a cause in Topic 7.2's explanation of World War I — the Balkan instability created by Ottoman collapse is a direct contributing factor to the war that follows.

Sources: Albert.io AP World History Review, Fiveable — Shifting Power After 1900.