1. Bourgeoisie are the middle class.
These are people who
during older times lived in cities and were not just farmers or the working
class but rather people like merchants or service providers. Originally, the
concept wasn’t pejorative since Burger meant resident of a city, but it got a
negative connotation when various revolutions started rising.
2. Creole is a person of European ancestry who was born in
the Americas.
This term mostly revolves around the Caribbean area where
numerous European settlers mixed with locals. The children born were creoles
and they developed their own language which was a mixture of the two and
eventually they became the majority.
3. Manumission is the practice of emancipating slaves.
It
was a formal way to say that a slave had been freed by their masters and was a
free man or a free woman. It was an important word during older times when
slavery was allowed before it was abolished in the United States. In Europe, it
was abolished even earlier.
4. Mestizo is a person of mixed European and indigenous
descent.
These were people who were usually children of European settlers and
local native americans and the term is mostly connected to the Spanish colonies
where white Spaniards mixed with local Natives in the Latin American area of
the Americas.
5. Mulatto is a person of European and African descent.
These people were born mostly through miscegenation where white people had
children with black slaves. Since the practice was forbidden, any resulting
children were treated as completely black and were born into slavery regardless
of the fact that they were part white.
6. Proleteriat are the working class.
This word is heavily
used in Marxist critique because it is the word used for the working class
which is the majority of the population of every country in the world. It is
believed by many that the Bourgeoisie is exploiting the Proleteriat for its own
benefit and the proletariat needs to be freed.
7. Sepoys are indian troops.
These were soldiers from India
during the British occupation and colonization of India and they were famous
for the Sepoy Rebellion agains the British India Company after which the
Maharaja took the top position as one of the locals but the rule was actually
done by the British crown.
8. Suffrage is voting rights.
Suffrage is the concept of
having voting rights. At first the voting rights belonged to only a smaller
privileged group that had them, even in ancient Greece, but as time went by and
people modernized their societies voting rights were extended and in democratic
societies today suffrage is usually universal
9. Zaibatsu were powerful industrial families in Japan.
They
came into existence following the Meiji restoration when the crown took back
rule over Japan and wealthy entrepreneurs started opening more and more
companies. They used to have huge power over certain regions of Japan but they
lost their power following world war 2.
