The Great Depression Ch.20

As we are all knowledgeable about the Great Depression and the impact it had on the United States the book asks a question regarding how the Great Depression was a global phenomenon.   In 1929 the American Stock Market crashed and overnight Banks closed, people lost their lifetime savings,  committed suicide, and many people lost their jobs.  The book states that "Unemployment soared everywhere, and in both Germany and the United States it reached 30 percent or more by 1932. Beggars, soup kitchens, breadlines, shantytowns, and vacant factories came to symbolize the human reality of this economic disaster"(P.892).

It states that "Colonial Southeast Asia, the world's major rubber-producing region, saw the demand for its primary export drop dramatically as automobile sales in Europe and the United States were cut in half" (P.893). Latin American countries, whose main financial resource was agricultural products and raw materials also saw a major downfall in the world market. 

Because of the Great Depression many people started to take a second look at the Soviet Union. It says that "Russian Revolution had encompassed much of the territory of the old Russian Empire. There, the dispossession of the propertied classes and a state-controlled economy had generated an impressive economic growth with almost no unemployment in the 1930s, even as the capitalist world was reeling" (P.894).