Utilitarianism encouraged the government and the Elite to ensure that the greatest number of citizens benefited from the distribution of resources, materials, and profit. This became popular in the Industrial revolution as a middle class developed, the poor got poorer, and there was a surplus of material goods in the economy as a result of factory production.

Liberals worked to push society forward and have the voice of the populace represented in government. They would be opposed to any government that favored traditional values over progress, and monarchical over elected officials.

The Monroe Doctrine was issued by American President James Monroe in 1823. It was issued in reaction to the independence movements taking place in Latin America. The doctrine states that the whole of the American hemisphere is under American protection and that the United States will intervene to prevent a renewal of European interference in the Americas. It has remained a significant part of American foreign policy ever since.

The Self Strengthening Movement emerged in China in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a series of institutional and military reforms that were enacted following a humiliating series of concessions and defeats at the hands of European powers.

The character and tone of the American Revolution (much like the French Revolution a decade later) was greatly shaped by enlightenment philosophy. The political theories of enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Baron de Montesquieu are variously enshrined in the United States’ Constitution.

The Communist Manifesto was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in 1848. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels outline the history of human society through the lens of class struggle. They then provide advice on how workers can overthrow the established hierarchy and form a classless society by seizing the means of production from the capitalists in a bloody revolution.

Theodor Herzl is often remembered as one of the leading figures in the Zionist movement. Herzl founded the World Zionist Organization and was instrumental in organizing and encouraging Jewish settlement in Palestine. The Zionist movement, it is worth noting, was the movement to create an independent Jewish state (Israel) in British territory in Palestine.

All of these statements are statements that the enlightenment writer Jean Jacques-Rousseau would have agreed with. In his writings, like The Social Contract and Discourses on Inequality, Rousseau argued that rule through force is not legitimate and that the only legitimate form of rule comes with the consent of the people. He also argued that individuals enter into a social contract with one another that forces them to forgo certain personal interests and rights for the greater good of society. Finally, Rousseau argued that direct democracy was only feasible in small states and that large states required more authoritarian forms of government.

St. Petersburg was constructed in 1703, during the reign of Russian Tsar Peter the Great. Much of Peter’s time in power was concerned with improving the Russian navy and establishing Russian ports in the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. In the last two attempts he was unsuccessful, but in the construction of St. Petersburg he broke Sweden’s control over access to the Baltic Sea. St. Petersburg, which would serve as the capital of the Russian Empire, from the early eighteenth century until the Russian Revolution in 1917, became known as Russia’s “window to the West.”

Charles Fourier and Robert Owen are remembered as early advocates for utopian socialism. Both Fourier and Owen predate Marx, and their version of socialism may be understood as distinct from Marxism. Owen and Fourier advocated for utopian socialism on a very small-scale and communities modeled on their writings arose in France, Britain, and the United States of America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.